An American Sunrise

by Joy Harjo

Overview

National Bestseller

A stunning new volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, informed by her tribal history and connection to the land.

In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family’s lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother’s death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo’s personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. A descendent of storytellers and “one of our finest—and most complicated—poets” (Los Angeles Review of Books), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324003861
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/13/2019
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	201,261
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the author of nine poetry collections and two memoirs, most recently Poet Warrior. The recipient of the 2023 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and the 2017 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, she lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Table of Contents

Prologue xv

Map of the Trail of Tears xvii

Break My Heart 3

My grandfather Monahwee 5

Exile of Memory 6

Granddaughters 20

The Fight 21

Directions to You 22

Seven Generations 25

In 1990 a congress 26

Weapons 27

The Story Wheel 28

Once I looked at the moon 29

Washing My Mother's Body 30

There is a map 34

Rising and Falling 35

The Road to Disappearance 36

Mama and Papa Have the Going Home Shiprock Blues 37

My great-grandfather Monahwee 46

How to Write a Poem in a Time of War 47

Mvskoke Mourning Song 51

First Morning 52

Singing Everything 53

Falling from the Night Sky 54

Our knowledge is based 55

For Earth's Grandsons 56

Running 57

A Refuge in the Smallest of Places 59

I'm Nobody! Who Are You? 60

Bourbon and Blues 61

My Great-Aunt Ella Monahwee Jacobs's Testimony 63

Road 64

The Southeast was covered 65

Desire's Dog 66

Dawning 67

Honoring 68

My Man's Feet 70

"I Wonder What You Are Thinking," 72

For Those Who Would Govern 74

Rabbit Invents the Saxophone 75

When Adolfe Sax patented 77

Let There Be No Regrets 78

Advice for Countries, Advanced, Developing and Falling 79

Tobacco Origin Story 81

My aunt Lois Harjo told me 83

Redbird Love 84

We follow the DNA spiral of stories 86

Becoming Seventy 87

Beyond 95

Ren-Toh-Pvrv 96

Memory Sack 97

Every night 98

Cehotosakvtes 99

One March 100

By the Way 101

When we made it down last year 103

Welcoming Song 104

An American Sunrise 105

Bless This Land 106

Acknowledgments 111

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/21/2019

Newly named poet laureate and Ruth Lilly prize–winner Harjo (Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings) intertwines verse with prose vignettes, oral histories, and flash memoirs in this expressive and generous book. In a fable about the origins of the saxophone that “made a rip in the sky,” she writes: “Musicians are musicians, no trick will get by./ You either have it, or want it/ Nothing else will fly.” Harjo exhibits this gift in the tight choreography of these pages, evoking the music of her Muskogee ancestors who were among the native peoples forcibly relocated by Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830. Music is “a sack that carries the bones of those left alongside/ The trail of tears,” she writes. Harjo offers poems of lament and praise, pleas for patience and calls to action: “In the fog of thin hope, I wander this sad world/ We’ve made with the enemy’s words.” Harjo invites the reader to consider the “many migrations stacked within sky memory,” including, most immediately, “the indigenous peoples who are making their way up from the southern hemisphere.” “Nothing is ever/ forgotten says the god of remembering,” she writes in tones that will speak to readers who are ready to remember, or to learn anew. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"While the subject matter of her new poems continuously hits you in the gut, Harjo brings a sense of resilience to that dark history."

Vogue - Christian Allaire

"Full of celebration, crisis, brokenness, and healing."

New York Times - Daisy Fried

"Resplendent and reverberating... Harjo's bracing political perspective is matched by timeless wisdom... In clarion, incantatory poems that recalibrate the heart and mind, Harjo conveys both the endless ripples of loss and the brightening beauty and hope of the sunrise."

Booklist

"Radiant... [A] profound, brilliantly conceived song cycle celebrating ancestors, present and future generations, historic endurance and fresh beginnings."

BBC - Jane Ciabattari

"An American Sunrise is a wisdom quest as Joy Harjo returns to the place of her ancestors. This haunting and breathtaking book invokes the relocation of the southeastern peoples, of what they endured and lost. Harjo is a visionary and a truth sayer, and her expansive imagination sweeps time, interpolating history into the present. She writes: 'Rivers are the old roads, as are songs, to traverse memory.' Creating a confluence of words, a new language for storytelling arises. An American Sunrise is a powerful tour de force."

Elise Paschen

"If you only read one book of poems this summer, make it An American Sunrise.... Every step of the journey is deeply moving... Rich and deeply engaging, An American Sunrise creates bridges of understanding while reminding readers to face and remember the past."

Washington Post - Elizabeth Lund