Yona Harvey
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You Don't Have to Go to Mars for Love
In the center of wisdom made from crushing rocks against boulders, Harvey’s brilliant lyric lives in the resistance of black women whose presence on this soil is now in its fifth century. In You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love Yona Harvey shows how an original poetic lives in the marrow of the immortal bones of ancestry. The events of her life have moved the poet to write fiercely of her children and of loss, as well as the failures of the country where she was born. When the poet speaks to the soul sickness of men and of America it is with the generational wealth that is her inheritance, a wisdom that is the greater galactic mass to balance the more recent visions of black immigrants. Her voice is essential to making a cultural wholeness that would otherwise be impossible. This lyric, this unique, multimedia gift is evidence of an awakening only a few poets ever approach, an awakening that is the reward for an unfaltering belief in love’s profound nature.— Afaa M. Weaver 尉雅風
View playlistWhat's a Prose Poem to Do
I—a habitual writer of sequences, and particularly of untitled prose poem sequences—have been trying to write an Individual Poem. I’m interested in the single moment, but I distrust it. So I met myself halfway in this playlist and looked for prose poems with titles, whose main unit was the punctuated sentence. We start with Yona Harvey’s “Q.," whose sentences catch Harvey’s wonderful & particular rhythm, and with Ashley Toliver’s exquisite emotional miniature, “Housekeeping.” But, as usually happens when I write with constraints, they crack a bit by the end. In Jenny Xie’s haibun “Corfu” we see how a line break differently holds tension from the sentence, and in Trace Peterson’s funny and whip-smart HRT poem “The Valleys are so Lush and Steep” the propulsive energy of the sentence travels across each section break. Each of these poems find potential in the focused attention to the texture of their language that a prose form provides.
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