Yona Harvey

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: "Who am I to say? The eye is often mistaken. Or is it the mind? Always eager to interpret." Our hero is captured, escapes, scuba dives, 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 River's we shall haunt."

The world building of Wakanda continues in a love story where tenderness is matched only by brutality You know them now as the Midnight Angels, but in this story they are just Ayo and Aneka, young women recruited to become Dora Milaje, an elite task force trained to protect the crown of Wakanda at all costs. Their first assignment will be to protect Queen Shuri... but what happens when your nation needs your hearts and minds, but you already gave them to each other? Meanwhile, former king T'Challa lies with bedfellows so dark, disgrace is inevitable. Plus, explore the true origins of the People's mysterious leader, Zenzi. Black Panther thinks he knows who Zenzi is and how she got her powers - but he only knows part of the story COLLECTING: BLACK PANTHER: WORLD OF WAKANDA 1-6

Channeling the collection's muse, jazz composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams, Hemming the Water speaks to the futility of trying to mend or straighten a life that is constantly changing. Here the spiritual and the secular comingle in a "Fierce fragmentation, lonely tune." Harvey inhabits, challenges, and explores the many facets of the female self--as daughter, mother, sister, wife, and artist. Every page is rich with Harvey's rapturous music.