Unfortunately, when she waxes most universal, her prose falls most flat. As she narrates her own journey, Harjo weaves in water monsters and forced sterilization, the myths and histories that shaped her. “Yet we each have our own individual soul story to tend.” This has been Harjo’s poetic strategy - to root the stories of native peoples in specific narratives, tales, myths, and images - and in “Crazy Brave’’ it becomes her autobiographical strategy.įinally, “Crazy Brave” is the chronicle of a people. “We enter into a family story, and then other stories based on tribal clans, on tribal towns and nations, lands, countries, planetary systems, and universes,” writes Harjo. The dynamic between the individual tale and that of the group is purposeful from the book’s first pages. But it is also a larger saga about the survival of spirituality and creativity in the face of generations of dispossession, racism, and familial dysfunction. “Crazy Brave” is the story of how Harjo survived abandonment and abuse, an oppressive evangelical church, the temptations of alcohol, and youthful struggles with failed marriages and single motherhood to become one of our most acclaimed Native American poets.

‘How the ’60s changed my life” is a long-exhausted narrative, but Joy Harjo might be the one person who could successfully - and thrillingly - revive it.

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