In Mad Love and War

by Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo is a powerful voice for her Creek (Muscogee) tribe (“a stolen people in a stolen land”), for other oppressed people, and for herself. Her poems, both sacred and secular, are written with the passions of anger, grief, and love, at once tender and furious. They are rooted in the land; they are one with the deer and the fox, the hawk and the eagle, the sun, moon, and wind, and the seasons – “spring/ was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.” There are enemies here, also lovers; there are ghost dancers, ancestors old and new, who rise again “to walk in shoes of fire.”

Indeed, fire and its aftermath is a constant image in the burning book. Skies are “incendiary”; the “smoke of dawn” turns enemies into ashes: “I am fire eaten by wind.” “Your fire scorched/ my lips.” “I am lighting the fire that crawls from my spine/ to the gods with a coal from my sister’s flame.”

But the spirit of this book is not consumed. It is not limited by mad love or war, and “there is something larger than the memory/ of a dispossessed people.” That something larger is, for example, revolution, freedom, birth.

Genres: Poetry, Indigenous, Native American, Nature, Race, Read For School, Feminism

67 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Bio 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.

Reviews

[Brina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joy Harjo is one of my favorite poets. Her words paint a picture of a nexus of native American issues and feminism and are a true tribute to balancing humanity and nature. In Mad Love and War is one of her earlier works. The writing is raw and waiting to be painted onto the page and the author is new and waiting to be discovered. While not containing as much story telling and background information as her later works, In Mad Love and War is a touching collection and one that should not be overlooked by poetry lovers.

4+ stars

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memory has many forms.
When I think of early winter I think of a blackbird laughing in the
frozen air; guards a piece of light. (I saw the whole world caught in that
sound, the sun stopped for a moment because of tough belief.) I don’t know
what that has to do with what I am trying to tell you except that I know you
can turn a poem into something else. This poem could be a bear treading
the far northern tundra, smelling the air for sweet alive meat. Or a piece of
seaweed stumbling in the sea. Or a blackbird, laughing. What I mean is that
hatred can be turned into something else, if you have the right words, the
right meanings, buried in that tender place in your heart where the most precious animals live.
[…] That’s what I mean to tell you. On the other side of the place you live stands a dark woman. She has been trying to talk to you for years.
You have called the same name in the middle of a nightmare,
from the center of miracles. She is beautiful.
This is your hatred back. She loves you.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I am no poetry expert. I didn't study it exclusively or depend on analyzing it to get my master's - heck, I don't even have a master's. I am in the camp of "How does this poem make me feel when I read it aloud?"

And using this criteria, Joy Harjo is becoming one of my favorite poets. My first encounter with her work was She Had Some Horses, which was gorgeous and actually made me break down crying with The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window.

Not only are the poems beautiful (read them out loud - I am begging you to do this) but I learn so much by reading them. There's not only a peek into Native American culture and heart but there are also notes about various places and mythological characters and dedications on several of the poems that lead me on Google searches on women like Jacqueline Peters and Anna Mae Aquash. If you're not familiar, it's well worth the time to learn about them.

By the time I finished, the book was swollen with dog-eared pages. Always a good sign.

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear,
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.

Nothing can be forgotten, only left behind.

4 Stars

[Lisa Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

A line that stuck with me from “If I Think of You Again It Will Be the Fifty-third Monday of Next Year”: Hatred is a vice that smells like four mutilated cats smoking in a gasoline fire.

Took my time with collection, re-reading, reflecting, and admiring the way Joy Harjo can put words on paper that encapsulate the human experience.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joy Harjo possesses a bottomless well of emotion and humanity, and this collection is haunting and triumphant and wandering. I am deeply moved by her work, and I am so thrilled that she is the current U.S. Poet Laureate. Knowing her beliefs of rootedness and all poetry having ancestral context makes her work even more significant.

[Jolene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very beautiful but I wasn't in quite the frame of mind to dive in and try to understand her meaning in each poem.

