I’d like to thank the publisher and Joy Harjo for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! This is a collection of 50 poems and explanations of their meanings and how she wrote them. I really enjoyed this collection and the poems were all really meaningful and the mini-essays at the end of the book helped to understand them better. This is a must have for poetry fans!

This is a collection of poetry from across Joy Harjo's long career, and at the end, done fascinating little mini-essays by Harjo about the writing of those poems. Her fans will definitely want this collection.

Many of the poems here bore meanings and themes that I couldn’t fully grasp - which should have been no surprise. They are after all birthed from various contexts from Joy Harjo’s life as an indigenous woman (amongst other parts of her unique personal identity), whereas I’m a Caucasian male born and raised in southern New England. However, I still enjoyed the lyricism of her words and the various forms they took as outlets of her expression, and also the time I spent trying to muse over the potential themes. Meanwhile, those poems whose greater meanings I could recognize (or were at least spelled out pretty plainly, as far as I could interpret) more often than not were able to immediately reach straight to my spirit in some shape, and made for even better reflection afterwards. Also, as one can probably imagine, I was quite pleased to finish all fifty poems to then find context from Harjo on each and every one - giving me not only background information and expanded understanding, but a greater potential to appreciate them even more.

To be blunt though, I’m not fully sure others need to hear of my own personal experience in order to decide whether they want to give “Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light” a try. After all, it’s a collection of poems from Joy Harjo. Even if she didn’t officially bear the title of Poet Laureate, she’s still one of the contemporary greats. Honestly, what’s not to be enjoyed here?