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A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales
"This breathtakingly honest collection of writings is alive with deeply felt and beautifully expressed emotions."―Wilma Mankiller In her fifth book, Joy Harjo, one of our foremost Native American voices, melds memories, dream visions, myths, and stories from America’s brutal history into a poetic whole.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
47 people are currently reading
954 people want to read
About the author
Joy Harjo
99 books1,962 followersBio Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. She has released four award-winning CD's of original music and won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year. She performs nationally and internationally solo and with her band, The Arrow Dynamics. She has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, in venues in every major U.S. city and internationally. Most recently she performed We Were There When Jazz Was Invented at the Chan Centre at UBC in Vancouver, BC, and appeared at the San Miguel Writer’s Conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Her one-woman show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, which features guitarist Larry Mitchell premiered in Los Angeles in 2009, with recent performances at Joe’s Pub in New York City, LaJolla Playhouse as part of the Native Voices at the Autry, and the University of British Columbia. Her seven books of poetry include such well-known titles as How We Became Human- New and Selected Poems and She Had Some Horses. Her awards include the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She was recently awarded 2011 Artist of the Year from the Mvskoke Women’s Leadership Initiative, and a Rasmuson US Artists Fellowship. She is a founding board member and treasurer of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Harjo writes a column Comings and Goings for her tribal newspaper, the Muscogee Nation News. Soul Talk, Song Language, Conversations with Joy Harjo was recently released from Wesleyan University Press. Crazy Brave, a memoir is her newest publication from W.W. Norton, and a new album of music is being produced by the drummer/producer Barrett Martin. She is at work on a new shows: We Were There When Jazz Was Invented, a musical story that proves southeastern indigenous tribes were part of the origins of American music. She lives in the Mvskoke Nation of Oklahoma.
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. She has released four award-winning CD's of original music and won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year. She performs nationally and internationally solo and with her band, The Arrow Dynamics. She has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, in venues in every major U.S. city and internationally. Most recently she performed We Were There When Jazz Was Invented at the Chan Centre at UBC in Vancouver, BC, and appeared at the San Miguel Writer’s Conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Her one-woman show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, which features guitarist Larry Mitchell premiered in Los Angeles in 2009, with recent performances at Joe’s Pub in New York City, LaJolla Playhouse as part of the Native Voices at the Autry, and the University of British Columbia. Her seven books of poetry include such well-known titles as How We Became Human- New and Selected Poems and She Had Some Horses. Her awards include the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She was recently awarded 2011 Artist of the Year from the Mvskoke Women’s Leadership Initiative, and a Rasmuson US Artists Fellowship. She is a founding board member and treasurer of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Harjo writes a column Comings and Goings for her tribal newspaper, the Muscogee Nation News. Soul Talk, Song Language, Conversations with Joy Harjo was recently released from Wesleyan University Press. Crazy Brave, a memoir is her newest publication from W.W. Norton, and a new album of music is being produced by the drummer/producer Barrett Martin. She is at work on a new shows: We Were There When Jazz Was Invented, a musical story that proves southeastern indigenous tribes were part of the origins of American music. She lives in the Mvskoke Nation of Oklahoma.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews
October 12, 2020
"At birth we know everything, can see into the shimmer of complexity. When a newborn looks at you it is with utter comprehension. We know where we are, and we know where we've been. And then we forget it all. That's why infants sleep so much after birth. It is an adjustment. The details of a new awareness have to be fine-tuned. But memory is elastic and nothing is ever forgotten. It's submerged below the bloodstream, in the river of memory informing us of direction, like a gyroscope in the heart of a ship. We are all headed to the same destination, eventually."
Excerpt of 'when we were born we remembered everything' from the collection A MAP TO THE NEXT WORLD: Poems and Tales by Joy Harjo / 2000
My first poetry collection by the recently named Poet Laureate of the United States, Joy Harjo. This collection combines poetry, and short prose called 'tales' in the title. Some are personal narratives about her music career, her family, others more like fables with animal characters, and still others more philosophical musings, like the quote I shared above.
"It's not just humans who sing for rain, make poetry as commentary on the meaning of life.
We aren't the only creatures, or the most likely to succeed."
Excerpt of 'when we were born we remembered everything' from the collection A MAP TO THE NEXT WORLD: Poems and Tales by Joy Harjo / 2000
My first poetry collection by the recently named Poet Laureate of the United States, Joy Harjo. This collection combines poetry, and short prose called 'tales' in the title. Some are personal narratives about her music career, her family, others more like fables with animal characters, and still others more philosophical musings, like the quote I shared above.
"It's not just humans who sing for rain, make poetry as commentary on the meaning of life.
We aren't the only creatures, or the most likely to succeed."
March 14, 2018
between 4 - 4.5 stars. a vulnerable and haunting collection.
"There was a massacre in El Salvador. The soldiers had gathered all the men and boys in the church at the center of town and killed them. Then the women and the girls were taken to the fields and raped and killed. One particularly beautiful one was assaulted by many soldiers before they left her to die. She began her song as she was pushed down into the dirt and did not stop singing, no matter what they did to her. She sang of the dusky mountains who watched them that day from the clouds. She sang of the love of a boy and a girl. She sang of flowers and the aroma of the moon as it linked the night with dawn. She did not stop singing. She is still singing. Can you hear her?"
