Reviews with content warning for Genocide - An American Sunrise: Poems

I listened to this at single speed because it's a poetry book, not necessarily an information book. It was hard to listen to because of my own experiences of gender dysphoria of school faculty telling us how people in however-many years would surveil our corpses & determine our sex & maybe gender expression, but not our personalities.

Also there is actual information in here, such as about the trail of tears, and mechanisms of genocide. Like there was a quote given from 1937, and it felt so recent. (Currently there's an escalation of ethnic cleansing on the gaza strip.)

So like seeing this indigenous work is important for not doing self-indigenization when processing trauma (such as from genocide against lgbtqia+ people, disabled people) as a settler.

As a sign of the times (2019) & settler-fragility, this book uses the term immigrants to refer to european settlers who as a community, chose to be colonizers instead of welcome guests. I'm not sure how to feel about that due to how "immigrant" has still been weaponized by said white settlers, and because I've become less patriotic than I was when I thought AOC/Bernie Sanders/DSA had a chance at being administrators.

That being said, the blues is connected to residential school trauma (at least hers) & it's like... This poem book is from 2019, and I read this in 2023. I learned this year that the blues was titled the blues because west africa (where a lot of black people were kidnapped from during the trans-Atlantic slave trade) uses an 11-note music scale while Europeans used a 7-note scale. European supremacists were like white is universal so anything that isn't the 7-note frequency is odd/blue.

At first listen I'm sure which way Harjo means to go with the saying the blues are American. (To be clear, I think this is referring to after the label of blues was applied to the 11-note scale brought by kidnapped black peoples.) Like is this is a re-up of "new americana" (2015) by halsey? Is Harjo meaning how an audience & feedback between the audience & performers is part of theater? Because to be clear, she does include samples she tries to sing herself of the songs she's talking about & it does feed into some papers I read once about decolonizing music & decolonial art.

- (this one is about public art) Dylan Robinson (2022) Reparative interpellation: public art’s Indigenous and non-human publics, Journal of Visual Culture, 21(1), pp.69– 84
- (this is the one about decolonizing music. I found Harjo gave a better sampling than this essay gave because it's like in order to learn about different standards had by colonized peoples, you need to learn those standards, etc.) Dylan Robinson (2022) Giving / Taking Notice, Performance Matters, 8(1), pp.24–36

So point being, this is kind of a book for when thinking about 2019-esque DSA & "new americana". While IDK if I'd recommend the entire book to people, I'd definitely recommend some of the poems, especially about surviving residential school. (Basically they would escape the campus, listen to blues, and drink, self-medicate, and imagine/dissociate.)

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hanhantap's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

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thisisabbie's review against another edition

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emotional medium-paced

5.0

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katharina90's review

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emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

5.0

I love this collection and come back to it often. It is heartbreaking, uplifting, and utterly beautiful.

"Bless us, these lands, said the rememberer. These lands aren't our lands. These lands aren't your lands. We are this land."

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gabbygarcia's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

3.25

I read around a third of the physical copy before having to return it to the library. For once in my life I'm grateful for a library due date--It gave me the chance to borrow the audiobook instead. Harjo's poetry really lends itself to an audiobook format--I highly recommend it! So lovely to hear her reading her own words. It's a breathtaking book, really song-like & extraordinary.

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serendipitysbooks's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

4.0

An American Sunrise is a powerful mix of the personal and political, the past and the present. Joy Harjo returns to the sites of her Muscogee ancestor’s Trial of Tears and draws connections between what happened then and what is happening now to Native Americans generally, herself, her family, and in society more broadly - the treatment of migrants from south of the border being the most obvious of the latter. While there is grief and anger at what was lost in the past and what is happening today, there is also joy in the present and hope for the future. The raw power in some of her lines really took my breath away. I can only imagine the audio, with Harjo reading her own words, would be even more impactful.

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spinesinaline's review against another edition

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challenging emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

3.75

I was considering reading a digital copy of this one but a friend highly recommended the audiobook and that made for a great read. This is such personal poetry so it’s really special to hear it from Harjo herself and her intonation helps with understanding and following the poems.

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