Cloud Runner: Poems

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.