Radioactive Starlings
Poems
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From an award-winning poet, a collection that explores the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics
In Radioactive Starlings, award-winning poet Myronn Hardy explores the divergences between the natural world and technology, asking what progress means when it destroys the places that sustain us. Primarily set in North Africa and the Middle East, but making frequent reference to the poet’s native United States, these poems reflect on loss, beauty, and dissent, as well as memory and the contemporary world’s relationship to the collective past.
Hardy imagines the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa as various starlings dwelling in New York City, Lisbon, Tunis, and Johannesburg, flying above these cities, resting in ficus and sycamores and on church steeples and minarets. Inhabiting the invented voices of Gwendolyn Brooks, Bob Kaufman, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, the poems make references to Miles Davis, Mahmoud Darwish, Tamir Rice, Ahmed Mohamed, and Albert Camus, and use forms such as ghazal, villanelle, pantoum, and sonnet, in addition to free lyricism. Through all these voices and forms, the questing starlings persist, moving and observing—and being observed by we who are planted on a crumbling ground.
A meditation on the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics, Radioactive Starlings is an important collection from a highly accomplished young poet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hardy (Kingdom), who divides his time between New York and Morocco, invites readers along as he journeys from the U.S. to Africa to the Middle East and back, ruminating on politically charged events of the past and comparing them to injustices of the present, and exploring how identity is shaped by individual memories as well as collective historical memories. He makes constant references, both popular and obscure, to world history and politics, art and literature, and even sporting events. For example, in "Walking Jerusalem," Hardy writes with a nod to Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: "Among ashen stone I'm reading In Jerusalem.'/ Reading a line a stanza then walking/ about the gray." Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, notable for writing under numerous heteronyms, appears in various locations in the form of a starling. Hardy achieves the greatest emotional impact when he utilizes simple, clean, direct imagery to articulate complicated themes. In "The Silence in Sunlight," he reflects on the viral photograph of Iesha Evans's arrest while protesting the shooting of Alton Sterling in New Orleans: "Silence as armor her armor after numbness./ Black gun to black body in black cotton." This is an illuminating, if occasionally difficult, collection.
