Aurora Americana: Poems
Department or Program
English
Files
Description
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.
ISBN
9780691253671
Publication Date
10-10-2023
Publisher
Princeton University Press
City
Princeton and Oxford
Recommended Citation
Hardy, Myronn. Aurora Americana: Poems. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691253671
Copyright Note
Copyright © 2023 by Myronn Hardy
Comments
Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, Volume 174