From an award-winning poet, an exciting new collection that explores exile and return, from North Africa to North America
In Aurora Americana, Myronn Hardy, an American poet who moved back to the United States after living for years in Morocco, reflects on exile and return as he describes the experience of leaving North Africa and rediscovering a North America both recognizable and unrecognizable. What does it mean to feel exiled both away from and at "home"? What does it mean to miss something?
In forms such as the sonnet, ghazal, and triolet, Aurora Americana takes up the distant and recent past of the United States, from Thomas Jefferson to the deadly "Unite the Right" march in Charlottesville, Virginia. But the book also meditates on smaller, momentary encounters across racial and national barriers, from evocations of Francophone Africa to a screening of Black Panther in Portugal for a mostly white audience. Allusions to Fannie Lou Hamer, Frantz Fanon, Prince, John Coltrane, Alessandro de' Medici, Ahmed Zaki, Modesto Brocos y Gómez, Nasser Zefzafi, and others anchor the collection. With poems set at or near dawn, Aurora Americana explores an ominous yet hopeful new morning in America, one in which potential cataclysm exists alongside possibility and change.
"For the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, a new collection of poems that explore questions of exile and return. In this collection of poems, Myronn Hardy reflects on the nature of power and history, on scales both intimate and broad, using a range of poetic forms and genres, such as the ghazal, the sestina, the sonnet sequence, and the elegy. He meditates on the recent past of the United States, drawing on the deadly "Unite the Right" march in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Trump presidency, and Civil War history, but more often on smaller events: momentary encounters across racial and national barriers; a screening of Black Panther in Portugal for a predominantly white audience; memories and images from his time teaching in Francophone Africa; the death of an aunt poisoned by pesticides sprayed from a plane over farmland. Several other poems grapple with the writings and legacy of the Martiniquais psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon. Taken together, these diverse explorations create a portrait of a precarious national moment, and of the troubling influence of American history on the world"--
"A clear-eyed vantage of America. . . . [
Aurora Americana] is in itself the record of a complicated parting triggered by being an expatriate, and the necessity of returning home."
---Rebecca Morgan Frank, Poetry Foundation