"There was a massacre in El Salvador. The soldiers had gathered all the men and boys in the church at the center of town and killed them. Then the women and the girls were taken to the fields and raped and killed. One particularly beautiful one was assaulted by many soldiers before they left her to die. She began her song as she was pushed down into the dirt and did not stop singing, no matter what they did to her. She sang of the dusky mountains who watched them that day from the clouds. She sang of the love of a boy and a girl. She sang of flowers and the aroma of the moon as it linked the night with dawn. She did not stop singing. She is still singing. Can you hear her?"
December 14, 2021
If this be poetry, I'll have some more please. Joy Harjo is someone I'll be dropping in on again and again. Her A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales is full of sudden insights and visions like chasms. Suddenly, in the middle of a poem, I find this:
Let me at her other books.
Humans are the strangest of animals because they make lawsAnd on the very next page:
from lies, then reinforce them. We should be like the antelope
who gratefully drink the rain,
love the earth for what it is—their book of law, their heart.
Some days are innately in harmony. We were born to a spirit on a particular day and it jives with the one we are in. Other days are doomed to give us a rough ride and the only way through it is to hang on and get back again if you get bucked off. Any conscious preparation will allow us to act with steady grace, no matter the fluid destiny.Whether with her poetry or the interspersed prose, Joy Harjo is class A number 1.
Let me at her other books.
March 5, 2025
Brilliant, warm, graceful, , breathtaking, bittersweet, unbearable. All apply to this amazing collection of Native American poet Joy Harjo!
February 21, 2024
Très doux et poétique, j'ai rarement lu de texte sur les Amérindiens et celui-ci me donne envie d'en lire d'autres
June 10, 2022
This is a book I read for my poetry analysis class. I really liked it honestly. I don't think it is a book that I will think about a lot, but reading it and analyzing it in class was a very positive experience. Joy Harjo works at my college, The University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and I actually got the chance to attend a lecture that she spoke at whilst reading the book. I really like getting to see her outside of the covers of a book. This is a combination of poems and prose/short stories telling about her Native/Indigenous heritage, her connection with the world, and the people in her life who shaped her.
January 15, 2009
Full of sincerity and reverence for the world, this book is a good reminder to be grateful. It is also necessary for someone to be constantly reiterating the politics and history recounted in the book. That said, there is virutally no artisitic or literary merit to the writing in this book. My guess is that the author's response to such a comment would be that I am mired in the language of "the enemy." I'm willing to consider that possibility.
January 28, 2017
In A Map to the Next World Joy Harjo's poems and tales bear beauty and grace amidst tragic witness to Native American history and identity.
"Instinct" (16)
"In the dark I travel by instinct,
through the rubble of nightmares,
groaning of monsters toward the crack of light
along your body's horizon.
I roll over to my side, take you in my nostrils
test you for shape, intention and food
as nations fall apart.
Small winds tattoo my cheek.
Soon they will bring mist,
a small rain to clean the world
send rainbows to dress us,
for the ceremony
to rid us of the enemy mind."
"when we were born we remembered everything" (17-18)
"We are living in a system in which human worth is determined by money, material wealth, color of skin, religion, and other capricious factors that do not tell the true value of a soul. This is an insane system. Those who profit from this system have also determined, by rationale and plundering, that the earth also has no soul, neither do the creatures, plants or other life forms matter. I call this system the overculture. There is no culture rooted here from the heart, or the need to sing. It is a system of buying and selling. Power is based on ownership of land, the work force, on the devaluation of life. The power centers are the multinational corporations who exploit many to profit a few. True power does not amass through the pain and suffering of others.
Phillip Deere, a spiritual leader from the Mvskoke, predicted the many twists and turns this path through the colonized world could take. He and others like him warned that this season will eventually pass, but not without great pain and suffering for everyone.
It's difficult to walk through the illusion without being awed and distracted by it. Power is seductive and sparkles. False gold also glitters. We think we know the difference, but it's easy to be seduced when all appearances tell you there is everything to be gained by winning.
At birth we know everything, can see into the shimmer of complexity. When a newborn looks at you it is with utter comprehension. We know where we are coming from, where we have been. And then we forget it all. That's why infants sleep so much after birth. It is an adjustment. The details of a new awareness have to be fine-tuned. But memory is elastic and nothing is ever forgotten. It's submerged below the bloodstream, in the river of memory informing us of direction, like a gyroscope in the heart of a ship. We are all headed to the same destination, eventually.
We who greet these arriving souls rejoice that the old ones have returned and will accompany us through the next cycle of the story.
I struggled and choked as I slid down the road through my mother. She was terrified, had not maternal instruction on birth. I wanted out as quickly as possible yet had serious doubts as to whether I wanted to take it on, a life that early on would run the jagged borders of despair and joy, so I went forwards and backwards, fought and nearly killed both of us as I came into this world, two months before my due date. I still battle impatience and the bad habit of struggle when there need be no fight.
I try to remember the beautiful sense of the pattern that was revealed before that first breath when the struggle in this colonized world threatens to destroy the gifts that my people carry into the world. But we cannot be destroyed. Destiny can be shifted by evil, but only for a little while."
"A Map to the Next World" (19-21)
"In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky.
My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.
For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.
The map must be of sand and can't be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.
In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.
Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.
Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our children while we sleep.
Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born there of nuclear anger.
Trees of ashes wave goodbye and the map appears to disappear.
We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to them by their personal names.
Once we knew everything in this lush promise.
What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles and wasted blood.
An imperfect map will have to do, little one.
The place of entry is the sea of your mother's blood, your father's small death as he longs to know himself in another.
There is no exit.
The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine--a spiral on the road of knowledge.
You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.
They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.
And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.
You will have to navigate by your mother's voice, renew the song she is singing.
