Cloud Runner
| Author: | Harjo |
| ISBN: | 9781324123651 |
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Harjo (Girl Warrior) has spent decades building worlds of words that draw on Indigenous histories and mythologies and carefully and deliberately weaving them into feminist discourses, social justice, and environmentalism, always blending the literal and the literary. She has explored memory, loss, and spirituality from different angles, but her latest collection of poems may be her most stunning work to date. In it, she invokes the loss of her own daughter in verses that are by turns stark and taciturn or expansive, yet share a sense of the eponymous cloudlike nature and impermanence of people and things. While the book is painfully, beautifully personal, Harjo allows moments of public grief, political hurt, and external forces to breathe into and out of her own deeply felt story. VERDICT Like Margaret Atwood's poems on the death of her husband, Harjo offers rawness and resiliency in equal measure, acknowledging that loss and grief possess their own fragmentary, repetitive syntax. —Library Journal