Aurora Americana

Myronn Hardy’s sixth collection, Aurora Americana, offers a clear-eyed vantage of America after the poet’s decade traveling and living in Morocco. The poems shift between worlds: a pool in Aleppo, a bench in Darwish’s park, streets of Mohammedia, and back to America, both its past—the fields and histories of Mississippi in “Sugar Snap Peas for Fannie Lou Hamer”—and its present. “The Rage, 11 August 2017,” which confronts the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, traces contemporary “[r]age as ignorance” to its roots in Thomas Jefferson and the origins of the United States: “This was never for all. / We’re luminous about the inventor.” Hardy guides us into the iconic founding home of democracy, both figurative and literal:

Winged beings in a room where he slept
with a child he owned.

I was there too                 trembling in glass.
At Shadwell too               consuming his house.

They’re consuming this house.
Our house is burning.

As one title notes: “The Jester Lives in the Pale House Built by the Enslaved.” This collection emerges from the era of Trump’s presidency, but the Jester is a larger force: “[…] he isn’t that unique,” says the speaker in the opening line of “Fanon Considers the Jester,” which concludes: “My neck     our necks aren’t safe”

When the poems leave America, there is a sharp sensory presence: “azure parakeets,” “green bottles of orange blossom water,” and “[s]treets lined with jacarandas.” “The Almost Life” depicts everyday scenes like this one, of a market:

The fisherman hacks a shark into steaks.
The shark’s eyes are black.  You watch. He clenches
seeing his own eyes   the marbles they’d make
if they’d roll. That breaking sound in the fish
market.

The book both includes aubades and is in itself the record of a complicated parting triggered by being an expatriate, and the necessity of returning home. “Sometimes I Believe I’m a Moroccan Poet Exiled on Mars” concedes, in the opening line, “[b]ut I’m from the middle of another country.” The poem concludes:

I’m writing in dust.
What I’m writing will become dust.
I’m the premonition
of dust exiled here.