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    Here is the Sweet Hand: Poems
    Here is the Sweet Hand: Poems
    Here is the Sweet Hand: Poems
    Ebook86 pages43 minutes

    Here is the Sweet Hand: Poems

    By francine j. harris

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    About this ebook

    WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD IN POETRY

    The poems in Here is the Sweet Hand explore solitude as a way of seeing. In particular, the speakers in francine j. harris’ third collection explore the mystique, and myth, of female loneliness as it relates to blackness, aging, landscape and artistic tradition.

    The speakers in these poems are often protagonists. Against the backdrop of numerous American cities and towns, and in a time of political uncertainty, they are heroines in their quest to find logic through their own sense of the world.

    The poems here are interested in the power of observation. But if there is authority in the individual versus the collective, Here is the Sweet Hand also poses questions about the source of that power, or where it may lead.

    As in her acclaimed previous collections, harris’ skillful use of imagery and experimentation with the boundaries of language set the stage for unorthodox election commemoration, subway panic, zoomorphism, and linguistic battlefields. From poems in dialogue with the artistry of Toni Morrison and Charles Burnett to poems that wrestle with the moods of Frank Stanford and Ty Dolla $ign, the speakers in this book signal a turn at once inward and opening.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 4, 2020
    ISBN9780374721916
    Here is the Sweet Hand: Poems
    Author

    francine j. harris

    francine j. harris is the author of play dead, winner of the Lambda Literary and Audre Lorde Awards and a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her first collection, allegiance, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery and PEN Open Book Awards. Originally from Detroit, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Houston.

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    • 3/5
      Most of the time I had no idea of what was being spoken. I could pick up pain and loneliness but I could not put it in context. She does, at times, have a good turn of phrase. On the whole, I just did not get it.

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    Book preview

    Here is the Sweet Hand - francine j. harris

    i.

    Versal

    The wood is not a negro with tree in the farm-split sand

    for almighty, not a road to bend over,

    not a lakeside, or sideways log stump, not

    a sidelong, not a strangler clutch

    or fruiting body of fungus. The warn

    of wood is not hiding in bark, in deer suit,

    or elk piss musk, not in camouflage. Not

    a snowshoe a negro, not a cowhide stripped

    or oversprawl. The tree is not a loner type, not

    a sleeper cell, not a jumpy trigger.

    The foliage low hangs a lake I like, an ice cave

    shot, a hit tide, frozen in place.

    And a black girl is standing on it, over a river rocking.

    Sidebank isn’t thug among us, not

    a rush gang, not a flower snatched from sidewalks,

    which isn’t breaking in root. Nothing

    for jewels, isn’t watching through windows. The black meadow

    isn’t sniper squatting, cheapening the field reek,

    eyesore cattail driving down

    the sound of stream driveby. The wood

    is an eager, a Negus among us, a runner like eagle,

    a brown sighting, root system gathered in growl

    of curl, of amassed vein feed. Say it with us.

    The wood is a falcon, a clean stretch of might.

    The dark bark is humming. Night stretched.

    A reserve is craning in its path glow, pitch fall.

    Matted grass atrament, blowing night

    like long husk. and a black girl is standing in it.

    Reflections in a Pool of Hair

    You have been standing in a pool of your own hair.

    You rub the hair into dirt and pick out crows you’d like to lift it away.

    You take off your socks.

    Hand to eyes to block the sun, you look

    for someone who looks like you.

    You see men in retro glasses, you see men behind retrofitted glass

    and men on black bikes and women with small

    piercings in their sharp noses and you see their bad silver nail polish, you’ve got

    bad silver nail polish

    and everyone wheezes. You wheeze

    and the small gay men at the bar spend sunset

    tuning American Idol onto two screens.

    They talk like bar glass. In their gravel, they vote singers.

    There is a tingle at the back of your throat that holds the phone on hold

    and thinks the words

    Obama.

    Obama wants to be a palindrome.

    You catch yourself in a plate glass window, you catch yourself

    in the neighbor’s glass plate, you catch yourself

    wondering if you look like your hair

    in their windows. They put away

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