Cloud Runner: Poems

by Joy Harjo

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.”

Genres: Poetry, Native American

96 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication October 13, 2026

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

[pedro]

Joy Harjo’s poetry collection, Cloud Runner, was an unexpected read for me as I’m trying to be better about the arcs that i slowly but steadily start to accumulate and leave for last minute 🙈

First of all, the cover — vibes! 🌈

Second, it took me a little rereading here and there but I didn’t expect to be in my feels about a mother-daughter book of elegy of sorts where Harjo recounts the loss of her daughter 🥺

Now I understand the plea, the grief and the prayer that the poet gives us readers so tenderly as the endings to each of her poems serves as the aftermath of living that moment of need, full of love, and curious in its meditation and even more immense in its generosity of words.

I wish I could quote some lines but alas this one comes out sometime later this year in October so that just may have to wait 💙

Rainy Dawn Ortiz is the child’s name and what a beautiful ode of remembrance to her from mother to daughter — hope is a revelation worth witnessing! ✨

[Brice Montgomery]

Thanks to NetGalley & W.W. Norton & Company for the ARC!

Joy Harjo’s Cloud Runner is a tender reflection on what it means to lose someone—whether grief compromises or comprises beauty.

As a poet, Harjo has always been comfortable with a directness and transparency that feels boldly disinterested in posturing. Her poetics are centered in life as it is, and she favors attention over interpretation. Cloud Runner, a tribute to Harjo's late daughter, Rainy Dawn Ortiz, is a heartbreaking thematic variation because it’s about life as it isn’t. This is a collection where its form is its own resistance—poems about how poetry is inadequate for grief.

The first piece, “This is Not a Poem, It is a Cry,” sets the tone when the speaker immediately eschews embellishment in favor of bluntness:

It has been four days.
I have lost my girl.
Some things do not belong in words.

Grief ruptures the book before it even begins, and the speaker spends the remaining poems circling questions of meaning. The metaphors here are overplayed, but in Harjo’s hands, the ubiquitous dance between light and dark doesn’t feel like a cliché. The speaker can yearn for a sunrise without it feeling like a trope. Loss is the fulfillment of fear, so grief has no room for pretense.

To some extent, Harjo situates her personal loss within the pain of fights for Native sovereignty, and she finds closure in open-endedness. Colonized history has tried to erase Indians, but they persevere and persist even as their identities change shape. Adaptation offers something richer than mere survival. Similarly, the speaker begins to dwell on the motif of her daughter as water in flux—sometimes cloud, sometimes tears, sometimes river, sometimes the vapor of a rainbow. Nobody is ever really gone, but our relationship to them changes alongside their form.

Cloud Runner is a call to remember, but more importantly, it is an assertion that memory is an active, life-giving act. People live beyond death, sometimes as the pain of a phantom limb (“The Sacred Art of Mothering”), and sometimes as a rain shower growing the next generation. It is good to grieve because, as Joy Harjo gently reminds us, it is a generative act.

[Abimael Pérez]

I’m usually the kind of reader who keeps a little distance from poetry about grief. It has a way of calling up losses of my own—family, friends, people who mattered deeply—and, maybe more than anything, confronting me with one of my greatest fears: death itself. I’m not sure what pushed me toward Cloud Runner. Maybe a loved one whispered, this one is for you.

Whatever the reason, Cloud Runner was, is, and will be one of those poetry collections that found me at exactly the right moment. I went in with almost no expectations and came out feeling like Joy Harjo had given me both what I needed and what I didn’t yet know I needed. I had heard so much about her and knew of her history as a three-term U.S. Poet Laureate, but this was my first real encounter with her poetry—and I finally understood the force of her voice. She writes grief without containing it, allowing memory, spirit, history, and love to exist beside loss rather than beneath it.

I expected a book about mourning. What I found was a book about carrying on. Some poems ask you to remember; these felt like they were remembering me.

Thank you to NetGalley and W. W. Norton & Company for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

[June]

Just absolute stand-still-in-your-tracks type of poems following the loss of Harjo's daughter. Some poems center grief, some center family history and nature as creation story, and some shine a light on the power of song, poetry, and ceremony. I adored this. I was able to read this on my first ever trip to the west, and the way that the sun shone there and the rain fell and the winds carried me away really impacted me and my enjoyment of her poems. It has been years since I first read a Joy Harjo poem, and this was a wonderful reminder of her skill and my need to read more of her work.

