Yard Show [Paperback]

Winner of the 90thAnisfield-Wolf Book Award
Winner of the 2025PEN/Voelcker Award
Finalist for the Midland Authors Award (Poetry)
Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award
Named one of the top 25 Best New Poetry Books by the New York Public Library

Black history, cultural expression, and the natural world fuse in Janice N. Harrington’sYard Showto 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. 

BURN

The wind then, through seams of bluestem,

or switchgrass swayed by a coyote’s passing.

Where the fabric gapes, Barthes said,

lies the sensual. A prairie cut

by winding seeps, or winds or shearing wings.

Mare’s tails, mackerels, cirrus,

distance dispersed as light. Under a buzzard’s bank

and spiral the prairie folds and unfolds.

Here between the stands of bluestem, I am interruption.

I rake my fingers over culms and panicles.

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