Fresh courage glimmers from planets.
And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.
When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.
You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.
A white deer will come to greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction.
Remember the hole of our shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds.
We were never perfect.
Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.
We might make them again, she said.
Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.
You must make your own map."
"The Gift" (125)
"When I walked your land of buffalo and tall grasses
under a sky that shimmered thick with spirits who watched over you
I knew I had walked into an encampment of distant relatives.
Though it was winter, and your country is famous
for breaking horses and souls with little tolerance for ice and darkness,
I was taken in and seated next to the fire. The children were curious
about the songs I was carrying, the horn packed in the bag
that had traveled with me, many lands to get here.
You offered me soup with corn, and meat from a recent hunt.
We traded stories, laughter about the usual foul-ups of our terrible
human selves. We spoke quietly, even fearfully of the cruelty
galloping our lands, each new act of violence more inspired than the last.
We knew we knew nothing and this nothing was the huge expanse of mystery
kept alive in the brightness of remembering everything, from the exquisite detail
of the finest running horses, shining eyes of the newly born, or
spirits who allowed themselves to be kept in a song or story as food
through the longest seasons of brutality.
When it was time to leave we left behind any words of sadness
or hopelessness. I followed the tracks of other travelers
toward thinking stars on the horizon of loneliness.
I wanted you to know this song overcame me.
I carry you with me everywhere."
"Morning Song" (128)
"The red dawn now is rearranging the earth
Thought by thought
Beauty by beauty
Each sunrise a link in the ladder
The ladder the backbone
Of shimmering deity
Child stirring in the web of your mother
Do not be afraid
Old man turning to walk through the door
Do not be afraid"
"In the Beautiful Perfume and Stink of the World" (133-135)
"Instinct" (16)
"In the dark I travel by instinct,
through the rubble of nightmares,
groaning of monsters toward the crack of light
along your body's horizon.
I roll over to my side, take you in my nostrils
test you for shape, intention and food
as nations fall apart.
Small winds tattoo my cheek.
Soon they will bring mist,
a small rain to clean the world
send rainbows to dress us,
for the ceremony
to rid us of the enemy mind."
"when we were born we remembered everything" (17-18)
"We are living in a system in which human worth is determined by money, material wealth, color of skin, religion, and other capricious factors that do not tell the true value of a soul. This is an insane system. Those who profit from this system have also determined, by rationale and plundering, that the earth also has no soul, neither do the creatures, plants or other life forms matter. I call this system the overculture. There is no culture rooted here from the heart, or the need to sing. It is a system of buying and selling. Power is based on ownership of land, the work force, on the devaluation of life. The power centers are the multinational corporations who exploit many to profit a few. True power does not amass through the pain and suffering of others.
Phillip Deere, a spiritual leader from the Mvskoke, predicted the many twists and turns this path through the colonized world could take. He and others like him warned that this season will eventually pass, but not without great pain and suffering for everyone.
It's difficult to walk through the illusion without being awed and distracted by it. Power is seductive and sparkles. False gold also glitters. We think we know the difference, but it's easy to be seduced when all appearances tell you there is everything to be gained by winning.
At birth we know everything, can see into the shimmer of complexity. When a newborn looks at you it is with utter comprehension. We know where we are coming from, where we have been. And then we forget it all. That's why infants sleep so much after birth. It is an adjustment. The details of a new awareness have to be fine-tuned. But memory is elastic and nothing is ever forgotten. It's submerged below the bloodstream, in the river of memory informing us of direction, like a gyroscope in the heart of a ship. We are all headed to the same destination, eventually.
We who greet these arriving souls rejoice that the old ones have returned and will accompany us through the next cycle of the story.
I struggled and choked as I slid down the road through my mother. She was terrified, had not maternal instruction on birth. I wanted out as quickly as possible yet had serious doubts as to whether I wanted to take it on, a life that early on would run the jagged borders of despair and joy, so I went forwards and backwards, fought and nearly killed both of us as I came into this world, two months before my due date. I still battle impatience and the bad habit of struggle when there need be no fight.
I try to remember the beautiful sense of the pattern that was revealed before that first breath when the struggle in this colonized world threatens to destroy the gifts that my people carry into the world. But we cannot be destroyed. Destiny can be shifted by evil, but only for a little while."
"A Map to the Next World" (19-21)
"In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky.
My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.
For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.
The map must be of sand and can't be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.
In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.
Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.
Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our children while we sleep.
Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born there of nuclear anger.
Trees of ashes wave goodbye and the map appears to disappear.
We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to them by their personal names.
Once we knew everything in this lush promise.
What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles and wasted blood.
An imperfect map will have to do, little one.
The place of entry is the sea of your mother's blood, your father's small death as he longs to know himself in another.
There is no exit.
The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine--a spiral on the road of knowledge.
You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.
They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.
And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.
You will have to navigate by your mother's voice, renew the song she is singing.
Fresh courage glimmers from planets.
And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.
When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.
You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.
A white deer will come to greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction.
Remember the hole of our shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds.
We were never perfect.
Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.
We might make them again, she said.
Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.
You must make your own map."
"The Gift" (125)
"When I walked your land of buffalo and tall grasses
under a sky that shimmered thick with spirits who watched over you
I knew I had walked into an encampment of distant relatives.
Though it was winter, and your country is famous
for breaking horses and souls with little tolerance for ice and darkness,
I was taken in and seated next to the fire. The children were curious
about the songs I was carrying, the horn packed in the bag
that had traveled with me, many lands to get here.
You offered me soup with corn, and meat from a recent hunt.
