From Library Journal
In what might very well be the year of the memoir, it often seems that every literate Baby Boomer is putting his or her reminiscences on paper. Joe is quite another memoirist altogether: poet, educator, and ambassador for Native people, she here recounts in both poetry and prose her struggles with racism, sexism, and poverty as well as her search for identity. Since the Native and non-Native worlds make such different demands, the quest for personal understanding is no easy one; addressing her non-Native audience, Joe says, "It is hard for you to see our face, and sometimes it is hard for us to see ourselves." In late life Joe finds solace in religion, but her continuing search for her true self still shows in the writing, which is quiet, almost dreamy on first reading, yet edgy beneath its surface calm. For specialized collections.?David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"Remember: I found the good," Rita Joe says in the introduction to her sometimes harrowing, always inspiring autobiography. "Look at us and you, too, will find the good." Her account proves true to her introductory words, for where another might emphasize the poverty and prejudice she has encountered as a Native Canadian, Joe makes of her story a moral tale in which each difficulty hides a lesson. She learns strength and self-reliance from the multiple short-term foster homes of her childhood; she learns to value family when she gives up her firstborn for adoption; she learns how necessity can lead to beauty as her poems, forged from the pain of her life, gain her an increasing audience. In addition, this is not a conventional prose autobiography, for Joe wraps the prose around many meaty, direct poems that embellish and expand upon the narrative.
Patricia Monaghan
