The poems of award-winning poet Yona Harvey’s much anticipated You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love follow an unnamed protagonist on her multidimensional, Afro-futuristic journey. Her story stretches the boundaries normally constraining a black, female body like hers. Half-superhero, half-secret-identity, she encounters side-slipping, speculative realities testing her in poems that appear like the panels of a comic book. Music directs readers through large and small emotional arcs, constantly retroubled by lyric experimentation. Harvey layers her poems with a chorus of women’s voices. Her artful use of refrain emphasizes the protagonist’s meaning making and doubling back: “Who am I to say? The eye is often mistaken. Or is it the mind? Always eager to interpret.” Our hero is captured, escapes, scuba dives, goes interstellar, and she emerges on the other end of her journey renewed, invoking the gods: “taunt the sharks. & when the glaciers get to melting, / all God’s River’s we shall haunt.”

Yona Harvey’s first poetry book, Hemming the Water, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. She is among the first black women writers for Marvel Comics and earned an Eisner Award for her contribution to World of Wakanda. She co-authored Black Panther and The Crew with Ta-Nehisi Coates. She is a graduate of Howard University and earned her MFA from the Ohio State University and a Masters of Library and Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh where she is also an associate professor. She is the recipient of the Carol R. Brown Achievement Award from the Heinz Foundation and winner of the inaugural Lucille Clifton Legacy Award in poetry from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She facilitates creative writing workshops, delivers writing-specific speaker topics, and currently serves on the editorial board of Poetry Daily.