Aurora Americana: Poems

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. Myronn Hardy is the author of five previous books of poems, including Radioactive Starlings (Princeton). His poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Poetry, the New Republic, and the Baffler, among other publications, and have won many prizes, including the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award. He teaches at Bates College. "Myronn Hardy's tough, analytical, associative mind moves with astonishing inventiveness between America and Algeria, and between persona and his own speaking voice, as in the splendid title poem. His idiom is as spare as it is singular, but never obtuse or unmoored from ordinary human concerns. Quietly visionary, Aurora Americana is among the best books of poems I've read in a long time."-Tom Sleigh, author of The King's Touch: Poems "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