[Melike · Rating 2 out of 5]

beğendiğim bikaç dize vardı ama ödevim olmasaydı alıp okucağım bi şiir kitabı değil

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an excellent collection.

[Sarah Gamal · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I have fallen in love a thousand times over; every day is a
common miracle of salt roses, of fire in the prophecy wind, and now and
then"
loved it. very captivating writing

[Krissquared · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read Harjo's poetry for an undergraduate class, it was as if I'd found a sister. She speaks in a language I understand. That I feel deep within. Her words are like no others.

Harjo speaks with such honesty and human spirit. She has a strong voice with a rhythm that is primal - that keeps a beat like the heart of the earth. Her poems are as good as meditation. I return to her poems often, especially when I need to get in touch with myself.

If you've ever felt displaced in the world or ever felt haunted, these poems may show you how your story is tied to all the stories around you.

[cyano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yesterday I skimmed Bukowski, today I waded in Harjo’s lush painted words.


Two of my favorite excerpts:

I will dream you the wind, / taste salt air on my lips until / I take you apart raw.

We are all in the belly of a laughing god / swimming the heavens, in this whirling circle. / What we haven’t imagined will one day / spit us out / magnificent and simple.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Grace" (1)

"The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated... I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance... And Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it."

"Deer Dancer" (5-6)

"Of course we noticed when she came in. We were Indian ruins. She was the end of beauty. No one knew her, the stranger whose tribe we recognized, her family related to deer, if that's who she was, a people accustomed to hearing songs in pine trees, and making them hearts...

Some people see vision in a burned tortilla, some in the face of a woman.

This is a bar of broken survivors, the club of shotgun, knife wound, of poison by culture...

How do I say it? In this language there are no words for how the real world collapses... So I look at the stars in this strange city, frozen to the back of the sky, the only promises that ever make sense...

and that's when she broke, became human...

That's what I'd like to know, what are we all doing in a place like this?

... The way back is deer breath on icy windows...

And then she took off her clothes. She shook loose memory, waltzed with the empty lover we'd all become.

She was the myth slipped down through dreamtime. The promise of feast we all knew was coming. The deer who crossed through knots of a curse to find us...

But I imagined her like this, not a stained red dress with tape on her heels but the deer who entered our dream in white dawn, breathed mist into pine trees, her fawn a blessing of meat, the ancestors who never left."

"Mercy" (20)

"Forget the massacres, proclamations of war, / rumors of wars. / I won't pour rifle shot through the guts of someone / I'm told is my enemy. / Hell, my own enemy is right here. / Can you look inside, see past the teeth worn down / by meat and anger, / can you see? / Sometimes the only filter / is a dead cat in the road... unless this light / becomes a bayonet of sound, hands of fire / to lead you to yourself / until you cry / mercy."

"Eagle Poem" (65)

"To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear,
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty."

[Khetsia · Rating 1 out of 5]

NO! NO! NO!

except for this poem:

read it AFTER listening to the song of the same title as interpreted by Nina Simone (imo, Billie Holiday’s version is CRIMINAL in comparison!!!)

Strange Fruit

I was out in the early evening, taking a walk in the felds to chink about chis
poem I was writing, or walking to the store for a pack of cigarettes, a
pound of bacon. How quickly I smelled evil, then saw the hooded sheets ride
up in the not yet darkness, in the dusk carrying the moon, in the dust behind
my tracks. Last night there were crosses burning in my dreams, and the day
before a black cat stood in the middle of the road with a ghost riding its
back. Something knocked on the window at midnight. My lover told me:

Shush, we have too many stories to carry on our backs like houses, we have
struggled too long to let the monsters steal our sleep, sleep, go to sleep,
But I never woke up. Dogs have been nipping at my heels since I learned to
walk. I was taught to not dance for a rotten supper on the plates of my
enemies. My mother taught me well.

