From an award-winning poet, a collection that explores the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics In Radioactive Starlings, award-winning poet Myronn Hardy explores the divergences between the natural world and technology, asking what progress means when it destroys the places that sustain us. Primarily set in North Africa and the

"Myronn Hardy is a citizen of worlds, including the North Africa where he lives and the America where he was born. Recalling Damascus, he sees Dylann Roof emerging with 'the gracelessness of the unburied, ' and on Ibn Rochd Avenue in Rabat, an image of a father tying his son's shoes evokes Trayvon Martin's untied laces. Filled with ecstatic moments, the poems in Radioactive Starlings are supreme examples of lyric restraint as well as lush, colorful precision. This compelling collection makes a powerful case for claiming Hardy as one of our finest lyric poets."--Khaled Mattawa, author of Tocqueville: Poems

"Exigent, insistently international in their references, Myronn Hardy's poems combine painterly sensuality with a restless interrogation of history and self. Bodies, in Hardy's poems, stand where other bodies stood centuries before. Absences grow visible; someone is always looking at someone else looking away. Such themes are enacted in Hardy's singular prosody. The starlings of the book's title are what unite all the poems and places. We sense them, specks of blackness, flying over us, blowing through us like neutrinos, bringing us together, living and dead, into the fullness of our humanity."--Forrest Gander, author of Core Samples from the World

"What Myronn Hardy attempts in Radioactive Starlings, few dare to dream of doing, and rightly so, for rare is the poet that is capable of the breadth, depth, and density that characterize his exploration. I know this, because, reading it, I am overrun."---Ciahnan Darrell, Marginalia