We traded stories, laughter about the usual foul-ups of our terrible
human selves. We spoke quietly, even fearfully of the cruelty
galloping our lands, each new act of violence more inspired than the last.
We knew we knew nothing and this nothing was the huge expanse of mystery
kept alive in the brightness of remembering everything, from the exquisite detail
of the finest running horses, shining eyes of the newly born, or
spirits who allowed themselves to be kept in a song or story as food
through the longest seasons of brutality.
When it was time to leave we left behind any words of sadness
or hopelessness. I followed the tracks of other travelers
toward thinking stars on the horizon of loneliness.
I wanted you to know this song overcame me.
I carry you with me everywhere."
"Morning Song" (128)
"The red dawn now is rearranging the earth
Thought by thought
Beauty by beauty
Each sunrise a link in the ladder
The ladder the backbone
Of shimmering deity
Child stirring in the web of your mother
Do not be afraid
Old man turning to walk through the door
Do not be afraid"
"In the Beautiful Perfume and Stink of the World" (133-135)
April 26, 2022
Better than She Had Some Horses, imo. But it was close. My gut-reaction favorite section part was, ‘Returning from the Enemy.’
November 27, 2013
Adrienne Rich wrote of this book, "I turn and return to Harjo's poetry for her breathtaking, complex witness and for her world-remaking language: precise, unsentimental, miraculous." And, I whole-heartedly agree.
Joy Harjo is a visionary, a fierce story-telling warrior woman. Her writing is holy, insightful, contemplative, honest and graceful. I will turn and return to Ms. Harjo's poetic prose also.
Joy Harjo is a visionary, a fierce story-telling warrior woman. Her writing is holy, insightful, contemplative, honest and graceful. I will turn and return to Ms. Harjo's poetic prose also.
November 23, 2008
Harjo always asks me to do more than read; she asks me to participate. A Native American woman who has lived in many worlds writes hauntingly of personal history and of History, the History which may not be as pleasant as we might like it to be. What saves the poems is the language, fine and dancing, and always connected to the heart.
February 9, 2020
I don’t have any experience with poetry except the occasional assignment in High School. So I definitely missed a lot here, but none the less the collection read well. The order of the poems in their parts told a beautiful whole story and felt very intimate. Makes me want to get into poetry more :)
June 5, 2018
Art is a funny thing. It has to speak to you. Harjo is a very talented storyteller, but maybe this wasn't the right story for me.
February 1, 2019
Joy Harjo and Mary Oliver are two of my favorite poets and I have turned to each of them this month for solace. Joy Harjo's words are magic to me - the truth that pours from her feels like it heals me every time. I first read this book many years ago (and long before my Goodreads account) and return to it often, but it had been a while since I sat and read the whole book again. Sometimes one dip into poetry (Mary Oliver's , when she died earlier this month) suddenly makes me want a whole ocean of poetry to sink into. The poem below is the title poem and my favorite from this collection.
A Map to the Next World ( for Desiray Kierra Chee)
In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky.
My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.
For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.
The map must be of sand and can't be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.
In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.
Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.
Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our children while we sleep.
Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born there of nuclear anger.
Trees of ashes wave goodbye and the map appears to disappear.
We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to them by their personal names.
Once we knew everything in this lush promise.
What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles and wasted blood.
An imperfect map will have to do, little one.
The place of entry is the sea of your mother's blood, your father's small death as he longs to know himself in another.
There is no exit.
The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine--a spiral on the road of knowledge.
You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.
They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.
And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.
You will have to navigate by your mother's voice, renew the song she is singing.
Fresh courage glimmers from planets.
And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.
When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.
You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.
A white deer will come to greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction.
Remember the hole of our shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds.
We were never perfect.
Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.
We might make them again, she said.
Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.
You must make your own map.
- Joy Harjo, 2000
A Map to the Next World ( for Desiray Kierra Chee)
In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky.
My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.
For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.
The map must be of sand and can't be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.
In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.
Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.
Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our children while we sleep.
Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born there of nuclear anger.
Trees of ashes wave goodbye and the map appears to disappear.
We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to them by their personal names.
Once we knew everything in this lush promise.
What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles and wasted blood.
An imperfect map will have to do, little one.
The place of entry is the sea of your mother's blood, your father's small death as he longs to know himself in another.
There is no exit.
The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine--a spiral on the road of knowledge.
You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.
They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.
And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.
You will have to navigate by your mother's voice, renew the song she is singing.
Fresh courage glimmers from planets.
And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.
When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.
You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.
A white deer will come to greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction.
Remember the hole of our shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds.
We were never perfect.
Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.
We might make them again, she said.
Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.
You must make your own map.
- Joy Harjo, 2000
January 6, 2023
Truly, this "A Map to the Next World" is a hidden gem.
This book was gifted to me by a very sweet person that I had met one time almost 5 years ago. I couldn't bring myself to pick up the book during the past 5 years because of how hurt I had felt in my life. The first few lines of the first poem "Songline of Dawn" was too much for my hear to handle. So I left it with my parents after I moved out. However, when I had found the book at the bottom of a box in my parents' basement that they were going to donate, I felt an intense pull to read it. I questioned to myself, "Why had I been given this book?" And surely, it's because this sweet person knew I was going to need to read it.
"A Map to the Next World" is truly a map to the next world for me. It's helped me on the self discovery journey that I've embarked on post-grad especially as an Indigenous woman that is navigating the world through so much beauty and turmoil. The most prevalent (and my favorite) themes of the book were birth and its counterpart, death. There are many poems in which birth and death are referenced in their purest forms of the word, and in others through metaphors, similes, and imagery.
