Catching the Light
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
United States Poet Laureate and winner of the 2022 Academy of American Poets Leadership Award Joy Harjo examines the power of words and how poetry summons us toward justice and healing
“Her enduring message—that writing can be redemptive—resonates: ‘To write is to make a mark in the world, to assert “I am.”’ The result is a rousing testament to the power of storytelling.”—Publishers Weekly
“Harjo writes as if the creative journey has been the destination all along.”—Kirkus Reviews
In this lyrical meditation about the why of writing poetry, Joy Harjo reflects on significant points of illumination, experience, and questioning from her fifty years as a poet. Comprised of intimate vignettes that take us through the author’s life journey as a youth in the late 1960s, a single mother, and a champion of Native nations, this book offers a fresh understanding of how poetry functions as an expression of purpose, spirit, community, and memory.
Harjo insists the most meaningful poetry is birthed through cracks in history from what is broken and unseen. At the crossroads of this brokenness, she calls us to watch and listen for the songs of justice for all those America has denied. This is an homage to the power of words to defy erasure—to inscribe the story, again and again, of who we have been, who we are, and who we can be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Memoir, poetry, and criticism come together in this slim but potent treatise on "the why of writing poetry" from Harjo (Poet Warrior: A Memoir). Arranged into 50 vignettes (one for each of Harjo's 50 years as a published poet), the collection shows how writing "can be useful as a tool for finding the way into or through the dark." For Harjo, that darkness includes the papal bulls that declared "indigenous peoples as non-humans" and the history of manifest destiny, which led to mass displacement and genocide: "Indigenous artists must be part of the leadership in the revision of the American story," she writes. Harjo also reflects on the start of her poetry career when she was a full-time student and single mother of two; the despair that accompanied Donald Trump's presidency ("When the despot ineptly sought to turn the country to a totalitarian nightmare, where was poetry?"); the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic; and her first encounters with literature: reading the Bible, "the only book in our home." Her musings on the "story we call ‘America' " hit home, and her enduring message—that writing can be redemptive—resonates: "To write is to make a mark in the world, to assert ‘I am.' " The result is a rousing testament to the power of storytelling.
