A #panther poised in the cypress tree about to jump is a panther poised in a cypress tree about to jump.
The panther is a poem of fire green eyes and a heart charged by four winds of four directions. From 'Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings' by #Native American #Poet Laureate #JoyHarjo
http://contentcatnip.com/2025/11/26/a-panther-is-a-poem-with-the-fire-green-eyes/
I lay at the feet of desire for years.
Then I heard this song, calling me.
It was a woman in a red dress, It was a man with a gun in his hand.
It was a table filled with fruit and flowers.
It was a fox of fire, a bird of stone.
Then, it was gone.
What was left disintegrated by rain and wind
I had followed desire, to the end.
I was desire's dog.
I ate when I was fed. I did what I was told.
I knew how to sit, stand and roll over on command.
When I was petted, I was made whole.
Even when I dreamed, I dreamed a chain around my neck.
Desire is a bone with traces of fat.
It's the wag smell of a bitch in heat.
It's that pinched hit at the end of a beat.
It's a stick thrown into a rabbit chase.
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. #Indigenous #native #literature #books #bookreview #JoyHarjo #Poetry #poems
http://contentcatnip.com/2025/10/12/book-review-conflict-resolution-for-holy-beings-by-joy-harjo/
Book Review: Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo
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
Follow me on Mastodon Watch my videos Donate to my Ko Fi#AmericanHistory #art #BookReview #bookTag #BookReview #books #Colonisation #History #indigenous #JoyHarjo #JoyHarjo #literature #Native #nature #nonFiction #Philosophy #poems #poetry #storyteller #storytelling
🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #SoundsOfSurvivance
Joy Harjo:
🎵 One Day There Will Be Horses
I’d ride over the meadow of doubt flowers
Overwhelm
Joy Harjo
#Poetry #JoyHarjo #Overwhelm #TheNewYorker #Drinking
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/23/overwhelm-joy-harjo-poem
I really liked this collection. These are powerful, deeply personal and political poems about being a woman, being someone from a group which has historically been oppressed and has experienced enormous generational trauma, and also about being alive. The title poem is quite famous, but the ‘horses’, which reappear in many of the poems, can mean a lot of different things. Women's poetry from the 1970s and 80s is🔥
Joy Harjo, 'She Had Some Horses' (1983)
Content Catnip
chuls
Rachel W.
Content Catnip
The Lifeboat Academy
KEXP 🎶 #NowPlaying Bot
Andrew Shields
Mair Rigby