Black history, cultural expression, and the natural world fuse in Janice N. Harrington’s Yard Show to investigate how Black Americans have shaped a sense of belonging and place within the Midwestern United States. As seen through the documentation of objects found within yard shows, this collection of descriptive, lyrical, and experimental poems speaks to the Black American Imagination in all its multiplicity.
Harrington’s speaker is a chronicler of yesterdays, using the events of the past to center and advocate for a future that celebrates pleasure and self-fulfillment within Black communities. (From the publisher)
Juror Citation
At the heart of Janice Harrington’s monumental collection is the yard show: an African American vernacular aesthetic practice of cultivating and decorating outdoor space, making use of reclaimed and repurposed objects—the detritus, both natural and man made, of everyday life. “Yard work,” Harrington writes: to make,/to sow, sweep, hoe, meaning/to hone a word sharp enough/to stake claim or uproot. Here, that reclamation is grounded in the Midwest, uprooting the notion of the American “heartland” that renders the African American presence invisible in the national imagination. In the precise language and meticulous details of Harrington’s Yard Show, the aesthetics of a black woman are centered, creating a particular Eden—her wild, original, unfettered making—another way of seeing, another kind of beauty. – Natasha Trethewey
