Here is the sweet hand Poems

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

"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.

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