Here is the Sweet Hand
Poems
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD IN POETRY
The poems in Here is the Sweet Hand explore solitude as a way of seeing. In particular, the speakers in francine j. harris’ third collection explore the mystique, and myth, of female loneliness as it relates to blackness, aging, landscape and artistic tradition.
The speakers in these poems are often protagonists. Against the backdrop of numerous American cities and towns, and in a time of political uncertainty, they are heroines in their quest to find logic through their own sense of the world.
The poems here are interested in the power of observation. But if there is authority in the individual versus the collective, Here is the Sweet Hand also poses questions about the source of that power, or where it may lead.
As in her acclaimed previous collections, harris’ skillful use of imagery and experimentation with the boundaries of language set the stage for unorthodox election commemoration, subway panic, zoomorphism, and linguistic battlefields. From poems in dialogue with the artistry of Toni Morrison and Charles Burnett to poems that wrestle with the moods of Frank Stanford and Ty Dolla $ign, the speakers in this book signal a turn at once inward and opening.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With poems that pant, keen, and rumble, harris (play dead) offers a fresh and dazzling third collection. The poet's subjects are difficult and necessary, rendered in language that "takes information by the hair and rides it// nighttime" to create a record of violence against Black and queer bodies and the ongoing effects of slavery and colonialism ("O, route to burrow, you,/ like pipeline, leak the grease of wayward stream,"). These are poems of solitude and full-throated coupling, of nonhuman and extraterrestrial phenomena, "the hunger and orbit and wobble." But no list of topics or themes can capture the erotic heat, imaginative breadth, and syntactical daring of this poet's voice. These are litmus poems, testing the reader's readiness to be doubted, doubled, called out, and rubbed raw: "You can hide your face until you most succumb (I ain't spinning.)/ We can get the gist. and then we throat a song.// Come sick em. Stretch a bully on a prong." In this formidable book, poems resist the intelligence successfully, as the poet opts instead "to live above the intelligence. the flash."
