מאת Joy Harjo
A nationally best-selling volume of wise, powerful poetry from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States.
In this stunning collection, Joy Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where the Mvskoke people, including her own ancestors, were forcibly displaced. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the Native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings.
A nationally best-selling volume of wise, powerful poetry from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States.
In this stunning collection, Joy Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where the Mvskoke people, including her own ancestors, were forcibly displaced. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the Native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings.
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Starred review from October 21, 2019
Newly named poet laureate and Ruth Lilly prize–winner Harjo (Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings) intertwines verse with prose vignettes, oral histories, and flash memoirs in this expressive and generous book. In a fable about the origins of the saxophone that “made a rip in the sky,” she writes: “Musicians are musicians, no trick will get by./ You either have it, or want it/ Nothing else will fly.” Harjo exhibits this gift in the tight choreography of these pages, evoking the music of her Muskogee ancestors who were among the native peoples forcibly relocated by Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830. Music is “a sack that carries the bones of those left alongside/ The trail of tears,” she writes. Harjo offers poems of lament and praise, pleas for patience and calls to action: “In the fog of thin hope, I wander this sad world/ We’ve made with the enemy’s words.” Harjo invites the reader to consider the “many migrations stacked within sky memory,” including, most immediately, “the indigenous peoples who are making their way up from the southern hemisphere.” “Nothing is ever/ forgotten says the god of remembering,” she writes in tones that will speak to readers who are ready to remember, or to learn anew. -
August 1, 2019
Harjo, a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and Wallace Stevens Award, is now the first Native American U.S. poet laureate. This momentous appointment will steer readers to her previous collections; her memoir, Crazy Brave (2012); and to this resplendent and reverberating new volume deeply rooted in tribal and family experiences, nature, land, and tradition. Harjo places swatches of history between her entrancing lyrics like specimens of poisonous plants in a naturalist's log, beginning with President Andrew Jackson's forced removal of Native Americans, including Harjo's ancestors; she then follows the subsequent Trail of Tears back to the White House where the current occupant has hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office. Harjo's bracing political perspective is matched by timeless wisdom as she reflects on her life and lessons learned, and celebrates her time-bending grandfather, saxophone-playing grandmother (Harjo does the same), Earth's bounty, and the transcendent power of song and love. In clarion, incantatory poems that recalibrate heart and mind, Harjo conveys both the endless ripples of loss and the brightening beauty and hope of the sunrise.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.) - New York Times Book Review Full of celebration, crisis, brokenness and healing.
- Maya Phillips;The New Yorker Harjo, though very much a poet of America, extracts from her own personal and cultural touchstones a more galactal understanding of the world, and her poems become richer for it.
- Elizabeth Lund;Washington Post Rich and deeply engaging, An American Sunrise creates bridges of understanding while reminding readers to face and remember the past.
- Craig Morgan Teicher;NPR [Joy Harjo's] poems are accessible and easy to read, but making them no less penetrating and powerful, spoken from a deep and timeless source of compassion for all.... [A] stark reminder of what poetry is for and what it can do.
- Oprah;O, The Oprah Magazine [An American Sunrise] touched me to the marrow.
- John Freeman;Boston Globe A powerful reminder as to why [Joy] Harjo's voice is so at home everywhere.... When a poet scales her gaze so grandly, something strange and miraculous happens to poetry. It opens up and becomes more than a mere literary device, it becomes a delivery system of wonder.... Harjo's goal as a poet has been to wake us up, to talk to us as if there is nothing so natural as singing. It is impossible to read this beautiful book and not wonder if our world would be a little better if more of us remembered how.
- Christian Allaire;Vogue While the subject matter of her new poems continuously hits you in the gut, Harjo brings a sense of resilience to that dark history.
- Jane Ciabattari;BBC Radiant.... [A] profound, brilliantly conceived song cycle, celebrating ancestors, present and future generations, historic endurance and fresh beginnings.
- Drew Tewksbury;Los Angeles Times Reveals glimpses of life in Oklahoma's Muscogee Creek Nation alongside delicately rendered ruminations on memory, family and healing.
