Catastrophic Bliss

Myronn Hardy

2012
88 pages
ISBN 9781611484939
The Griot Project Book Series

Catastrophic Bliss contemplates the longing to understand connections and disconnections within a world ever more fragmented yet interdependent. With allusions to Dante, Stevie Wonder, Fernando Pessoa, Persephone and Marianne Moore, these poems move from the tumultuous to the sublime: a pit bull killing an invading thief, two people on a New York City subway playing chess, Billy Eckstine recording in Rio de Janeiro, to an imagined Barack Obama writing poems to his father. Myronn Hardy's third collection comprises war, place, love, and history all yearning to be reconciled.

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Reviews

"'The only medicine is the voice,' Myronn Hardy tells us in his vivid and eloquent new collection of poems, Catastrophic Bliss, and what he tries to mend by speaking are the fractured cultures and landscapes that haunt contemporary consciousness. Hardy's 'voice' sings with fresh and arresting observations - 'stingrays with pale/ undersides like hands' - and through them he explores the fragile co-existence of man and nature - the bliss of it and the catastrophe."
--Michael Collier

"Myronn Hardy's Catastrophic Bliss is a book of double exposures: whether his landscape is Africa, Spain, or North America, his landscapes are haunted by history, by other times and other places. History in these beautiful poems is both a blessing and a curse, a burden one can neither cast off nor carry. And while Hardy understands that there is no 'sweetness without toil,' he honors the toil by presenting the sweetness as a poor exchange, however necessary, for all the suffering behind it. This is a complicated, mature collection, a collection for adults."
--Alan Shapiro

About the author:

Myronn Hardy is the author of two previous books of poetry. He divides his time between New York City and Morocco.

Distributed by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

eBook: 9781611485028