Poetry

In summer 2019, Oklahoma-born Joy Harjo became the first Native American appointed as the United States Poet Laureate. Outdoor readers are most familiar with Harjo for her memoir, Crazy Brave, but the Muscogee (Creek) Nation member is also an award-winning playwright, musician, and activist. An American Sunrise, her new collection of poems, traverses the kind of committing and uncomfortable terrain Harjo has been exploring her whole life: “Through the immense and terrible echo of injustice a meadow bird sang and sang.” Some argue outdoor recreation should be the one place we can go to get away from politics. Harjo, whose family was violently forced west on the Trail of Tears, reminds that the sacred exists in step with the profane. “That’s how blues emerged, by the way—Our spirits needed a way to dance through the heavy mess.” Stormy, radiant, singing in rhythms ancient and new, Sunrise is a call to a future restored and whole.

Camille Dungy's anthology traces Black nature writing from the colonial era to the present. The poems challenge the assumption that nature writing is a white tradition. Dungy's introduction alone is worth the book.