Yard Show

"This generous volume is a memorable testament to Black creativity." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“In this splendid collection, Janice N. Harrington pays meticulous attention as she visits and travels and ‘makes place,’ and through place reads history, constructing her own gorgeous ‘yard show’ of observations, facts, fragments, quotations, memories, and stories. Moving from a single figure to a broad sweep of what was once Midwestern prairie, she illustrates and celebrates the resilience of Black people, through whom ‘broken things’ are ‘redeemed, reused, repurposed.’ Both testimony and praise song, Yard Show is a bountiful offering.” —Martha Collins, author of Casualty Reports

“In Yard Show, Janice N. Harrington proves once again why she is one of our great American writers. Regarding Black women gardeners in particular, in the poem ‘Yard Show 1’ Harrington notes, ‘No one studied her lived aesthetic.’ But Harrington in her courageous, nuanced portraits does. She gives such women all the room they need to grow, to flourish, to spill over trellises and rail in full sun. Are these women going along, trying to fit the fulsomeness and ache of their lives into prim, acceptable parcels? No. This kind of defiance isn't for those who prefer their flowers dried and pinned, trapped in a theory of life over life itself. It takes courage to reveal hidden or denied beauty. No text reclaims and lauds that bounty of Black womanist work out of the 70's and 80's like this poetry does. Morrison of loam and prairie, Janice N. Harrington bids us to lose ourselves in the tall bluestem. To claim our place in this most American of landscapes, the grass and grain cradle. Harrington asks, "Is this restoration?" Yes it is. Righteously, unapologetically, unabashedly so.” —Vievee Francis, author of The Shared World 

"In an epigraph to Yard Show, Roxane Gay theorizes that 'There aren’t a lot of black people writing about the Midwest,' and any reader of this collection will be glad for it. Janice N. Harrington has rendered a sweepingly intimate landscape, taking in the detail of small things as does a bird crossing the plains. The skillful leaping in these lines is astonishing and deeply concerned with interruption/disruption: 'That shadow? It could be a spider. / It could be a brown recluse. / It could be my nappy hair.' or 'Scabs of linoleum atop a cement slab.' This is the kind of poetry that teaches us to see and, in 'If You Should Wake' (what is certainly the most rewarding poem I have read in a decade), teaches the imagination how to renew itself." —Dante Micheaux, author of Circus

"The erudite latest from Harrington celebrates the yard show—a personalized, and personally significant, display of objects in one’s yard—as a microcosm for Black American expressions of place and belonging. Harrington’s poems draw on a variety of sources—from roadside signs to the words of Martin Luther King Jr.—to create a delightful poetic mélange that showcases the ingenuity of Black Americans making space for themselves. The long title poem catalogs a specific yard show, moving fluidly between the voice of the speaker and a woman whose yard reflects her efforts to define her environment, incorporating 'a red-capped gnome,' 'two ponds, three fountains,' a hand-painted plastic cherub, and 'a cast-iron kettle pinked with sedum,' among other treasures. Harrington captures the (at times) mundane and oppressive Midwest: 'I am heading to Springfield,/ through flatscapes, past variegated greens,/ the Second Amendment Burma-shaved on fence posts/ SHOOTING SPORTS/ ARE SAFE AND FUN/ THERE’S NO NEED/ TO FEAR A GUN/ while a voice on the radio predicts farm futures.' Yet possibility remains in '[a] woman’s backyard and garden.// What she’s made, with coins of sweat and constant work.' This generous volume is a memorable testament to Black creativity." —PublishersWeekly, starred review