ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Joy Harjo's poetry through the prism of botanical hope. The dehumanization of vegetal life at the fore of Harjo's appraisal of the industrial rendering of corn, tobacco, and other spiritually- and culturally-potent species internalizes the values of empathic identification with nonhumans and love for plants. The botanical imagination thus integral to Harjo's hope-filled poetics is not the end result of wistful longing or starry-eyed idealism regarding flowers, but is instead part and parcel of the enduring practice of renewal rooted in pan-tribal oralities, cosmogenies, and ethnobotanical knowledge. Harjo entreats her readers and listeners to embrace dialogue with the botanical world by speaking with and listening to plants— by attending sensitively to their specific desmological modes. Harjo's poetry draws—directly and indirectly—from a lineage of Muscogee Creek and other Native American poets for whom plants provided vital subject matter for poetic reflection.
