You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The poems of award-winning poet Yona Harvey’s much anticipated You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love follow an unnamed protagonist on her multidimensional, Afro-futuristic journey. Her story stretches the boundaries normally constraining a black, female body like hers. Half-superhero, half-secret-identity, she encounters side-slipping, speculative realities testing her in poems that appear like the panels of a comic book. Music directs readers through large and small emotional arcs, constantly retroubled by lyric experimentation. Harvey layers her poems with a chorus of women’s voices. Her artful use of refrain emphasizes the protagonist’s meaning making and doubling back: “Who am I to say? The eye is often mistaken. Or is it the mind? Always eager to interpret.” Our hero is captured, escapes, scuba dives, goes interstellar, and she emerges on the other end of her journey renewed, invoking the gods: “taunt the sharks. & when the glaciers get to melting, / all God’s River’s we shall haunt.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harvey (Hemming the Water) explores in her striking latest the relationship between freedom, social justice, and the lyric imagination. Spanning a variety of literary forms, from prose poems and lyric fragments to sonnets, the work in this frequently gorgeous collection is unified by its concern with cultivating and articulating a collective consciousness. Harvey critiques popular culture and its myriad incarnations of "grand theft auto," allowing poems to provide an alternate psychic space that affords the possibility of community and empowerment: "Part of the answer. is about. learning from/ & adapting. to each other. Part of the answer./ is about. Abbey Lincoln/ & Madonna. & Erykah. Badu." Discordant experiences and historical moments, as well as various types of rhetoric, are vividly placed in conversation with one another, allowing poems to offer a hypothetical testing ground for preserving history and jostling hierarchies. Readers will be captivated by Harvey's voice and vision.
