Today’s GalleyCrush is Joy Harjo’s Poet Warrior, forthcoming from W. W. Norton on September 7, 2021.
Perfect pitch: “Poet Laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life.”
First lines: “To imagine the spirit of poetry is much like imagining the shape and size of the knowing. It is a kind of resurrection light; it is the tall ancestor spirit who has been with me since the beginning, or a bear or a hummingbird. It is a hundred horses running the land in a soft mist, or it is a woman undressing for her beloved in firelight. It is none of these things. It is more than everything.”
Book notes: Hardcover, memoir, 240 pages.
Author bio: Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently An American Sunrise (Norton, 2019). Named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2019, she lives in Tulsa.
