Yard Show
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Black history, cultural expression, and the natural world fuse in Janice N. Harrington’s Yard Show to investigate how Black Americans have shaped a sense of belonging and place within the Midwestern United States. As seen through the documentation of objects found within yard shows, this collection of descriptive, lyrical, and experimental poems speaks to the Black American Imagination in all its multiplicity.
Harrington’s speaker is a chronicler of yesterdays, using the events of the past to center and advocate for a future that celebrates pleasure and self-fulfillment within Black communities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The erudite latest from Harrington (Primitive) celebrates the yard show—a personalized, and personally significant, display of objects in one's yard—as a microcosm for Black American expressions of place and belonging. Harrington's poems draw on a variety of sources—from roadside signs to the words of Martin Luther King Jr.—to create a delightful poetic mélange that showcases the ingenuity of Black Americans making space for themselves. The long title poem catalogs a specific yard show, moving fluidly between the voice of the speaker and a woman whose yard reflects her efforts to define her environment, incorporating "a red-capped gnome," "two ponds, three fountains," a hand-painted plastic cherub, and "a cast-iron kettle pinked with sedum," among other treasures. Harrington captures the (at times) mundane and oppressive Midwest: "I am heading to Springfield,/ through flatscapes, past variegated greens,/ the Second Amendment Burma-shaved on fence posts/ SHOOTING SPORTS/ ARE SAFE AND FUN/ THERE'S NO NEED/ TO FEAR A GUN/ while a voice on the radio predicts farm futures." Yet possibility remains in " woman's backyard and garden.// What she's made, with coins of sweat and constant work." This generous volume is a memorable testament to Black creativity.
