Ms.
“Stirring. . . . In her harrowing and ultimately hopeful story, Harjo allows the reader to know her intimately, and we are enriched by her honesty.”
Boston Globe
A saga about the survival of spirituality and creativity in the face of generations of racism, dispossession, and familial dysfunction.— Rebecca Steinitz
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
A must-read for her fans and a fascinating door into her world for those new to her work.”— Elizabeth Wilkinson
Booklist
“Harjo allows the reader to know her intimately, and we are enriched by her honesty.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
A must-read for her fans and a fascinating door into her world for those new to her work.— Elizabeth Wilkinson
Rebecca Steinitz - Boston Globe
“A saga about the survival of spirituality and creativity in the face of generations of racism, dispossession, and familial dysfunction.”
Elizabeth Wilkinson - Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A must-read for her fans and a fascinating door into her world for those new to her work.”
Library Journal
Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle, poet/performer Harjo writes verse suffused with spiritual concern, sociopolitical hunger, and evidence of her Muskogee Creek heritage. This memoir returns to her youth (abusive stepfather, Indian arts boarding school, single motherhood as a teenager) to disclose how she became a poet. Expect beautiful writing, and look how popular Leslie Marmon Silko's The Turquoise Ledge was.
Kirkus Reviews
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace "the spirit of poetry." For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release "the voices, songs, and stories" she carried with her from the "ancestor realm." On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author's stepfather "sang songs and smiled with his eyes," but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping "the darkness that plagued the house and our family" was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by "colonization and dehumanization." An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose "poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood." But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming "crazy brave," she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the "intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors." A unique, incandescent memoir.