My favorite line was from the poem "Holdup" where Harjo wrote, "Most humans breathed and died / without knowing they breathed planets" (p.48 lines 12-13). This is a very obvious reference to birth and death in that Harjo references the act of breathing, which is what all babies must do once having emerged from the womb. Then quickly references death and the vast expansiveness of our atomic connections to other planets and thus other beings in the universe. I immediately put down the book and thought of my interconnectedness with the world, and the beings around me while taking deep breaths.
Furthermore, as I've mentioned, I was truly experiencing quite a rough time over the past few years. I felt that Harjo's poetry gave me words to describe how I'm feeling, and also provided me a new perspective for which to look at my life. For example, Harjo wrote "Returning from the Enemy" a multiple page long poem. Harjo imparted the advice in section 11, "You can walk through hell with your head up, still sparring with the fire, or you can be defeated by any small thing" (p. 90). This was the advice that I needed to read. Harjo encourages the readers to be strong, resilient in the times of struggle, while also bending and allowing oneself to be fully open to feeling love and a range of emotions.
This is a book that I highly recommend for folks to read, as it will live in my personal library now. I'm glad my parents saved it for all these years for me to find after that the sweet person had given it to me.
This book was gifted to me by a very sweet person that I had met one time almost 5 years ago. I couldn't bring myself to pick up the book during the past 5 years because of how hurt I had felt in my life. The first few lines of the first poem "Songline of Dawn" was too much for my hear to handle. So I left it with my parents after I moved out. However, when I had found the book at the bottom of a box in my parents' basement that they were going to donate, I felt an intense pull to read it. I questioned to myself, "Why had I been given this book?" And surely, it's because this sweet person knew I was going to need to read it.
"A Map to the Next World" is truly a map to the next world for me. It's helped me on the self discovery journey that I've embarked on post-grad especially as an Indigenous woman that is navigating the world through so much beauty and turmoil. The most prevalent (and my favorite) themes of the book were birth and its counterpart, death. There are many poems in which birth and death are referenced in their purest forms of the word, and in others through metaphors, similes, and imagery.
My favorite line was from the poem "Holdup" where Harjo wrote, "Most humans breathed and died / without knowing they breathed planets" (p.48 lines 12-13). This is a very obvious reference to birth and death in that Harjo references the act of breathing, which is what all babies must do once having emerged from the womb. Then quickly references death and the vast expansiveness of our atomic connections to other planets and thus other beings in the universe. I immediately put down the book and thought of my interconnectedness with the world, and the beings around me while taking deep breaths.
Furthermore, as I've mentioned, I was truly experiencing quite a rough time over the past few years. I felt that Harjo's poetry gave me words to describe how I'm feeling, and also provided me a new perspective for which to look at my life. For example, Harjo wrote "Returning from the Enemy" a multiple page long poem. Harjo imparted the advice in section 11, "You can walk through hell with your head up, still sparring with the fire, or you can be defeated by any small thing" (p. 90). This was the advice that I needed to read. Harjo encourages the readers to be strong, resilient in the times of struggle, while also bending and allowing oneself to be fully open to feeling love and a range of emotions.
This is a book that I highly recommend for folks to read, as it will live in my personal library now. I'm glad my parents saved it for all these years for me to find after that the sweet person had given it to me.
September 22, 2023
read for class—
really loved all the poems, but a map to the next world is on another level.
really loved all the poems, but a map to the next world is on another level.
May 18, 2023
I came across A Map to Next World by way of its titular poem in
American Religious Poems
, an anthology edited by Harold Bloom. Though I didn’t much care for the anthology, the poem itself stood out like a beacon because of its striking insight, wisdom, and originality. I resolved to read more of Harjo, and started with this book.
For me 5 stars is an easy rating to give this book. And here I don’t mean some lower fraction between 4.5 and 4.9 rounded up with hesitancy because I’m stuck between a choice of exactly 4 or 5 stars; this is a full 5 stars out of 5 full stars, no reservations. It is very rare that I’ll rate a book of poetry at 5 stars.
It is arranged into 4 parts, perhaps reflective of significant milestones in Harjo’s journey through life. We start with “Songline of Dawn,” with eight poems and nine prose vignettes. From here we move through “Returning from the Enemy,” with three poems, three prose vignettes, and one titular poem in 14 parts, each of which consists of one poem and one vignette. After this we drift toward a close through “This is My Heart; it is a Good Heart,” with ten poems and eleven prose vignettes. Then we close with “In the Beautiful Perfume and Stink of the World,” with just one longer titular poem closing at page 135.
So, counting the 14 parts of the poem “Returning from the Enemy” as individual pieces, this book in all consists of thirty-six poems and thirty-seven prose vignettes. The final two pages contain brief notes on some of the terms used throughout, such as “beauty” and “monster,” which we learn Harjo has been using to express ideas, beliefs, and sentiments in connection with specific Native American cultures.
The poems and vignettes are on average longer than one page. Harjo has a lot of story to tell, many insights to share, and one gets the sense that she really wants to share those stories and insights. There’s a stream-of-consciousness feel to much of the content, yet when I go back through a poem or vignette, I begin to realize what’s not there—the explication, the drab details, the random asides, any excess at all. These are polished pieces, each with a refined focus, a determined purpose. I find myself imagining that there are first drafts of many, if not all of the pieces herein that are much longer and don’t look, read, or feel anything like the finished product. She has taken the time and expended the energy to distill her meditations into refined offerings.
