Aurora Americana

Poems

Myronn Hardy

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780691250571, 9780691252537
• eBook ISBN: 9780691253671
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Epigraphs
• Dedication
• Aurora Americana
• Solemnity
• Fanon’s Country
• Missiles
• The Rage: 11 August 2017
• The Hiss
• Blue Circles
• Blue Neon
• City of Saudade
• Consideration
• Parade
• Pastime
• Sugar Snap Peas for Fannie Lou Hamer
• The Emperor of Terracotta Roofs Confronts the Jester
• Americana: A Becoming
• The Turning
• The Moth in the Dryer
• Impossibility
• Canceled Flights: An Odyssey
• Democracy Americana
• Levitation
• Crisis
• Fanon’s Banania 1953
• Fanon in Tunis after Tunis
• Fanon Considers the Jester
• Fanon in Bethesda
• Gaza Ghazal: Blue Dissent
• Miss Algeria after Viewing The Battle of Algiers
• Oblivion
• Muhammad Ali at La Luna but Not the Boxer
• My Lebanese Friend Buys Blue Contacts in Beirut
• No Longer
• On Valentine’s Day a Pool in Aleppo
• The Champions
• The Panther in Lisbon
• The Jester Lives in the Pale House Built by the Enslaved
• The Slur during Ramadan
• This Scheme of Making
• Reading
• Her Yellow Dress
• Sometimes I Believe I’m a Moroccan Poet Exiled on Mars
• Mr. Coltrane It’s Autumn in These Mountains
• Musicians in Red: A Summoning
• Dusk into Dawn: The Rippling
• Blue over Bicycles
• Folly
• For Roundness
• Jawad’s Flock in Mohammedia
• Neither Atlantic nor Mediterranean
• Performance Day in the Vaulted Theater
• The Spaceship in Tamri
• Aubade: Troposphere
• Adoration
• Tachfyn’s Cats
• Reflecting
• The Almost Life
• The Water My Love
• The Wheels Then Seagulls
• Ode to Tangle
• Farewell Mountain
• To the Linear
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Series List