National best seller
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 US 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.
