Ways to remember

#40days40books entry 36

Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings is Joy Harjo's latest book of poems. She writes of time, of living, saxophones, hotel rooms and remembrance. The work is living, changing from piece to piece and creates a whole that moves within itself as well as on the heart of the reader.

Harjo is a working musician and brings the depth of that life and the depth of history into view in these poems. There is loneliness and love, as there is always, and there are moments of transcendent understanding, but those do not have to be the focus. Sometimes the focus is what limits - the unrecognized treaties, the disenfranchisement of millions of souls, colonizers and the perpetual work they have to do to maintain "control" of land that has been usurped and lives that have been sidelined. Sometimes the focus is the music, the rhythms and voices that carry humanity from one person to the next and also that are tiring and a challenge as they are a call. Every so often we hear from a different voice, a voice that is around, within, without and beyond. It speaks in between and gives what is not a frame, but a foundation for the approach to the conflict, and the recognition of holiness in beings.

Joy Harjo writes such whole works of poetry - the poems all work together as a kind of guide taking readers along a path they would never have seen or imagined on their own. She tracks the world with our feet and then bends all the laws we think we know to make something else possible.

I picked up this book because I really like hardcover poetry books - it's a thing that came with the job and may not leave with it gone. I'd read A Map to the Next World in a class on Native Women writers back in my (extremely long) undergrad career, and knew that her writing is a very real and very deliberate journey. She writes of travel - this is how I walk in to her work. The feel of new roads, of a new/known bar or hotel. She does not travel to get home, she travels to be home. 

And home is never uncomplicated, and it is never un-holy.

#40days40books list