Leap & Grow Feathers

Both an instruction and a divination, Leap & Grow Feathers is an extraordinary transmission. In her third full-length collection, Yona Harvey listens — to her predecessors, her instincts, and her environment — gleaning sense from the static fraying our nerves, knowing the personal and the historical travel along the same frequency. Responding to the physical disruption and emotional disassociation of of the COVID-19 pandemic, the poet argues that the societal insistence on returning to “business as usual” reflects an institutional, academic, and political ineptitude to provide either physiological healing or social repair, a structural denial that erodes our humanity. As authoritarianism and ecological devastation progressively encroach on our lives, these poems prioritize hoodoo, spirit, intuition, and ancestral conversations in their readings, invoking the carekeeping and persistence of Harriet Tubman, Nikki Giovanni, and the countless forbears, unnamed and named, who traveled the Middle Passage and the Kalunga Crossing. This book channels the power and promise of that legacy as well as the full emotional range of sisterhood, the heartache and borrowed strength and shared laughter. Its humor, whitespace, sparseness, and longform narratives elicit reader participation and, in turn, enduring consideration. “This float. This bob. This drown. This rock. // (This Rock. This Rock.) // This Great Goddamn.” What do we find in this vastness, the simultaneity of the ever expanding time that lies ahead and full presence of history consolidating here now? An invitation to join Harvey in her vow: “May I never pretend, / May eye be I.” This collection unveils our vision so we can see it all, not only yesterday’s “Nina Simone lyric / Spun out over a newborn Sunday” in this very moment but also the music unfurling over each incipient morning of the future world we might build together. Leap & Grow Feathers describes and directs: everything we need to survive, to shelter one another, and to protect the Earth lives already in our bodies, our lineages, and our lore.