Without Terminus: untraining an archive

by Chaun Webster

Overview

A dazzlingly inventive account of kinship and dispossession by a two-time Minnesota Book Award–winning 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 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. Throughout, webster also reflects on nonbiological kinship, tethering his and his predecessors’ lives to those of several historical Black figures—Harriet 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 Terminus is a philosophically rigorous and deeply moving text that takes us beyond the archive of loss.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644453926
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	06/02/2026
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	1.00(w) x 1.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

“chaun webster’s Without Terminus is a beautifully lyrical rumination on unknowing. The word ‘terminus’ could be the end of a transportation line as well as a finishing point. Right away with the title, we see webster’s facility with metaphoric language. 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

“Without Terminus tracks chaun webster gone further into that which won’t stop, even for that last, bleak station. In his newest work, the poet considers the possibility of Black rest without Black death, the labor that memory demands of the living, and Black life as both fuel and lubricant for the U.S. progress engine. 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

“Poised to be a preeminent writer of our time, chaun webster has done it again. Exquisitely wrought, without terminus plumbs the haunted post-bellum history of a Black grandfather’s labor as a Pullman porter on the railroad, questioning what can be known from a legacy of fragments: faded photographs, weary retirement notices. “the black historical” writes webster, “is already the hauntological.” To be Black, to be a laborer, is to be entangled with violence “until we ourselves are laying the tracks of our undoing.” 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. Combining family artifacts with the rigor of intellectual research in Black studies, fugitivity, wake work, and haunting, 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 be disappeared.” Perhaps yes, but without Terminus ardently contends with these erasures of the Black past, present, and future.”—Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, author of Negative Money

From the Publisher