"A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathersthe work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. With work from Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, Layli Long Soldier, among others, Living Nations, Living Words showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, "poetry [that] emerges from the soul of a community, the heart and lands of the people. In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than 500 living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.""-- - (Baker & Taylor)

Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry.Living Nations, Living Words - (WW Norton)

A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. - (WW Norton)

Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* This richly individualized anthology takes its title from an interactive online map of current Native poets, a project undertaken by Harjo during her tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate. Sponsored by the Library of Congress, the map enables visitors to explore historical contexts in multimedia offerings, including recordings of recitations and commentary by the contributors, who each chose a poem based on the theme of place and displacement, and with four touchpoints in mind: visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Poets also decided where to place themselves on the map, and this literary agency as well as the large portraits and brief bios that introduce each writer humanize the collection. Several established Native writers are included, such as Sherwin Bitsui, Jennifer Elise Foerster, and Craig Santos Perez, but the anthology dedicates ample space to emerging authors. And while another recent anthology edited by Harjo and others, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (2020), also organizes poems by geography, this title approaches place metaphorically, collecting poets and poems around shared themes. East includes pieces on daybreak and beginning,Center functions as the belly and the heart of presence, and West signals departure and looks to the future.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Poet Laureate Harjo's historically important project for American poetry belongs in every collection. Copyright 2021 Booklist Reviews.