To be honest, I will read anything that Joy Harjo writes. This is a beautiful collection from her 50 years as a poet with such a deeply poignant indigenous voice.

One of Harjo’s best works. It is intimate and raw. Starting with an introduction from Cisneros allows the reader to feel as if they know the poet, following along her journey. A gorgeous portrayal of human connection and pain.

Joy HArjo is an amazing poet and I was excited for her new collection and was not disappointed. I look forward to more and more

Joy Harjo, three term Poet Laureate of the United States, is considered the voice of Native Americans but actually she speaks for us all, to us all. In Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light, Harjo has selected fifty poems spanning her remarkable fifty year career and also provided an illuminating brief discussion of each one.

When I think of Joy Harjo writing, I envision her with her ear pressed to the earth with her eyes on the sky. She speaks as a biologist trained in nature rather than the classroom, as a historian of the heart. She speaks of love of the earth and all of its creatures. She speaks of social injustices with devastatingly powerful prose. She speaks of the old ways and the power of stories, music, and dance. Reading Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light will open you up, break you apart and put you back together.
You don't need to love poetry to love this book.

I received a drc from the publisher via NetGalley.

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years by Joy Harjo is a deep and insightful introduction to Harjo’s poetry from the past fifty years. Harjo’s selections cover poignant rituals, lasting love, generational challenges, and more. I definitely discovered some new favorite poems of hers. My only critique of this collection, at least based on the eARC version I read, is that the wonderful notes from Harjo reflecting on how each poem came to be and why were relegated to the back of the book. I would have preferred the notes and poetry to be paired together so the poem could be enjoyed and the details of its birth into the world read in tandem.

This collection marks 50 years of poetry writing for Harjo. The poetry is beautiful, as expected. She had chosen 50 of her previous poems for inclusion in the collection. My favorite part was the notes section where Harjo explains where she was in life when each poem was written and often includes influences. These notes weave together a biography of a half a century of poetry and the poet that created it. It was fascinating.

These poems portray the power of a story, the strength of a voice, the indelible marks left by experiences, and offer hope that as long as stories are told, people cannot be erased.

4.5 stars

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light was my first exposure to the poetry of Joy Harjo, and what a great collection it was for introducing me to her. It was great being able to be exposed to poems from across her 50 year career, seeing how her poems and themes developed and expanded across time.

Joy Harjo has such a unique and flowing poetic voice, and I found myself drawn into the worlds she weaves through her words. I loved that this collection also included her reflections on and inspiration for the poems, though I do wish they were paired directly with each poem rather than relegated to the back of the book.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Joy Harjo is back at it again with another thought-provoking novel that entices me to think more deeply while offering us insight into her life. 50 poems for 50 years was not enough, but I will eagerly await her next release.

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light is a collection of 50 poems by Joy Harjo, the last United States Poet Laureate. In this collection, Harjo gathers and then discusses 50 poems she has written over the course of her 50-year career. The poems range in topic and change throughout the course of Harjo's life. Many of them focus on Harjo's identity as a Native American.

This was a lovely collection of poetry and a great way to start off 2023. I appreciated the reflective nature of an anthology of poetry spanning 50 years - it matched the mood for the new year perfectly.

** Thanks so much to Joy Harjo, W. W. Norton & Company, and NetGalley for this ARC! Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light is available now. **

I really enjoyed this journey through Harjo's poetry. New Orleans and Santa Fe were favorite poems. I especially liked the short histories of the writing of each poem and only wish they individually followed the poem it referenced so you didn't have to go back through the pages. Jazz, music and place are all integral. I was especially moved by the story behind washing her mother's body. So many thoughts and emotions evoked, I just want to read more.

Copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley

Joy Harjo selected her best poems from the last 50 years to include in this treasure. Harjo's voice speaks of ancestral memory, tribal histories, politics, love and more. This former US Poet Laureate is one of the great poets of our time and this compilation is not to be missed.

Thank you to Joy Harjo, W. W. Norton & Company, and Netgalley for an advanced reader copy of "Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years" for an honest review.

I came into reading Jo Harjo's work during her tenure as the United States Poet Laureate (2019-2021), and I have been unable to put her down since. In a gorgeous little gem of a collection, Harjo picks her best fifty poems from across 50 years, and each of them is deftly crafter with notes around it, talking about her process in the time of writing, both before the words and looking back on them now.

I cannot wait to see what magic she puts out next!

A Collection of 50 poems spanning 50 years of Joy Harjo’s life. And after reading this collection she fast becoming a favorite poet of mine. And it’s to see why she was a three-term US Poet Laureate. She writes not only for herself but her people and the land as well. She is a must read poet.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this book. Joy Harjo is flawless, and this collection showed the progression of her voice over her career. I loved that it also included her personal stories of how she conceptualized them, and what these poems meant to her at the time of their writing. What a gift.

