You Don't Have To Go To Mars For Love

Winner of the Believer Book Award in Poetry.

The poems of award-winning poet Yona Harvey’s much anticipated You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love follow an unnamed protagonist on her multidimensional, Afro-futuristic journey. Her story stretches the boundaries normally constraining a black, female body like hers. Half-superhero, half-secret-identity, she encounters side-slipping, speculative realities testing her in poems that appear like the panels of a comic book. Music directs readers through large and small emotional arcs, constantly re-troubled by lyric experimentation. Harvey layers her poems with a chorus of women’s voices. Her artful use of refrain emphasizes the protagonist’s meaning-making and doubling back: “Who am I to say? The eye is often mistaken. Or is it the mind? Always eager to interpret.” Our hero gets captured, escapes, scuba dives, and goes interstellar, and she emerges on the other end of her journey renewed, invoking the gods… “Taunt the sharks & when the glaciers get to melting, / all God’s Rivers we shall haunt.”