Cloud Runner Poems

An Independent Press Bestseller
Three-term U.S. Poet Laureate returns with a moving collection about grief, loss, and how art can transform suffering.

Losing 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,” she writes. Despite a devasting loss, 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 up our burdens / And go on.”

Harjo's magical poems are known for weaving myth, song, and spirit. In this searing volume, her poems 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.

From Cloud Runner:

“I am Cloud Runner, you whispered, as I rinsed dishes and looked

out the window, the sun flaring dusky gold through our story. I

dried my hands and went outside to read the clouds.

Remember me in my children and their children, you sang.

Remember me in poetry.

Remember me when it rains, when the plants rise up in

green to drink.

Remember me in butterflies.

And then, you were gone.”