Media: Interviews, Reviews, Articles

From the Country’s New Poet Lau­re­ate, Poems Reclaim­ing Trib­al Culture

In June, after decades as a sig­nif­i­cant pres­ence for poet­ry read­ers, Joy Har­jo was named Unit­ed States poet laureate.

“In An Amer­i­can Sun­rise, Harjo’s 16^th book of poet­ry, released by Nor­ton this week, she con­tin­ues to bear wit­ness to the vio­lence encoun­tered by Native Amer­i­cans in the after­math of Andrew Jackson’s Indi­an Removal Act. Her words express that the…

“If you read only one book of poems this sum­mer, make it ​“An Amer­i­can Sun­rise” (Nor­ton) by Joy Har­jo, the first Native Amer­i­can to be named U.S. poet lau­re­ate. In these stun­ning pages, Har­jo, a mem­ber of the Musco­gee Creek…

“…while the sub­ject mat­ter of her new poems con­tin­u­ous­ly hits you in the gut, Har­jo brings a sense of resilience…”

“Amer­i­ca may be get­ting more polar­ized, but a good way to talk about polit­i­cal issues, she says, is not through polit­i­cal lan­guage, which relies on clichés and pro­hibits peo­ple from under­stand­ing each other.”

This is the first in a series of five posts doc­u­ment­ing Poet Lau­re­ate Joy Harjo’s sum­mer­time meet­ings with librar­i­ans and cura­tors across the Library of Congress.

“Her 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 — but also from a very spe­cif­ic and jus­ti­fied well of anger.”

Joy shares ​“Advice for Coun­tries, Advanced, Devel­op­ing and Falling” with an introduction.

“Joy Har­jo is a world trea­sure, rare and for­mi­da­ble amongst poets writ­ing today, with a voice equal parts wise woman, jazz, rain, and earth. Her col­lect­ed poems bring togeth­er the full range of her work, an impres­sive spec­trum of word…

Ear­li­er this sum­mer, the edi­tors of WLT invit­ed more than two dozen writ­ers to nom­i­nate one book, pub­lished since 1969, that most influ­enced their extralit­er­ary com­mit­ments, along with a brief state­ment explain­ing their choice.

“As the book’s title asserts, In Mad…