Yona Harvey is a poet of the speculative, a poet of other worlds—other words—that turns out to be our worlds and words. Her first full-length collection of poems was Hemming the Water, which won the Kate Tufts in 2013, and her second was You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love which appeared when the pandemic was six months old. It’s not just that Mars is far from disturbed Earth, but also that it’s alien, that feeling human sometimes means feeling alien. She works slowly and deeply—there’s a third collection close to finished, but still a ways off—and sometimes she takes time away from poetry to write words for Marvel comics with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Hemming the Water is a riff on sound and song, a book that gets in the head of—or into conversation with—figures like Mary Lou Williams, Toni Morrison, Ruth Stone, Pablo Neruda. “A door & the darkness,” a “song in the head of a heathen.” One poem is called “The Riot Inside Me,” one is titled “Chatterblue,” another “Gingivitis, Notes on Fear.” As a book of discovery, discovering the self and its histories and burdens, it registers, in brash delicate gorgeous styles, “The shock / Of your voice.”