Should I dream you afraid so that
you are forced to save yourself?
Or should you ride colored horses into the cutting edge of the sky to know that we're alive we are alive.
This collection gathers poems from throughout Joy Harjo's twenty-eight-year career, beginning in 1973 in the age marked by the takeover at Wounded Knee and the rejuvenation of indigenous cultures in the world through poetry and music. How We Became Human explores its title question in poems of sustaining grace.
Over a quarter-century's work from the 2003 winner of the Arrell Gibson Award for Lifetime Achievement.
—Amazon Paperback
W.W. Norton (Hardcover)
Any acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.
Joy Harjo is a powerful voice for her Creek (Muscogee) tribe ("a stolen people in a stolen land"), for other oppressed people, and for herself. Her poems, both sacred ad secular, are written with the passions of anger, grief, and love, at once tender and furious. They are rooted in the land; they are one with the deer and the fox, the hawk and the eagle, the sun, moon, and wind, and the seasons - "spring/ was lean and hungry with he hope of children and corn." There are enemies here, also lovers; there are ghost dancers, ancestors old and new, who rise again "to walk in shoes of fire."
—Amazon Paperback
Wesleyan University Press
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear,
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages that aren’t always sound but other Circles of motion.
. . .her writing is infused with a generosity of spirit that accounts for much of her appeal. Dancing children, the attempt to heal a broken life, rising moons, and blue horses turning into streaks of lightning are the images Harjo uses to spin her yarns, and her words are spellbinding. Her talent is manifest in "A Postcolonial Tale": "Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering power of dreaming stuff."
—Amazon Paperback
W.W. Norton
I’m not afraid of love
or it’s consequence of light.
It’s not easy to say this
or anything when my entrails
dangle between paradise
and fear.
In her fifth book, Joy Harjo, one of our foremost Native American voices, melds memories, dream visions, myths, and stories from America's brutal history into a poetic whole. —Amazon
Paperback
W.W. Norton
All my life I have entered into the ceremony from this door, toward the east into red and yellow leaves. It has always felt lonely though there were always messengers, like the praying mantis on my door when I opened it this morning. Or the smell of pancakes when there were no pancakes, coffee when there was no coffee. I walked through the house we had built together from scraps of earth and tenderness, through the aftermath of loving too hard.
Poetic Prose by Joy Harjo and photographs
by Stephen Strom
This book combines Stephen Strom's photographs of the landscape on and around the Navajo reservation in New Mexico and near the Four Corners area with Joy's invoking descriptive poetry.
Paperback
University of Arizona Press
My house if the red earth;
it could be the center of
the world.
The Spiral of Memory gathers the conversations in which Harjo has articulated her singular yet universal perspective on the world and her poetry. She reflects upon the nuances and development of her art, the importance of her origins, the arduous reconstruction of the tribal past, the dramatic confrontation between Native American and Anglo civilizations, the existential and artistic itinerary through present-day America, and other provocative and profoundly human themes.
Paperback
University of Michigan Press
This book combines Stephen Strom's photographs of the landscape on and around the Navajo reservation in New Mexico and near the Four Corners area with Joy's invoking descriptive poetry.
Paperback
W.W. Norton
One should always have a doorway leading from their heart. You see, we cannot permit ourselves to be perfect, to lock up perfection in anything that we create, in weaving, making pottery, or even in making bread. We must allow for our imperfections.
We must have a doorway.
First published in 1983 and now considered
a classic, She Had Some Horses is a powerful exploration of womanhood's
most intimate moments. Joy Harjo's
words speak of women's despair, of
their imprisonment and ruin at the
hands of men and society, but also
of their awakenings, power, and love.
Published by W.W. Norton
NEW EDITION
She Had Some Horses
Out of Print Books
The Last Song, Puerto del Sol Press, Las Cruces
What Moon Drove Me To This, Reed Books
“In Soul Talk Joy Harjo provides a rare and treasurable acoustic: the sound of an artist and woman thinking for herself, and for us. Never afraid of large questions of purpose and identity. But never remiss either in providing beautiful, small
details of craft and commitment.
This is an essential book.”
—Eavan Boland, author of
New Collected Poems
Soul Talk Soul Language
NEW BOOK
Crazy Brave
In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo, one of our leading Native American voices, details her journey
to becoming a poet.