I have not been unkind to the dead, nor have I been stingy with the living. I
have not been with anyone else's husband, or anyone else's wife. I need a
song. I need a cigarette. I want to squeeze my baby's legs, see her turn into
a woman just like me. I want to dance under the full moon, or in the early
morning on my lover's lap.

See this scar under my arm. It's from tripping over a rope when I was small,
I was always a little clumsy. And my long, lean feet like my mother's have
known where to take me, to where the sweet things grow. Some grow on
trees, and some grow in other places.

But not this tree.

I didn't do anything wrong. I did not steal from your mother. My brother did
not take your wife. I did not break into your home, tell you how to live or
die. Please. Go away, hooded ghosts from hell on earth. I only want heaven
in my baby's arms, my baby's arms. Down the road through the trees lye
the kitchen light on and my lover fixing supper, the baby fussing for her
milk, waiting for me to come home. The moon hangs from the sky likea
swollen fruit.

My feet betray me, dance anyway from this killing tree.

Foot notes
1. The title is from a song by Lewis Allan, often sung by Billie Holiday.
2. For Jacqueline Peters, a vital writer, activist in her early thirties, who was lynched in Lafayette, California, in June 1986. She had been working to start a local NAACP chapter, in response to the lynching of a twenty-three-year-old black man, Timothy Lee, in November I985, when she was hanged in an olive tree by the Ku Klux Klan.

[Khetsia · Rating 1 out of 5]

NO! NO! NO!

except for this poem:

read it AFTER listening to the song of the same title as interpreted by Nina Simone (imo, Billie Holiday’s version is CRIMINAL in comparison!!!)

Strange Fruit

I was out in the early evening, taking a walk in the felds to chink about chis
poem I was writing, or walking to the store for a pack of cigarettes, a
pound of bacon. How quickly I smelled evil, then saw the hooded sheets ride
up in the not yet darkness, in the dusk carrying the moon, in the dust behind
my tracks. Last night there were crosses burning in my dreams, and the day
before a black cat stood in the middle of the road with a ghost riding its
back. Something knocked on the window at midnight. My lover told me:

Shush, we have too many stories to carry on our backs like houses, we have
struggled too long to let the monsters steal our sleep, sleep, go to sleep,
But I never woke up. Dogs have been nipping at my heels since I learned to
walk. I was taught to not dance for a rotten supper on the plates of my
enemies. My mother taught me well.

I have not been unkind to the dead, nor have I been stingy with the living. I
have not been with anyone else's husband, or anyone else's wife. I need a
song. I need a cigarette. I want to squeeze my baby's legs, see her turn into
a woman just like me. I want to dance under the full moon, or in the early
morning on my lover's lap.

See this scar under my arm. It's from tripping over a rope when I was small,
I was always a little clumsy. And my long, lean feet like my mother's have
known where to take me, to where the sweet things grow. Some grow on
trees, and some grow in other places.

But not this tree.

I didn't do anything wrong. I did not steal from your mother. My brother did
not take your wife. I did not break into your home, tell you how to live or
die. Please. Go away, hooded ghosts from hell on earth. I only want heaven
in my baby's arms, my baby's arms. Down the road through the trees lye
the kitchen light on and my lover fixing supper, the baby fussing for her
milk, waiting for me to come home. The moon hangs from the sky likea
swollen fruit.

My feet betray me, dance anyway from this killing tree.

Foot notes
1. The title is from a song by Lewis Allan, often sung by Billie Holiday.
2. For Jacqueline Peters, a vital writer, activist in her early thirties, who was lynched in Lafayette, California, in June 1986. She had been working to start a local NAACP chapter, in response to the lynching of a twenty-three-year-old black man, Timothy Lee, in November I985, when she was hanged in an olive tree by the Ku Klux Klan.

[Rat · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Shush, we have too many stories to carry on our backs like houses, we have struggled too long to let the monsters steal our sleep, sleep, go to sleep.

But I never woke up. Dogs have been nipping at my heels since I learned to walk. I was taught to not dance for a rotten supper on the plates of my enemies. My mother taught me well."

This quote is from a piece title 'Strange Fruit,' inspired by the Lewis Allan/Billie Holiday song, and speaks of the violence of racism and colonialism experienced by indigenous folks.

In Harjo's collection, war, love, colonialism, death, life, and memory are inseparable from one another. Language is not enough, poetry is not enough, music comes the closest to expressing the woven nets between all the experiences, the micro and the macro. Spirals are a common theme, as linear time does not exist in Harjo's world. Things happened 50 years ago just as they are happening again now, being felt as strongly, through veils of mist and fire.

"And that is the ceremony. We sip wine, do a hit of courage, each of us imagining another spin of the wheel, and take up our horns again. Rabbit, who invented the saxophone and who must have invented our imaginary lovers, laughs through millennia. And who are we to make sense of this slit of impossible time?"

[bob walenski · Rating 3 out of 5]

" How do I say it? In this language there are no words for how the real world collapses."

" I didn't do anything wrong. I did not steal from your mother. My brother did not take your wife. I did not break into your home, tell you how to live or die. Please. Go away, hooded ghosts from hell on earth. I only want heaven."

Joy Harjo's poems are angry, troubled and musical. Her images focus around animals, stars and moons, and struggle. It's easy to see and feel her musical sensitivities coming through her words. Less easy to clearly understand all of her meanings. Her references of people and names weren't clear to me, I don't know all of her references or backstories. Having just finished her autobiography, her words echo more her oblique feelings, maybe that sea of raging emotions that drives her forward.

I have a great empathy for Native Americans. What happened to them was wrong, and it has never been effectively addressed. Not only were their lives and homes taken away, but also their heritage and history. There are so few left to carry on traditions and history, so few who are able to speak for the injustice and genocide. Harjo's words and songs are like ghosts, like vanishing memories of a dark time for us all.

[dipandjelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

"How do I say it? In this language there are no words for how the real world collapses."

[I've loved Harjo's writing for a while now, meeting it in chance encounters across the internet / shared here and there by friends and journals I follow for many years. Only quite recently have I committed to reading through her collections, staring with this one, and * crying in my balcony but also fading into hyperspace * I cannot recommend it enough. This collection is a lot more chiseled + sharper than her later works, but I feel like it packs in the /most/ of the ontology of womanhood as Harjo writes of it and experiences it. Just starting off with "Deer Dancer" (the lines quoted ^) which instantly creates the atmosphere for the rest of the volume + Harjo's stories of memory and narrative and the creation / violent process of story-making... I think I finished the entire collection in the span of a single day from cover to cover... ]

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second time I've read IN MAD LOVE AND WAR. The first time I did, which was my introduction to Joy Harjo's work, I was a freshman in high school and Harjo's writing style and themes didn't appeal to me. Fast-forward to 2020: I've matured as a reader, poet, and woman; and after reading a couple of Harjo's more recent poems, I dove back into this collection.

Best. Idea. This. Year. (In terms of reading, that is!)

Seriously, though. Harjo's work in IN MAD LOVE AND WAR is warm yet grounded, cerebral yet sensual, raw yet compassionate. She's so in tune with life here on earth as well as her sense of what's sacred, and her blend of familiar imagery with evocative metaphors takes your breath away. Her poems in this book demonstrate what happens when we observe our surroundings, pay attention to our emotions, and let our imaginations take flight. I can't wait to read more of her poetry in the future, and I'm THRILLED that she's the current US Poet Laureate.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I've always had a theory that some of us are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies"
- that's when I knew I loved this book.

Poetry for me is always how does this make me feel? And felt things I did. Like when I read
"And when you were born I held you wet and unfolding, like a butterfly newly born from the chrysalis of my body" - I recognized the feelings I had after my children were born.

And when I read
"We see you, see ourselves and know that we must take the utmost care and kindness in all things" - I saw the best parts of myself, ourselves, and humanity.

Poetry is amazing when it is these passionate, angry, full of love and life and everything poems of Joy Harjo.

[Molly Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joy Harjo demonstrates a wide talent in this collection, with poems that strongly evoke a scene (“We Encounter Nat King Cole…”), poems that feel tapped directly from poignant personal memory (“Crystal Lake”), and poems that, through establishing characters and scene, peer thoughtfully into Native American culture (“Deer Dancer”). The collection features many prose poems, and I found the narratives in these to be among my favorites. Harjo also speaks to an unknown “you” in many poems, and I enjoyed the directness and fierceness of her voice in these.

[mumtaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's always difficult to measure the affect of poetry, i included some stanzas that stood out to me:

"I want to lie out on steaming beaches.
Find my way back through glacier ice another way."

"You are the curled serpent in the pottery of nightmares.
You are the dreaming animal who paces back and forth in my head.
We must call a meeting."

"That's how you tell real time. It is here, it is there."

"I will dream you a hawk
and circle this city in your
racing heart."

"And who are we to make sense of this impossible slit of time?"

[Daquinua · Rating 5 out of 5]

JOY HARJO IS THE POET EVER..... "If I Think About You Again It Will Be the Fifty-third Monday of Next Year" puts me in shambles every time I read it. This poem has single-handedly altered my brain chemistry and I wouldn't have it any other way. "Mercy" is also one of my favorites. No I am not just obsessed with Joy Harjo because she writes about deer, I love her for her other nature imagery too. 🙄

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Relentless in its pursuit and portrayal of truth, like the dogs in “Nine Below,” with images fashioned into numinous effigies of the familial, the mus(e)ical, the elemental, the erotic, and the body politic.

Favorites:
“For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash”
“We Must Call a Meeting”
“Mercy”
“Bleed Through”
“Crossing Water”
“Transformation”
“Heartshed”

[Matt Sautman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I suspect I may give this a higher rating on a reread, as I do think Harjo has some excellent poetry here, but I wasn’t prepared for the sheer amount of essay poems that I felt undercut the overall power of her lines. I appreciate the post-colonial themes and imagery present in this verse. I only wish the forms better reflected the poems’ strengths.

[David Grosskopf · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a beautiful slim book of poetry, and she layers friendship with history with sex and violence and parenthood. For poems especially ripe in ancestral imagery in its modernity, see "Deer Dancer" (5), "Autobiography" (14), "The Real Revolution is Love" (24), "Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On" (30), "A Winning Hand" (44), "Hieroglyphic" (53), and "Eagle Poem" (65).

[Shaun M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joy Harjo's poems are lyrical, beautiful and harsh at the same time. There's a texture and depth to her language that makes you want to linger on her words just to savor the art of them, but then you are drawn back by how they flow together, their emotional insight and the tales they are telling. A really wonderful collection.

[Pam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I discovered Joy Harjo through her poem, “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” which I thought was gut-wrenchingly beautiful. None of the poems/essays in this book connected with me. I wanted to like it, but it just didn’t do much for me.

[Micaela Gerhardt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely magical. It took me awhile to adjust to Harjo's writing style, but once I did I was rapt. Love the infusion of the spiritual in her ways of interacting with the world. On my thesis book list. Really want to read again.

[aubrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

read for Native American Literature.

really solid book of poetry, and I think I'm truly starting to find my footing when reading poetry and stuff. i mean there's a reason why Harjo has been the Poet Laureate since like 2019

[Jack Van Dyke · Rating 5 out of 5]

It changed my personal look on my reality... My here and now,that's the direction l, Jack Lee Van Dyke lll needs to stear my boat in to through the good times, bad times,all of the time...


Thank you Joy 😎 Jack Lee Van Dyke lll