Radical Emancipation in Joy Harjo’s New Collection https://ift.tt/gIp7t3T
Advice for living abounds throughout the newest essay collection from poet and jazz musician Joy Harjo, Girl Warrior. In a straightforward and accessible tone she covers everything from paying attention to the world around you, to finding new opportunities, to defusing anger and spiritual rituals for the hardships of growing up.
“If you are not near water and you are on an emotional edge, you can go to the sink, run the water, dip your hands in the water and cover your head with it seven times,” Harjo writes. “You will feel calmer. Salt water is even better, and you can carry salt with you everywhere.”
As an outspoken member of the Mvskoke nation, Native American spirituality and mythology permeate the latest work by the legendary writer who served as United States poet laureate from 2019 to 2022. Harjo’s previously published poems are sprinkled throughout the chapters with behind-the-scenes insights on the experiences that inspired her, including “Sunrise,” “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet,” “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” and “Rabbit Is Up To Tricks,” just to name a few. For this reason, the book makes a great gift for older readers who were already fans of her work, as well as literary-minded teenagers. Girl Warrior dives into the inspiration and intentions that inspired Harjo’s career, including community activism, creative writing and music.
Harjo does all this while oscillating between talking to the reader and to her younger self. “You are my niece, grandchild, aunt, or friend, a young woman I have met along the way during my travels,” she writes at the start of a chapter about addiction. This book covers mature topics, from domestic violence to romance, although it does so in a way that felt appropriate (and relevant) for readers over the age of twelve. She warns that there may be times when young women put themselves into dangerous or compromising positions, or even seemingly minor, habitual self-harm like eating unhealthy food and zoning out in front of screens. This isn’t a reason to accept shame or become defensive, she argues in the chapter “Intimate Violence,” but it is important in these moments to remember one’s value. There is always an opportunity to turn towards healing, towards self-love, even if the steps down that path are small and slow.
With regards to romance, Harjo urges readers to honor their own boundaries while remembering to see beyond someone’s best qualities. It is better to be honest with oneself than to build sandcastle dreams that collapse when inevitable storms march across the sky. Failure, grief and hardship are coming, Harjo writes, but so are rainbows with mystical secrets that women can tap into if they tune into their own power and listen to the earth.
“We see you girl, with your baby in your arms,” she writes in another chapter, this one a rhetorical letter to her past self as a teenage mother. Yet even readers who haven’t experienced abuse, economic hardships or racism will find droplets of wisdom to wield as a warrior’s weapon in the chaotic time between girlhood and womanhood. Harjo offers advice about the importance of boundaries, of investing in friendships and forgiving yourself. She says friendships can be even more important than family because they are defined by our choices. Harjo describes her experiences with all of this using a combination of poetic grace and disarming honesty.
One shortcoming of the collection may be that it is self-indulgent but, even if so, who cares? On the other hand, a woman daring to prioritize her own thoughts and feelings, without needing justification or permission from anyone, or the veneer of Instagram-worthy perfection, may still be the ultimate act of radical emancipation. Either way, the brilliant mind contemplating her own pains and pleasures, with a heart for helping others avoid insecurities and embrace love in all its forms, is well worth following through the path of navel-gazing, traveling into the body and up through her clear eyes into the open blue sky.
“I am still working on the story,” Harjo writes. “What I have learned and am learning I am passing on to you.”
NONFICTION Girl Warrior Joy Harjo
W.W. Norton & Company
Published October 7, 2025
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