*Thank you W. W. Norton & Company for the e-arc of this collection. <3

[Christine]

A beautifully devastating collection of poems on grief. Harjo wrote these poems while grieving the loss of her daughter but the poems span many kinds of loss. Loss of loved ones, loss of culture, loss of safety, and loss of societal decency; all clouding life.

Harjo also reminds readers of the beauty still found every day in our lost loved ones and our surroundings.

“In Pueblo mythology those who leave this earth become the ancestors who bring rain clouds. My beloved raincloud I love you forever and ever”


I received an advanced reader copy, courtesy of NerGalley, in exchange for this honest review.

[Ambi]

Oh, how I love Joy Harjo’s poetry. This collection was so visceral and heart-wrenching and beautiful in its grief. The poem, “Nothing Left”, had me crying as I read it. This is a collection that will stick with you a long time after reading, a beautiful tribute to Harjo’s late daughter. Including “Nothing Left”, the other standouts in this collection for me were “The Sacred Art of Mothering”, “ECOLOCATION>>>>> ecolocation>>>>>”, “Eat”, and “Lullaby”.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC, and to Harjo for this incredible book!

[Catherine Miele]

Joy Harjo is a poet who needs no introduction, and this collection of poems is an extraordinary work.

The reader journeys through Harjo’s own grief—of losing her daughter—and through the hope and belonging that becomes known through her grief.

I especially loved “An Ordinary Morning,” Gathering the Light,” and “Holding On.”

Thank you Net Galley and W. W. Norton & Company for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

[RMazin]

Outstanding and breath-taking. Joy Harjo will always be the Poet Laureate of the heart. Here she shares the depths of her grief and remembrance of her daughter. Here she shares how her culture, traditions and the natural world sustain her with beauty and reflection. Will read again and again. Thank you. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher, and a shout out to Ron Charles who was graciously permitted to include an excerpt in his Substack column.

[Diane Payne]

Joy Harjo's "Cloud Runner" is a beautiful tribute to her daughter, Dawn. Remembering and reconnecting with Dawn, readers will remember and reconnect with those whose absence they have grieved. Mothers and daughters will feel a particularly strong pull with these poems. Though these poems speak as loudly to lost brothers, fathers and friends, empty bottles of booze, long nights of music, quiet afternoons with blank pages, silence, and storms.

[Sheila]

have always appreciated Joy Harjo’s work. I knew this one was a hit for me as soon as I found myself reaching for a pen and paper to jot down quotes. Harjo puts grief into a frame that rings true for me. I found myself reading it planning to buy a copy for a friend. Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for the chance to read it.

[Andrew]

Cloud Runner is a heart-rending collection largely centered around the loss of Harjo's daughter. Thoughts, dreams, and ruminations on grief, motherhood, human connection, and the spirit world all coalesce and give a voice to universal feelings that are often indescribable-- something Harjo has always been skilled at doing.

[Cecilia]

This was such a beautiful and heartbreaking collection of poetry. It explores grief, love, loss, and what it feels like to search for words when there just aren’t any answers for death. It was incredibly emotional and captured so many complicated feelings in a way that felt honest and real.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Lindsay Evans]

I received an advanced reader copy of this book from the publisher, and this is my honest review:

This is a powerful collection of poems that takes grief and weaves it into something beautiful. The imagery was gorgeous, and Harjo's way with words absolutely touching. I will be thinking about this collection for quite some time. Worth the read!

[Linda]

I am not much of a poetry fan, but when it comes to Joy Harjo, I make an exception.

This is a lovely book full of love and grief and the emotions a mother goes through after losing a child. A wonderful read for all.

[Lisa Penninga]

What a beautiful, tragic, important collection of poetry— speaking to grief, love, loss, and finding words when there are no explanations for death. I will definitely be adding this collection to my classroom when it’s published!

[Soledad]

Heart-breaking collection of poems. Harjo writes a power collection of grief and loss. Thank you to Netgalley and W.W. Norton for the eARC!

[Sierra]

I started crying four lines into the first poem. An unbelievable collection of poetry.

[Emily]

This was such a beautiful read at times. The way Harjo put her grief in words was powerful and so incredibly sad times. This was an incredible collection of poems. I will definitely purchase a physical copy.

*Thank you, NetGalley, for providing an arc in exchange for an honest review.*