Hard Country

Second Edition

Sharon Doubiago

Since childhood, Sharon Doubiago has sought to understand America in its dual relation as a haven of hope and a site of genocide. Hard Country is an epic poem of America, in which Doubiago inherits and transforms the poetic language of Whitman in a response to the male epic consciousness of twentieth-century American modernist poetry.

“One great poem, an epic in the proper sense, a personal journey but also the foundation myth of a culture: the seeker is the American earth herself incarnate in the voice of the poet, and the hero is collective—the voices of its living commingling with those of the dead, through ‘the terror of all history.’”—Carolyn Forché

“This is an angry and loving woman writing and it is dangerous. . . . Sharon Doubiago fearlessly enters the labyrinth of our history, our search and danger as woman as human as deep American wanderer. . . . It is a long saga, a woman’s history and the history of us all.”—Meridel Le Sueur

I took a vow never to be a poet
because art I was taught
is too delicate to sing of genocide.
But what else could I sing
while people were being murdered
in my name?

             —from “Wyoming”

6 x 9¼ inches • 274 pages • ISBN 0-931122-94-5 • $19.95