Yard Show
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. 

1144973094
Yard Show
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. 

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Yard Show

Yard Show

by Janice N. Harrington
Yard Show

Yard Show

by Janice N. Harrington

Paperback

$19.00 
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Overview

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. 


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781960145314
Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date: 10/15/2024
Pages: 107
Sales rank: 335,272
Product dimensions: 7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

With a heart divided between the Midwest and the South, Janice N. Harrington weaves memory and place into questions about how we build a sense of belonging.  Harrington a Guggenheim fellow, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Cave Canem Fellow, Harrington has published three previous books of poetry: Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, The Hands of Strangers, and Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin. Also an award-winning children’s writer, Harrington teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois.

Read an Excerpt

BURN

The wind then, through seams of bluestem,

or switchgrass swayed by a coyote’s passing.

 

Where the fabric gapes, Barthes said,

lies the sensual. A prairie cut

 

by winding seeps, or winds or shearing wings.

Mare’s tails, mackerels, cirrus,

 

distance dispersed as light. Under a buzzard’s bank

and spiral the prairie folds and unfolds.

 

Here between the stands of bluestem, I am interruption.

I rake my fingers over culms and panicles.

 

Here seeds burr into my sleeves, spur each hem.

In a prairie, I am chance. I am rupture. The wind—

 

thief, ruffian, quick-fingered sky—snatches a kink

of my hair. The broken nap falls, wound round

 

like a prairie snake, a coil of barbed wire, a snare

for the unwary. In the fall, volunteer naturalists

 

will wrench invading roots and scour grassy densities

with fire. Wick, knot, gnarl, my kindled hair

 

will flare, burn, soften into ash, ash that will settle,

sieve through soil, compost for roots to suck

 

and worms to cast out, out into the loess that raises

redtop, turkeyfoot, sideoats grama,

 

and all the darkened progenies of grass

that reach and strive and shape dissent from light.

WIND SHEAR

Under the magnolia, a winter-starved hare stills

and pretends it is not there,

and wanting less of fearfulness

I pretend that I do not see my camouflage, the wild promises

in my gaze, and step carefully by.

Morning, bitter morning—

lack and awful patience wait at every compass point.

Mourning, mournful, the prairie seals wind-scored stems with snow.

Here inside a stalk of goldenrod

a gall wasp will ride hard winter out.

Here between my ribs, wasps of lonely, wasps of

not yet, not yet wait and ride hard winter out.

Such a slow season, laggard and mean.

I can’t explain the cardinals I’ve seen of late,

but the crows’ black fists, the way they bully

eave and air, stab the morning with the sharpest awe,

I understand it now. I see the reason and agree.

A SHINING LURE

Beside the back porch

a crow hangs a string of meat

from the magnolia’s limb.

Poor garter snake, poor

ribbon, no longer container

for the reptilian. But still

your scales shine, still

they school—that we might

(couldn’t we? shouldn’t we?)

by shining lure

or by the clemency

of our body’s brief flare

deny, fend off, or pierce

that coming dark.

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