Harjo’s poetry is deeply rooted in her ancestral roots and the intergenerational trauma of colonisation. Her collection is a profound meditation on the lives, struggles, and resilience of all indigenous peoples.
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Poetry, Non-fiction, Native American Literature
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Review in one word: Transcendental
Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned poet, writer, and musician of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate. Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings is a powerful and essential collection of poems and prose from Harjo.
The book is not a linear narrative but a lyrical journey that weaves together personal memory, ancestral stories, and sharp political commentary to paint a vivid picture of Indigenous existence in the modern world.
The trajectory of the collection follows the profound cycles of life, loss, and survival. Harjo begins by emphasising the importance of passing down traditions from one generation to the next, a sacred act of cultural preservation.
Poems and short vignettes traverse time and geography, drawing on imagery and stories from ancestral knowing in North America, from Alaska to Hawaii to her own Cherokee lands.
The centrepiece poem, from which the collection takes its title, serves as a powerful axis for the book’s themes. In it, Harjo contrasts the worldviews of Native peoples and white Americans, particularly in their approaches to conflict, land, and spirituality.
Harjo critiques a colonising mindset that would build a casino on sacred land, contrasting it with the Indigenous preference for resolving conflict and expressing identity through art, music, poetry, and oral tradition.
There’s a lot of thematic focus on the Blues as a musical style and lifestyle and her prose is incantatory, blending the rhythms of traditional song and oral storytelling.
I loved this collection of elegiac and hopeful poems there is so much affinity I feel for her and her experiences seeing as I am indigenous as well. This is a moving and essential collection of poetry. Harjo is a genius for the ages!
Content Catnip 