It's been a minute since I picked up a poetry collection. I spent much of my developing years engulfed in poetry, only to abandon it in my adult years for the spell that fiction casts upon me. But every once in a while, I find myself returning to the purity of words that is found in poetry. It always has a way of awakening that part of my brain, the one that searches for complexity in simplicity of words.
(Norton, 2017)
"I was on a train stopped sporadically at checkpoints.
What tribe are you, what nation, what race, what sex, what
unworthy soul?"
In this collection of poetry from our current Poet Laurette, Joy Harjo explores the relationship of the individual with the world around through examinations of the everyday. Her perspective related to her experience as Native American and the spiritual teachings of indigenous peoples, an experience that has been fractured and frayed by the injustices of time.
It is about healing, or the more appropriated, attempts at healing. How do we reconcile being human in a society which seems bent on the destruction of the human connection with nature?
There isn't really an easy answer, but we attempt to do it through memory, through song, through words and celebration of all that we hold dear. These are powerful poems with subtle context that challenge the reader to examine themselves and their place in existence.
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