Daisy Fried Reviews Joy Harjo's American Sunrise for the NYT

The New York Times shares Daisy Fried's thoughts about the newest collection by incoming United States Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise (W. W. Norton, 2019). Reflecting on Harjo's appointment to the role, Fried remarks, "she’s the first indigenous poet to hold the post. This is overdue, and political: a reminder to those who view America as a white nation that we are nothing of the sort, and a reminder to those who believe it’s acceptable to terrorize and brutalize asylum seekers that the only real native Americans are pre-European indigenous peoples." Picking up from there: 

“An American Sunrise” is tribal history and retrieval. Harjo writes of ancestral lands and culture, and their loss, through personal, mythic and political lenses. In a prefatory prose statement Harjo explains the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which expelled tribes from their land, making explicit connection between past and present: “The indigenous peoples who are making their way up from the Southern Hemisphere are a continuation of the Trail of Tears.” She makes the connection again when, in “Exile of Memory,” a long poem of short parts, she describes the treatment of indigenous child migrants in the 19th century, with imagery suggestive of current headlines: “They were lined up to sleep alone in their army-issued cages.”

Learn more at the New York Times.