Thematically, the entries focus on personal and cultural identity, memory, trauma, and spirituality while weaving a connection and relationship with the natural world throughout. Throughout the book, as you tread through her words, her childhood is present, her children are present, her spirits are near, and her song is clear as it is vibrant. Each experience she reflects on is intertwined with past experiences and woven, beautifully—harmoniously, with insights, ancestral stories and memory, reality of the present, consequences of colonialism, and much more.
There are metaphors here—deep, rich, and steeped in Harjo’s culture and epigenetic memory. These aren’t the shock-and-awe metaphors of the Surrealist movement, nor are they the overly abstract images of the Symbolist or Modernist movements. These are accessible, poignant, and purposeful, intended to convey ideas, feelings, insights, and understandings that perhaps could be conveyed no other way.
Take this fragment from “Emergence:”
Accessible, poignant, and purposeful. Or, take this fragment near the end of the opening poem, “Songline of Dawn:”
Open to interpretation, concrete, and expressive all at once. Or, maybe this fragment that starts “Four Songs:”
By itself, this image might seem abstruse, but within the context of the poem expression becomes clear and the words even evoke sensation. I won’t give it away.
For me, movement through these pages felt like a journey through the life and thought processes of a valuable individual, an important figure—Someone who’s words we would be wise not to dismiss or disregard. I found myself relating to much of the content on a personal level, despite sharing no cultural or ancestral ties with Harjo. For instance, my father was also abusive, an alcoholic, and a womanizer—but this only scratches the surface. I was often hit so hard by a poem or vignette—or a fragment therein—that I choked back tears and found myself lost in deep reflection and contemplation for the next day or two.
This surprised me more than anything. I somehow related to her words in deeply personal ways though my experience has almost nothing in common with hers—which I often found so baffling in its own right that a second layer of reflection and contemplation was piled upon the first.
I feel it’s important to clarify that I’m a middle aged, lower income white male with no formal education and no cultural or ethnic ties to any Native American nation or community. In fact, from a genetic standpoint I’m about as white as it gets, with my genetic ancestry showing as being almost exclusively from Northwest Europe—And I look it. So I have almost no cultural, ethnic, or racial bias toward Harjo’s work.
I have to say almost, because my ancestors have been here since the Fortune landed in Plymouth Bay on November 9, 1621—a year after the Mayflower. Genealogical records indicate that my 10th great grandfather on my father’s side, William Beckett Jr., disembarked as a new settler who setup shop as a blacksmith and an armorer. So there must inevitably be a degree of cultural involution, and of course no shortage of karmic entanglement.
I was granted no opportunity for an education growing up, despite being white and male. In 1st grade I followed my father’s example of anger management and threw my desk over toward my teacher. I don’t remember this incident myself, but I am fully aware of the consequences. From this point forward I was relegated to “special education,” where at the time a child was simply warehoused rather than educated. But, there’s more.
My parents separated a few months after I was born and divorced by the time I was 5. I endured terror and abuse from my father until I was 7 and went to live with my mother, who was now a “recovering” alcoholic who had a form of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy involving Psychiatrists instead of surgeons and medical doctors. Parents with the regular form of this disease make their children physically ill for the attention of medical professionals. Through manipulation and entrainment my mother very successfully made me crazy and through this process won the attention of psychiatric professionals. In fact, she was so successful that at 12 I ended up institutionalized as a ward of the Los Angeles Juvenile Courts until I was 15, when I ran away to wander the highways of every state west of the Mississippi for the rest of my childhood. Parental abuse had now become systemic abuse, and I realized that I was dead either way if I didn’t run away. I chose to die on my own terms rather than in the hands of my abusers.
I introduce a little of my story with the hope of possibly highlighting a pathway by which I could relate to her words though they had nothing to do with my own experience. For instance, one fragment that had me in tears and deep contemplation I found in the second poem, “the psychology of earth and sky:”
She was reflecting on the experience of leaving her family behind as she ventured off to perform in Hawaii, but somehow her words brought me to think of my time as a runaway when on several occasions I attempted to commit “suicide by desert.” I would hike off into the desert for a day without water where I would sing, talk, and curse to the stars half the night before falling asleep, only to wake up the next morning and soon encounter hospitable people with food and water—sometimes Native American. I did not have a community, or a culture, or a people to which I felt any sense of relationship—But I met with and found promise and a degree of hope in the spirits of the wild. And they walk with me today.
There are many times I came across passages that resonate with my way of looking at the world, that connect with my own personal cosmology—A cosmology that I can’t pin to a given source. In the same poem she writes:
Sure, I’m not Indian, but there was every expectation that I would simply disappear from this world after a short period of misery and defeat, my story untold, my song unsung, my struggles unknown. Yet I survived, and I continue to sing to the stars and meet with those spirits that found and nurtured me in the wilderness so long ago. I learned to play the bansuri flute, gained some scattered semblance of an education through my own efforts, and to some extent it could even be argued that I thrive. While I have no way of relating to her experience as a Native American woman, her words resonate nonetheless and cause me to reflect, contemplate—and sometimes cry. There is recognition and understanding. Her words often resonate with my experience. I have to wonder if others may experience similar.
I could point out many such experiences for myself as a reader and delve deeper into my personal resonance with this poem or that passage, but I only want to provide an idea. Touching on every poem that touched me would involve a detailed analysis of well over half the material.
The point is that she reaches out with her words beyond her culture, beyond her experience, beyond her nation to the heart of even one who descended from her oppressors. There is a universality in her language and expression that is unlike anything I have encountered, and I am thankful to have discovered her work.
