Approaching the Center

by Myronn Hardy

Overview

In this beautifully wrought first book, Myronn Hardy writes poems that explore the connection between places, examine where things lie. The poet travels to countries such as Spain, Brazil, South Africa, Cuba, and always manages to enter into discourse with both citizen and place. He gets inside, is inhabited himself, while he recovers kinship to a multifarious planet. Hardy is both traveler and witness, and Approaching the Center promises much more to come from this brilliant new writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781930974012
Publisher:	New Issues Poetry and Prose
Publication date:	03/01/2001
Series:	Inland Seas
Pages:	99
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

MYRONN HARDY is the author of three previous books of poems: Approaching the Center, winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, The Headless Saints, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and Catastrophic Bliss, winner of the Griot-Stadler Prize for Poetry. He has received fellowships from the Anneberg Foundation, Djerassi, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sacatar Foundation, and Fundación Valparaiso. He divides his time between Morocco and New York City.

Table of Contents

I
	Mosquito	11
	September 21	12
	Dreaming in Antananarivo	13
	Cinema	14
	Five Pillars	15
	Broken	17
	Cursive	18
	1994	19
	Passing Rhonda	20
II
	Approaching the Center	25
	Conquest	26
	Africa Verde	27
	Call from Budapest	28
	Junior, 1940-1964	29
	The Chicken Vendor	30
	Granada Notebook #5	31
	An Andalusian Tale, Three Parts	32
	Familiar Distance	34
III
	Madagascar Notebook #1	39
	Madagascar Notebook #2	40
	Madagascar Notebook #3	41
	Nigger Out: Rome, 1993	42
	Girl #1	44
	Letter Box	45
	The Dirty River Between Us	46
	This Place	47
	Comets, 1942	48
	East: A South African Fable	49
	The Station	50
IV
	The Man Who Fell in Love with a Bahian Woman	55
	Soweto	56
	Return to the Labyrinth	58
	Cachoeira	60
	Friendship	61
	Inferno	62
	Genealogy: Lesson #1	63
	For Hector Peterson	64
	Salvador, After 1888	65
	100% Negro	66
	The Gathering	67
	Beyond These Americas	68
	Joaquim, Prince of the Abandonados	70
	Swimming #1	71
	Swimming #2	72
V
	To the Virgin of Regla	77
	Interpreting Piano Lessons	80
	Academia De Ciencias Filosofia	81
	Father's Day	82
	Poet in Havana	83
	The Visit	85
	Quietly	87
	Are You Langston Hughes?	88
	Waiting	89
	Photograph of Angola--1967	90
	Night of Chappotin	91
	Queen of Light	92
	At Tom's Restaurant	93
VI
	Independence Day, Arkansas 1998	97
	Notes	99

What People are Saying About This

Martin Espada

“Myronn Hardy is a poet of the world, universal in the truest sense. He brings exquisite poetic diction and a gift for the image to the plazas of Havana, the villages of Madagascar, a tin schoolhouse in Soweto, an ancient wall in Rome scarred with racist graffiti. But this is not a collection of vacation poems; Hardy is sensitive to suffering and defiance of suffering all around him. The poet awakens ghosts, invoking Hughes and Lorca, two voices that resonate throughout the poems. Just as the poet spreads a map across a picnic table in Arkansas, showing his grandparents the 'ghost lands' of Africa they have forgotten, so he maps a world of poetry for the rest of us, drawing a line from Soweto to Little Rock. The poetry of Myronn Hardy is indelibly vivid; he makes a memorable debut.”