Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
In Mad Love and War

In Mad Love and War

Harjo, Joy

Paperback

Series: Wesleyan Poetry

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $16.95

ISBN10: 081951182X
ISBN13: 9780819511829
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: May 21 1990
Pages: 79
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.40 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.30
Language: English
Awards: Reading the West

Sacred and secular poems of the Creek Tribe.

Winner of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award (1990)
Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1991)
2019 United States Poet Laureate

Joy Harjo is a powerful voice for her Creek (Muscogee) tribe (a stolen people in a stolen land), for other oppressed people, and for herself. Her poems, both sacred ad secular, are written with the passions of anger, grief, and love, at once tender and furious. They are rooted in the land; they are one with the deer and the fox, the hawk and the eagle, the sun, moon, and wind, and the seasons - spring/ was lean and hungry with he hope of children and corn. There are enemies here, also lovers; there are ghost dancers, ancestors old and new, who rise again to walk in shoes of fire.

Indeed, fire and its aftermath is a constant image in the burning book. Skies are incendiary; the smoke of dawn turns enemies into ashes: I am fire eaten by wind. Your fire scorched/ my lips. I am lighting the fire that crawls from my spine/ to the gods with a coal from my sister's flame.

But the spirit of this book is not consumed. It is not limited by mad love or war, and there is something larger than the memory/ of a dispossessed people. That something larger is, for example, revolution, freedom, birth.

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