For me 5 stars is an easy rating to give this book. And here I don’t mean some lower fraction between 4.5 and 4.9 rounded up with hesitancy because I’m stuck between a choice of exactly 4 or 5 stars; this is a full 5 stars out of 5 full stars, no reservations. It is very rare that I’ll rate a book of poetry at 5 stars.
It is arranged into 4 parts, perhaps reflective of significant milestones in Harjo’s journey through life. We start with “Songline of Dawn,” with eight poems and nine prose vignettes. From here we move through “Returning from the Enemy,” with three poems, three prose vignettes, and one titular poem in 14 parts, each of which consists of one poem and one vignette. After this we drift toward a close through “This is My Heart; it is a Good Heart,” with ten poems and eleven prose vignettes. Then we close with “In the Beautiful Perfume and Stink of the World,” with just one longer titular poem closing at page 135.
So, counting the 14 parts of the poem “Returning from the Enemy” as individual pieces, this book in all consists of thirty-six poems and thirty-seven prose vignettes. The final two pages contain brief notes on some of the terms used throughout, such as “beauty” and “monster,” which we learn Harjo has been using to express ideas, beliefs, and sentiments in connection with specific Native American cultures.
The poems and vignettes are on average longer than one page. Harjo has a lot of story to tell, many insights to share, and one gets the sense that she really wants to share those stories and insights. There’s a stream-of-consciousness feel to much of the content, yet when I go back through a poem or vignette, I begin to realize what’s not there—the explication, the drab details, the random asides, any excess at all. These are polished pieces, each with a refined focus, a determined purpose. I find myself imagining that there are first drafts of many, if not all of the pieces herein that are much longer and don’t look, read, or feel anything like the finished product. She has taken the time and expended the energy to distill her meditations into refined offerings.
Thematically, the entries focus on personal and cultural identity, memory, trauma, and spirituality while weaving a connection and relationship with the natural world throughout. Throughout the book, as you tread through her words, her childhood is present, her children are present, her spirits are near, and her song is clear as it is vibrant. Each experience she reflects on is intertwined with past experiences and woven, beautifully—harmoniously, with insights, ancestral stories and memory, reality of the present, consequences of colonialism, and much more.
There are metaphors here—deep, rich, and steeped in Harjo’s culture and epigenetic memory. These aren’t the shock-and-awe metaphors of the Surrealist movement, nor are they the overly abstract images of the Symbolist or Modernist movements. These are accessible, poignant, and purposeful, intended to convey ideas, feelings, insights, and understandings that perhaps could be conveyed no other way.
Take this fragment from “Emergence:”
I am lingering at the edge
of a broken heart, striking relentlessly
against the flint of hard will.
Accessible, poignant, and purposeful. Or, take this fragment near the end of the opening poem, “Songline of Dawn:”
The sun leans on one elbow after making love,
savoring the wetlands just off the freeway.
Open to interpretation, concrete, and expressive all at once. Or, maybe this fragment that starts “Four Songs:”
I fell through a hole in the sky from one end of the world
to the next. Burning off layers
like a comet
until I hit the surface of earth.
By itself, this image might seem abstruse, but within the context of the poem expression becomes clear and the words even evoke sensation. I won’t give it away.
For me, movement through these pages felt like a journey through the life and thought processes of a valuable individual, an important figure—Someone who’s words we would be wise not to dismiss or disregard. I found myself relating to much of the content on a personal level, despite sharing no cultural or ancestral ties with Harjo. For instance, my father was also abusive, an alcoholic, and a womanizer—but this only scratches the surface. I was often hit so hard by a poem or vignette—or a fragment therein—that I choked back tears and found myself lost in deep reflection and contemplation for the next day or two.
This surprised me more than anything. I somehow related to her words in deeply personal ways though my experience has almost nothing in common with hers—which I often found so baffling in its own right that a second layer of reflection and contemplation was piled upon the first.
I feel it’s important to clarify that I’m a middle aged, lower income white male with no formal education and no cultural or ethnic ties to any Native American nation or community. In fact, from a genetic standpoint I’m about as white as it gets, with my genetic ancestry showing as being almost exclusively from Northwest Europe—And I look it. So I have almost no cultural, ethnic, or racial bias toward Harjo’s work.
I have to say almost, because my ancestors have been here since the Fortune landed in Plymouth Bay on November 9, 1621—a year after the Mayflower. Genealogical records indicate that my 10th great grandfather on my father’s side, William Beckett Jr., disembarked as a new settler who setup shop as a blacksmith and an armorer. So there must inevitably be a degree of cultural involution, and of course no shortage of karmic entanglement.
I was granted no opportunity for an education growing up, despite being white and male. In 1st grade I followed my father’s example of anger management and threw my desk over toward my teacher. I don’t remember this incident myself, but I am fully aware of the consequences. From this point forward I was relegated to “special education,” where at the time a child was simply warehoused rather than educated. But, there’s more.
My parents separated a few months after I was born and divorced by the time I was 5. I endured terror and abuse from my father until I was 7 and went to live with my mother, who was now a “recovering” alcoholic who had a form of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy involving Psychiatrists instead of surgeons and medical doctors. Parents with the regular form of this disease make their children physically ill for the attention of medical professionals. Through manipulation and entrainment my mother very successfully made me crazy and through this process won the attention of psychiatric professionals. In fact, she was so successful that at 12 I ended up institutionalized as a ward of the Los Angeles Juvenile Courts until I was 15, when I ran away to wander the highways of every state west of the Mississippi for the rest of my childhood. Parental abuse had now become systemic abuse, and I realized that I was dead either way if I didn’t run away. I chose to die on my own terms rather than in the hands of my abusers.
