She Had Some Horses: Poems

She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo starts with a cover that invites motion into the conversation and is filled with poems that move the mind and the heart. Harjo delves into the intricacies of life and living with a deft hand that always feels in motion. I read one poem a night because I wanted to savor each poem and give myself to feel it and think about it. Harjo connects humanity to the earth and the earth to all its inhabitants in a way that reminded me of the just how interconnected everything on the earth is with both celebration and a call to action. She Had Some Horses moves through the imagination like horses in motion.

[[Joy Harjo]] belongs in the canon of great American poets, not just for her reinvigoration of Native voices, but simply because her own voice is so achingly evocative. A slim book, but powerful in its brevity. These are ones to savor one at a time over several days, and to reread many times over. These are not the typical modern verses, obscured to the point of unintelligibility. Rather, each stanza, each line, drips in layers of meaning and cut to the quick of the human condition, regardless of cultural connections, though those add another much deeper layer.

Highly Recommended!!!!!
4 1/2 bones!!!!!

A collection of poems by Native American poet (and one-time American Poet Laureate) Joy Harjo.

When I was in high school, back in the dim and distant year of Nineteen Eighty-Something, my English class did some kind of field trip thing to a poetry event that featured readings and classes on poetry. I remember almost none of it. What I do remember, so clearly that I can still almost hear her voice in my head all these decades later, is Joy Harjo reading the title poem from this collection.

Why it made that big of an impact on me, I honestly couldn't say. My relationship to poetry has always been weird, and a bit contentious. I tend to find it offputting unless it somehow just clicks with me, and then I love it with all my heart. show more Sometimes it's obvious why it clicks, when it does, and other times it's not. Harjo's life experiences are obviously very different from mine, and were even more so when she was a published poet and I was a high school kid, but that poem, at least as she presented it, clicked.

Not all the poems in this collection (which I can't believe it's taken me this long to read after carrying that one poem with me for all this time) clicked with me in the same way, even though I've since managed to accumulate at least a few things in common with Harjo, as she frequently writes about New Mexico, where I've lived since not that long after that high school experience. But I have, in recent years, gotten a bit better about learning to appreciate even poems that don't immediately have that click for me. The key, it seems, is to stop thinking of them as frustrating puzzles that require you to somehow decode the poet's hidden messages, and start thinking of them as if they were songs. And there are some good songs here. show less

The title poem 'She Had Some Horses' reinvents and updates the 'Navajo War God's Horse Chant' placing it in an urban and contemporary setting but drawing on the boast tradition with its parallel structures and syntax. Each time I use this poem in a workshop the students find different and new things in it, so a multi-layered poem in a multi-layered book by a real poet.

I adore Joy Harjo's work. As a poet, I really look up to her. This is the first book I read by her, loved it.

Beautiful and devastating. This book blew through me.

Glad to have read it entirely; found a few pieces to love besides the ones I already knew.