Radioactive Starlings

Poems

Myronn Hardy

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780691177106
  9780691177090
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400888764
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

From an award-winning poet, a collection that explores the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics

In Radioactive Starlings, award-winning poet Myronn Hardy explores the divergences between the natural world and technology, asking what progress means when it destroys the places that sustain us. Primarily set in North Africa and the Middle East, but making frequent reference to the poet's native United States, these poems reflect on loss, beauty, and dissent, as well as memory and the contemporary world's relationship to the collective past.

Hardy imagines the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa as various starlings dwelling in New York City, Lisbon, Tunis, and Johannesburg, flying above these cities, resting in ficus and sycamores and on church steeples and minarets. Inhabiting the invented voices of Gwendolyn Brooks, Bob Kaufman, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, the poems make references to Miles Davis, Mahmoud Darwish, Tamir Rice, Ahmed Mohamed, and Albert Camus, and use forms such as ghazal, villanelle, pantoum, and sonnet, in addition to free lyricism. Through all these voices and forms, the questing starlings persist, moving and observing—and being observed by we who are planted on a crumbling ground.

A meditation on the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics, Radioactive Starlings is an important collection from a highly accomplished young poet.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Pessoa as Starling: New York City
• Failure
• Refugees
• Orpheus Escapes with Turtle
• Tanner in Tangier: 1912
• Muddy: A Blues
• Sea Dark
• To Mecca with Gold
• Astronomy Night
• Devotion
• Radioactive Starlings
• Walking Jerusalem
• Bob Kaufman: 1967
• Priest with Poinsettia
• Pork-pie without Sun
• Pessoa as Starling: Lisbon
• Existential Guns
• But I Must Forget
• The Kneeling: Number 7
• Faults
• Hebron
• Crests
• Solitary
• Calling It
• Two Parallel Shadows of Myronn Hardy
• Chocolate Liqueur
• Oud with Guitar: Théâtre National Tunisian
• Pillars
• Cobalt
• Neymar’s Hair under Dictatorship
• Boxed Sandwiches over Algeria
• The Barber Soloist
• Pessoa as Starling: Tunis
• Philosophical Dinner
• Circles
• The Inescapable Escape
• The Breaking
• Black Typewriter: An Elegy
• Cascades
• Ghazal of Wreckage
• Pessoa as Starling: Johannesburg
• صباح
• The Super Looks from the Balcony
• The Silence in Sunlight
• At Beethoven’s after We Fast
• Branches
• Delivering Mint
• The Ticking
• Two Bottles of Rain
• What You Carry
• The Road Before
• You: An Apparition
• Vision near Dumpsters
• Yellowing
• Paseo
• Aubade: Lovely Dark
• Gwendolyn Brooks Sitting in Tayeb Salih Park Sixteen Years after Her Passing
• Notes
• Acknowledgments