Here Is the Sweet Hand

by francine j. harris

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374602901
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/03/2021
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	710,015
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.26(h) x 0.38(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Contents

I.
Versal
Reflections in a Pool of Hair
The Meek
Limulus Polyphemus
Ask me now and I would say
What Milkman Leaps For
Abortion
Against Storm, Against Glib Thunder
She is what I undo
The fat of the fog hovers over
Rabbit
Here is the sweet hand you always turn back on yourself
Language works over information . . .
Junebug barycente
Single Lines Looking Forward or One Monostich Past 45
Anise Swallowtail, Molting

II.
I won’t beg.
Sonata in F Minor, K.183: Allegro
Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 8, RV 315 “L’estate”: I. Allegro mà non molto
Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major, BWV 1010: IV. Sarabande
Morceaux de fantaisie, Op. 3 no.2: Prelude in C-Sharp Minor
So is we thinking up new ways to fuck, or nah.
White People Eating White Food
I cleaned the house.
Unlike my sister
Stand Up
Tardigrade 00
The Neighbor’s Buddy Through the Window
The day after 12 Years a Slave
It is a Choice (because Kanye)
Oregon Trail, Missouri
It Takes
Forestbathing (or Trees)
My hair is falling out.
That scene in Killer of Sheep when
Ablate the Suncups, not the Ice: an Incantation
Curtains
Self-Portrait as Good Samaritan

Notes
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"Entering mid-career with her extraordinary third book, harris . . . fully emerges as one of the best and most relevant contemporary poets. She writes with a historical and linguistic reach . . . She is also in league with some of the great practitioners of poetry that makes no distinction between the personal and the political, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Adrienne Rich." —Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

"harris reveals one of the roles of the contemporary poet: to expose unpleasant truths of the past and present, to call out the aspects of our worst selves . . . harris is an expert practitioner and guide; we are always in her orbit, captivated as she manipulates language, un-doing worn traditions, engaging the reader intimately, and unforgettably." —Mandana Chaffa, Chicago Review of Books

"Some of the poems are so full of heat, so pressing, that you’ll hold your breath until the last line." —goop

"With poems that pant, keen, and rumble, harris offers a fresh and dazzling third collection. The poet’s subjects are difficult and necessary . . . These are poems of solitude and full-throated coupling, of nonhuman and extraterrestrial phenomena . . . But no list of topics or themes can capture the erotic heat, imaginative breadth, and syntactical daring of this poet's voice.'" —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"This is a book full of 'heat,' of being beneath and being above, of desire, neighbors, the news, the horrors of systemic racism played out in a 19th-century orphanage and a shooting on a train — all presented without the censoring influence of traditional continuity . . . there is no point in questioning Here Is the Sweet Hand. It is better to let her voice be the center and take pleasure in change." —Lynn McGee, Lambda Literary

"harris's poems teem with emotion, but there’s a control to her lines that feels so clever . . . harris is original in syntax and rhythm: the poems in this collection never play quite the same song, as if their form keeps us active and alert." —Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions

"[harris] injects her work with lyrical strength that is poignant and powerful." —Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine

From the Publisher

★ 08/17/2020

With poems that pant, keen, and rumble, harris (play dead) offers a fresh and dazzling third collection. The poet’s subjects are difficult and necessary, rendered in language that “takes information by the hair and rides it// nighttime” to create a record of violence against Black and queer bodies and the ongoing effects of slavery and colonialism (“O, route to burrow, you,/ like pipeline, leak the grease of wayward stream,”). These are poems of solitude and full-throated coupling, of nonhuman and extraterrestrial phenomena, “the hunger and orbit and wobble.” But no list of topics or themes can capture the erotic heat, imaginative breadth, and syntactical daring of this poet’s voice. These are litmus poems, testing the reader’s readiness to be doubted, doubled, called out, and rubbed raw: “You can hide your face until you most succumb (I ain’t spinning.)/ We can get the gist. and then we throat a song.// Come sick ‘em. Stretch a bully on a prong.” In this formidable book, poems resist the intelligence successfully, as the poet opts instead “to live above the intelligence. the flash.” (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/01/2020

"If we could fuck in the open, on the wide-open shore. black/ sand. Would I be the dead woman whose back she clung to," asks Lambda Literary/Audre Lorde winner harris in her new collection (after play dead), summing up the cost of suppressing one's true self. Also at stake: the failure to connect, even when one wants to—the denizens of a sketchy bar look past one another and "put away things// as soon as you ask about them"—and the distorting burden of past and heritage—"The sugar wings of a myth, a guiltless grandfather,…/ with its skin lightened, with its orderly shoes." But a refreshing defiance surfaces with the very first poem, as the speaker proclaims, "The wood is not a negro with tree in the farm-split sand/ …The tree is not a loner type," then roundly asserts what she is: "a black girl is standing on it, over a river rocking." VERDICT Harris renders both strength in solitude and the desire to lean out in a tumble of dense and singing imagery that lands with an impact; one brilliant poem investigates the very nature of language. Strong work for ambitious readers.

Library Journal