These poems taken from half a century of Joy Harjo’s work show the powerful words and moving themes that have made her an unforgettable voice in the world of poetry. Even better, it includes an introduction by Sandra Cisneros, Harjo’s notes on inspirations for various poems, and a reflection on what her poems reveal about the current world. I honestly love this form of retrospective, and I would love for every prolific poet to publish something similar. Seeing Harjo's reflections on her work is really powerful, and being able to see how her poetry has shifted over the decades is really meaningful. This is a fantastic collection whether it's your first or hundredth time exploring Harjo's poetry.

Out of all the forms of writing, poetry is the most subjective—depending on highly personal preferences, such as whether or not someone likes/enjoys/understands the subjects a poet dwells on, the way their prose sings (or not) with a reader, and the imagery drawn in a reader’s head, some poets connect well with some readers, and others do not. Unfortunately, this collection, unlike prior collections by Harjo, did not connect with me, and I was baffled by this conclusion, as I’ve read a few of her other collections and memoirs before and enjoyed the majority of them.

The subjects that Harjo dwells on in this career-spanning collection are wide and varied, but most of them come back to a few themes: living as a Native American woman in modern-day America and having to deal with the trauma that requires; growing up as an independent woman raising several kids while struggling to put food on the table and committing to something as deeply personal as art; and broader darker themes, such as violence against women and Native Americans over the course of America’s history, crumbling family systems, and struggling to scrape by in the economic morass that America became in the second half of the twentieth century. While that all sounds dark and depressing, there are a lot of poems thrown in that celebrate some of the subjects listed prior, such as the joy of taking control of your life and trying to forge your own destiny, the joy of seeing a sunrise over a desert mountain, and the social/mental/emotional pleasures of having a family to call your own.

Connecting with poetry oftentimes has more to do with just the subject matter though, and I think this is where I struggled with Harjo’s collection that spanned some fifty-odd years of her career—the style of the poems was all over the place, and a lot of the styles chosen for some of the poems were just not ones that I personally loved. There are a significant amount of prose poems in this collection, and people usually feel one way or the other with that style of poetry, and it oftentimes depends on both the subject of the poem and the way that the lines of prose seem to sing (or not) on the page. I just didn’t find Harjo’s language to be elevated or beautiful in most of them, and they seemed to be filled with nothing but declarative sentences and base-level descriptions of their scenes or settings.

There is also a section at the very end of the collection where Harjo reveals the inspirations behind most of the poems, and this was the highlight of the entire book for me. I loved finding out both what the poems were supposed to mean and represent and where the ideas came from, but I wished they had been introduced either before or after each poem individually. I read through all the poems at first and then discovered the section at the end, and I found it tedious to go back and forth to see which poems she was referencing. I feel like it was an uneven way to discover the magic that the poems were supposed to represent with the reader, and by having them before or after the poems and getting that immediate story along with them, the poems would’ve had much more impact with me in the moment.

At the end of the day, Harjo is a legend in the American literary community, and I understand her importance on so many levels related to both her position in the poetry world and the way she’s shattered many glass ceilings. Even though I didn’t connect with much of the work in this book, I highly recommend the collection still, as the poems would appeal to a lot of other people’s poetical tastes, and she is a master of most styles of poetry (she didn’t become a three-time U.S. Poet Laureate for nothing). And, as the subjects Harjo tackles within her poems are extremely heavy but important, I would encourage all libraries or anyone who has a large poetry library to include this volume, as career-spanning collections usually contain the work that the individual poet deems his or her most important poems, and that holds true here, especially by giving a voice to a segment of the American population that is far too often overlooked in both history books and society in general.

Thanks to NetGalley, W. W. Norton & Company, and Joy Harjo for the digital ARC of 'Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light' in exchange for an honest review.

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light is not my first experience reading Joy Harjo's poetry, but it might be the experience that has impacted me the most. This collection of fifty poems spanning the fifty years of her career is a beautiful representation of her career as well as being a beautiful collection of poetry regardless of context. Sandra Cisneros penned a lovely foreword. Harjo's notes at the end are a special treasure, offering up the backgrounds of poems, the events and ideas that helped breathe life into them.

My favourite poems in the collection are She Had Some Horses, For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, A Postcolonial Tale, The Dawn Appears With Butterflies, Perhaps the World Ends Here, For Calling the Spirit Back From Wandering the Earth In Its Human Feet, and Rabbit is Up to Tricks.

Highly recommended!

Joy Harjo's Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light was a book I highly anticipated, and the introduction by Sandra Cisneros, recounting how their friendship began when they were both at University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop together and the joy as she'd reflect on when their paths would cross over the years, whetted my appetite for what I was about to experience.

Weaving Sundown gathers fifty poems across fifty years of Harjo's work. Themes of place and impact are replete in these pages, of barriers overcome and struggles survived.

I am drawn to poems, while also recognizing I don't catch everything and wishing I was more schooled in the framework of poetry. As such, while the poems themselves reliably drew me in, there was another level of enjoyment when I reached Harjo's notes at the close of the volume. As I read more about the context or inspiration of the individual poems, I found myself returning to the respective poems to read them anew, with some additional context now in my possession.

(I received a digital ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.)

Beautiful poems reprised with an insightful essay from Sandra Cisneros that gives readers a glimpse of what Harjo is like in person and how strongly she affected her peers. A perfect collection of Harjo's poems over the years.