Without Terminus // untraining an archive

A dazzlingly inventive account of kinship and dispossession by a two-time Minnesota Book Awardwinning author

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 knowand mournthe 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. Throughout, webster also reflects on nonbiological kinship, tethering his and his predecessors lives to those of several historical Black figuresHarriet Jacobs, John Henry, Henry Box Brown, and Henry Dumas, a writer who was killed by New York City police while riding the subway.

Attempting to exhaust the possibilities of the sentence and the grammar of anti-Blackness, webster riffs and rails on the debris within reach. Part elegy, part archival detective story, and part visual poem,Without Terminusis a philosophically rigorous and deeply moving text that takes us beyond the archive of loss.

Work by chaun webster has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day,Angel City Review,Obsidian,The Rumpus,Social Text,andTilted House. His booksGentry!ficationandWail Songeach won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry.

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publish Date: June 02, 2026
• Pages: 224
• Language: English
• Type: Paperback
• EAN/UPC: 9781644453926
• Dimensions: 8.2 X 139.7 X 16.5 mm | 0.6 pounds
• BISAC Categories: Literary Fiction, Biography & Memoir, Poetry