I introduce a little of my story with the hope of possibly highlighting a pathway by which I could relate to her words though they had nothing to do with my own experience. For instance, one fragment that had me in tears and deep contemplation I found in the second poem, “the psychology of earth and sky:”
The songs we sang all night together filled with me promise, hope, the belief in a community that understood that the world was more than a contract between buyer and seller.
She was reflecting on the experience of leaving her family behind as she ventured off to perform in Hawaii, but somehow her words brought me to think of my time as a runaway when on several occasions I attempted to commit “suicide by desert.” I would hike off into the desert for a day without water where I would sing, talk, and curse to the stars half the night before falling asleep, only to wake up the next morning and soon encounter hospitable people with food and water—sometimes Native American. I did not have a community, or a culture, or a people to which I felt any sense of relationship—But I met with and found promise and a degree of hope in the spirits of the wild. And they walk with me today.
There are many times I came across passages that resonate with my way of looking at the world, that connect with my own personal cosmology—A cosmology that I can’t pin to a given source. In the same poem she writes:
Is it ordained by the curve of a strand of DNA? Mixed with the urge to love, to take flight? My family survived, even continues to thrive, which works against the myth of Indian defeat and disappearance.
Sure, I’m not Indian, but there was every expectation that I would simply disappear from this world after a short period of misery and defeat, my story untold, my song unsung, my struggles unknown. Yet I survived, and I continue to sing to the stars and meet with those spirits that found and nurtured me in the wilderness so long ago. I learned to play the bansuri flute, gained some scattered semblance of an education through my own efforts, and to some extent it could even be argued that I thrive. While I have no way of relating to her experience as a Native American woman, her words resonate nonetheless and cause me to reflect, contemplate—and sometimes cry. There is recognition and understanding. Her words often resonate with my experience. I have to wonder if others may experience similar.
I could point out many such experiences for myself as a reader and delve deeper into my personal resonance with this poem or that passage, but I only want to provide an idea. Touching on every poem that touched me would involve a detailed analysis of well over half the material.
The point is that she reaches out with her words beyond her culture, beyond her experience, beyond her nation to the heart of even one who descended from her oppressors. There is a universality in her language and expression that is unlike anything I have encountered, and I am thankful to have discovered her work.
June 30, 2025
3.5 stars rounded up
September 1, 2019
Fantastisk poesi med kärlek för berättarglädje. "She had some horses" och "Rabbit is up to tricks" finns tonsatta av denna multikonstnär som tar ställning för Native Americans och vår jord. "She had some horses" tolkar jag som komplexiteten i varje människa.
November 4, 2011
I've read two other Harjo books and really enjoyed them, so I was a bit disappointed with this one. Everything in this book follows a similar set of themes. There are some very nice moments, but no where near on par with some of the sharp truths and insights in some of her other works. The kind of insights I had to read over and over again because of how wonderful they are. I found myself re-reading very few things in this one. The writing itself is fine, it just isn't as emotionally moving as others.
Read
January 6, 2013This is one of those books full of almost-great lines, which distract me as I rewrite them in my head. That doesn't necessarily make a bad book or a lazy writer, but it sure doesn't increase my enjoyment.
Among the almost-greats is some truly beautiful poetry, "spirits who allowed themselves to be kept in a song or story as food/ through the longest seasons of brutality." Much of it doesn't need the explanation of the "tales" that follow, which are a little self-indulgent. Perhaps I'll try another of her books. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Among the almost-greats is some truly beautiful poetry, "spirits who allowed themselves to be kept in a song or story as food/ through the longest seasons of brutality." Much of it doesn't need the explanation of the "tales" that follow, which are a little self-indulgent. Perhaps I'll try another of her books. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt.
August 22, 2013
Joy Harjo is among the two dozen poets I turn to when I yearn for poetry that illuminates the spirit, for such poetry much be fiercely and fully grounded in the beauty and the pain of this life. This volume, where stories interleave the poems, delivers, inviting reflection and memorization of lines to hold onto in future storms.
July 12, 2009
No matter how many times I read this volume, it's always amazing.
Each time I've read it, I've picked up new insights through this work.
I love the Native elements and references; her language is indicative of a world view that I love being a part of each time I read.
Each time I've read it, I've picked up new insights through this work.
I love the Native elements and references; her language is indicative of a world view that I love being a part of each time I read.
May 21, 2015
Poetry and prose that meditates on the ways that history lingers and spirals, not so much repeating itself but coming back to itself under new light and conditions. And the hope that new light may provide clarity and illumination to our enduring conflicts and dreams.
December 18, 2016
Joy Harjo shows tremendous skill in her essays and poetry, and great effort. Telling much of her personal story as well as that of those closest to her, her words resonate most pleasantly and sometimes startle. A Map To The Next World is a masterpiece.
May 31, 2008
My blog review here: http://poetaensanfrancisco.blog-city....
June 4, 2008
I enjoyed the poetry more than the prose, but Harjo's work doesn't disappoint.
February 20, 2011
gorgeous. making words do a whole new thing.
June 3, 2016
I enjoyed the Native American perspective. The intermingling of tales and poetry was a good combination that gave the work more depth. This is a book I could pick up more than once and enjoy.
December 24, 2016
Inspired by the journey Joy Harjo charts in this book. The flights she takes offer an example of courage and fortitude to navigate our lives in community with others (living and dead).
Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews