Review by Choice Review
In these poems Harjo fuses (as the title suggests) personal and political themes in free-verse and prose-poem forms. The emphasis is on confronting violence, revenge, loss, disillusionment, brutality to reach a human, miraculously graced center, whether the site be a prison, a gathering of dissidents in Central America, or the scene of a lynching in California. The poet draws on her Muscogee heritage (to which she traces her sensitivity to earth and its message) to ground both moral outrage and a liberation from recrimination. In content and stance Harjo belongs with poets like Carolyn Forche and Audre Lorde, though her poems suggest an additional dimension that can only be called spiritual. This book demonstrates a deepening, widening, and maturing of her considerable talent. Highly recommended for all general (public library) and undergraduate collections of contemporary American literature. H. Jaskoski California State University, Fullerton
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
In her third volume, Harjo continues to gain attention as one of America's most exciting native American poets. Most gripping here are prose poems that capture the intrusion of primordial sacredness into profane time: a woman who was "the end of beauty" enters a bar full of "Indian ruins . . . broken survivors" and creates "myth slipped down into dreamtime." And dreams appear that "aren't glass and steel but made from the hearts of deer" in the mall where a hickory-edged river once flowed. At her best, Harjo relies on simple, nonadjectival sentences through which strangeness flows, producing images like these: "a ceremony of boulders that has survived your many deaths," and "the same name in the middle of a nightmare, / from the center of miracles." Keep watching this poet. --Pat Monaghan
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
