Last night I finished Crazy Brave, a memoir by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, and it honestly blew me away. Her writing just held me and held me and wouldn’t let me go until the last page. Her use of metaphor is also really powerful, and it was just such a powerful memoir, just reading about her life and how poetry was her medium of survival and resistance made me appreciate even more deeply the poetry book I read by her, She Had Some Horses. One day it was hot in my car so I sat outside on the grass and just read this book amidst nature, and Harjo’s writing took me away. Harjo’s writing is lived experience, it is lived narrative. Joy Harjo reminds me how powerful poetry and writing is in healing, in addressing collective trauma across generations. I’m so glad that the person who told me about Joy Harjo’s She Had Some Horses also recommended this memoir because if I hadn’t read it I wouldn’t have known how amazing she is.
Crazy Brave: A Memoir by Joy Harjo. 2012. 169 pp.
Discover more from The Arts Are Life
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The Arts Are Life 