Three-term poet laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and
inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her
trailblazing life.
Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as U.S. poet laureate,
invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble
realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical,
kaleidoscopic, and wise follow-up to Crazy Brave, Poet Warrior
reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing,
poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice.
Harjo listens to stories of ancestors and family, the poetry and
music that she first encountered as a child, and the messengers of a
changing earth—owls heralding grief, resilient desert plants, and a
smooth green snake curled up in surprise. She celebrates the
influences that shaped her poetry, among them Audre Lorde, N. Scott
Momaday, Walt Whitman, Muscogee stomp dance call-and-response, Navajo
horse songs, rain, and sunrise. In absorbing, incantatory prose,
Harjo grieves at the loss of her mother, reckons with the theft of
her ancestral homeland, and sheds light on the rituals that nourish
her as an artist, mother, wife, and community member.
Moving fluidly between prose, song, and poetry, Harjo recounts a
luminous journey of becoming, a spiritual map that will help us all
find home. Poet Warrior sings with the jazz, blues,
tenderness, and bravery that we know as distinctly Joy Harjo.