Without Terminus: untraining an archive

“Potent and prophetic, this is a singular achievement.”―Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A virtuoso work of literary experimentation in the service of a forgotten history.”―Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Through experimenting with form, imagery, style, and language, the author makes a valiant attempt and succeeds in elegant and luminous prose. . . . Give this marvelous journey to readers of Joshua Bennett’s Owed and Claudia Rankine’s Just Us.”―Allison Escoto, Booklist

“A beautifully lyrical rumination on unknowing. For webster, ‘without terminus’ doesn’t mean forever, as in elongated emptiness, but ‘frayed edges’ as a reclamation and new space, the limits as haven. This book is a marvel, a language and image train to travel with.”―Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World

“This work demands of webster new grammars, a hauntology, a means of being without, which is to say a praxis of knowing with grief even that which you can barely mourn. Deeply intimate and tirelessly self-interrogating, Without Terminus is webster at his best. Phenomenal!”―Douglas Kearney, author of I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always

“webster, already a formidable poet, charts a genealogy of loss through an inquiry and lyric form of his own making, gifting a map that cracks open the expansive possibilities of memoir. . . . webster wonders “if blackness is the grammar of loss in the modern world” and if “we have all been had, gotten over, by the archive and the slippery words that make blackness known only when it is about to disappear.” Perhaps yes, but Without Terminus ardently contends with these erasures of the Black past, present, and future.”―Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, author of Negative Money

“Without Terminus does the uncanny, and absolutely sincere, work of obliterating everything I thought I knew about fracture, memory, labor, and Blackness. . . . The book is as fine, as delightful, as serious as any book I’ve read this century. There is a staggering gumption at work here, and it is indeed generative and wholly loving of what came before it.”―Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

“Familial and radically unfamiliar. Old and new, on time, untimely; ungendered, ante-generic, intergenerational. . . . What we have here in our hands is as beautiful and bruised and black and blue and bounteous and unbound as we R.”―Fred Moten, author of Perennial Fashion

“Without Terminus is an unflinching document of familial love and the legacy of Blackness in America. It is an act of revolution cloaked in the language of poetry, wielding a heart full of courage.”―Kao Kalia Yang, author of Where Rivers Part

Work by chaun webster has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Angel City Review, Obsidian, The Rumpus, Social Text, and Tilted House. His books Gentry!fication and Wail Song each won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry.