The three-term US Poet Laureate returns with a moving collection about grief, loss, and the ways that art can transform suffering.

The death of a child is one of the most unreconcilable griefs. In Cloud Runner, Joy Harjo reckons with the unspeakable pain of losing her daughter: “Reason has no home in this hour.” Despite this devastation, Harjo constructs a shrine to human resilience, reminding us that the most profound revelations can appear in our darkest hours: “I now know why we construct ceremonial epics of mystery and/beauty, / Of enemy and failure: it is so we can pick our burdens / And go on.”

Harjo’s magical poems are known for weaving myth, song, and spirit. In this searing volume, they become essential witnesses to history, especially in our current era of compounded loss: mass shootings, missing and murdered Native women, climate disaster, and political violence. Cloud Runner explores how all grief may be connected; it is a testament to poetry’s power to speak what is unspeakable, to touch what the mind cannot carry.

About the Author: Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States and is a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s 2024 Frost Medal, Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and was recently honored with a National Humanities Medal. Harjo has released seven award-winning albums and is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she lives.