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Joy Harjo. Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems. New York: W W Norton, 2015. isbn: 978-0-3932-4850-0.
Joy Harjo's newest collection of poems, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, is divine, ecstatic, heartbreaking, heartfelt, dangerous, loving, musical, playful, serious. This book does so much to the heart and mind that it's exhausting-in a good way, like exercise. It's the kind of book that takes weeks to read because each poem stands so strongly-you have to put the book down and drink a cup of tea and stare out of the window and wonder how you have lived so long and still don't have a brain that works like Harjo's, but where you might feel jealousy there's instead just a weird, intense rhapsody.
I do not think I am given to hyperbole, and it feels strange to reread my own words. But it's true, Conflict Resolutions for Holy Beings is a damn good book, and an important one. A few lines from "Talking with the Sun" may elucidate my excitement: "After dancing all night in a circle we realize that we are/a part of a larger sense of stars and planets dancing with us overhead./When the sun rises at the apex of the ceremony, we are renewed" The poem continues, "There...