Pessoa as Starling: New York City 3
Failure 4
Refugees 5
Orpheus Escapes with Turtle 7
Tanner in Tangier: 1912 8
Muddy: A Blues 9
Sea Dark 10
To Mecca with Gold 11
Astronomy Night 12
Devotion 14
Radioactive Starlings 17
Walking Jerusalem 19
Bob Kaufman: 1967 20
Priest with Poinsettia 22
Pork-pie without Sun 23
Pessoa as Starling: Lisbon 25
Existential Guns 26
But I Must Forget 28
The Kneeling: Number 7 30
Faults 32
Hebron 33
Crests 35
Solitary 36
Calling It 39
Two Parallel Shadows of Myronn Hardy 40
Chocolate Liqueur 42
Oud with Guitar: Théâtre National Tunisian 43
Pillars 44
Cobalt 46
Neymar's Hair under Dictatorship 47
Boxed Sandwiches over Algeria 49
The Barber Soloist 50
Pessoa as Starling: Tunis 52
Philosophical Dinner 53
Circles 54
The Inescapable Escape 55
The Breaking 57
Black Typewriter: An Elegy 58
Cascades 59
Ghazal of Wreckage 60
Pessoa as Starling: Johannesburg 62
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The Super Looks from the Balcony 64
The Silence in Sunlight 65
At Beethoven's after We Fast 66
Branches 68
Delivering Mint 71
The Ticking 72
Two Bottles of Rain 73
What You Carry 74
The Road Before 75
You: An Apparition 76
Vision near Dumpsters 77
Yellowing 78
Paseo 79
Aubade: Lovely Dark 80
Gwendolyn Brooks Sitting in Tayeb Salih Park Sixteen Years
after Her Passing 82
Notes 83
Acknowledgments 84

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 Middle East, but making frequent reference to the poet's native United States, these poems reflect on loss, beauty, and dissent, as well as memory and the contemporary world's relationship to the collective past.
Hardy imagines the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa as various starlings dwelling in New York City, Lisbon, Tunis, and Johannesburg, flying above these cities, resting in ficus and sycamores and on church steeples and minarets. Inhabiting the invented voices of Gwendolyn Brooks, Bob Kaufman, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, the poems make references to Miles Davis, Mahmoud Darwish, Tamir Rice, Ahmed Mohamed, and Albert Camus, and use forms such as ghazal, villanelle, pantoum, and sonnet, in addition to free lyricism. Through all these voices and forms, the questing starlings persist, moving and observing-and being observed by we who are planted on a crumbling ground.
A meditation on the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics, Radioactive Starlings is an important collection from a highly accomplished young poet.

Myronn Hardy is the author of four previous books of poems: Approaching the Center, winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Prize; The Headless Saints, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Catastrophic Bliss, winner of the Griot-Stadler Award for Poetry; and, most recently, Kingdom. He divides his time between Morocco and New York City.