You Don't Have to Go to Mars for Love

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 retroubled 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: "e;Who am I to say? The eye is often mistaken. Or is it the mind? Always eager to interpret."e; Our hero is captured, escapes, scuba dives, goes interstellar, and she emerges on the other end of her journey renewed, invoking the gods: "e;taunt the sharks. & when the glaciers get to melting, / all God's River's we shall haunt."e;