The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

by Joy Harjo

Overview

Joy Harjo, one of this country's foremost Native American voices, combines elements of storytelling, prayer, and song, informed by her interest in jazz and by her North American tribal background, in this, her fourth volume of poetry.

She draws from the Native American tradition of praising the land and the spirit, the realities of American culture, and the concept of feminine individuality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393313628
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/17/1996
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	88
Sales rank:	193,171
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(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.

What People are Saying About This

Adrienne Rich

I turn and return to Harjo's poetry for her breathtaking, complex witness and for her world-remaking language: precise, unsentimental, miraculous.

Sandra Cisneros

I fell in love with these poems, with their clarity and light, their wisdom born somewhere between sky and earth.

Editorial Reviews

"I fell in love with these poems, with their clarity and light, their wisdom born somewhere between sky and earth."

Sandra Cisneros

"I turn and return to Harjo's poetry for her breathtaking, complex witness and for her world-remaking language: precise, unsentimental, miraculous."

Adrienne Rich

``The leap between the sacred and profane is as thin as fishing line.'' In her seventh book, Harjo (Secrets from the Center of the World), a member of the Creek tribe, makes this leap time after time. Working with a diction and a syntax that seem deliberately plain and declarative, she invokes ancient Native American myth, often from the midst of ordinary contemporary places such as Brooklyn, N.Y.; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago's O'Hare airport (``Chicago rose up as a mechanical giant with soft insides buzzing''). Her myths endow everyday experience with a transformative meaning that rescues Harjo's characters from their sometimes isolating individuality. Yet the myths also heed the details of individual experience as ``the single complicated human becomes a wave of humanness.'' The warmth of her universalizing gift is inclusive, collecting the lives of taxi drivers, an infant granddaughter, and ``an Apache man who is passing by my table in a restaurant.'' Readers may likewise feel swept up in the gentle wave of Harjo's poetry and prose poetry, where ``every day is a reenactment of the creation story.'' (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Harjo (In Mad Love and War, Wesleyan Univ. Pr., 1990), a member of the Muscogee tribe, explores in these transcendent poems the myths imbedded in tribal memory and the spirituality they impart to everyday life.

Library Journal