The New U.S. Poet Laureate And Native American Memory

“[Joy] Harjo interrogates both one’s responsibility toward one’s culture and the fear of being buried under its weight. … This ‘trade language,’ as she later calls English, is weak, insufficient. It’s the language of the American story, and it comes freighted with all of that story’s history, atrocity, and false hope. How, she asks, can we escape its past?” – The New Yorker