coal by Remi Graves
Monitor Books
Published 15th July 2025.
Blackfriars Bridge, 1905. A Black Cherokee man is arrested and charged as a “wandering lunatic”. In the City of London asylum, he is photographed; looking directly at the camera, he insists and refuses. He dies in the asylum one year later. In the absence of Paul Downing's own account, Remi Graves writes from and into the trans archive, presenting a sequence of poems and experiments mapping resonances between selves across historical records. Through river crossings and library passes, chance meetings and visitations, coal is a document that interrogates what we do with the scattered fragments of a life.
Blackfriars Bridge, 1905. A Black Cherokee man is arrested and charged as a “wandering lunatic”. In the City of London asylum, he is photographed; looking directly at the camera, he insists and refuses. He dies in the asylum one year later. In the absence of Paul Downing's own account, Remi Graves writes from and into the trans archive, presenting a sequence of poems and experiments mapping resonances between selves across historical records. Through river crossings and library passes, chance meetings and visitations, coal is a document that interrogates what we do with the scattered fragments of a life.
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