11/13/2025
👀 chaun webster's WITHOUT TERMINUS—a dazzlingly inventive account of kinship and dispossession by a two-time Minnesota Book Award–winning author—is out June 2, 2026. Preorder:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/without-terminus-untraining-an-archive-chaun-webster/2fa87d8d88a87751?ean=9781644453926&next=t&next=t&affiliate=3215
In his first work of nonfiction, poet chaun webster blends memoir, archival research, visual poetics, and cultural criticism to trace the ways structural anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance, and grapples with the question of how to know—and mourn—the kin he was never able to meet. webster is particularly drawn to his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a Pullman porter, who was denied rest while his labor enabled rest for others, and who died without receiving a pension before webster was born. Returning to the figures of Reginald and the train, webster explores the relationship between comportment and confinement, speaking in tongues in the Pentecostal church, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, his fraught relationship with his mother, and moments with his own child. Part elegy, part archival detective story, and part visual poem, WITHOUT TERMINUS is a philosophically rigorous and deeply moving text that takes us beyond the archive of loss.
Cover design by Jeff Clark.
