For a Girl Becoming

“That day your spirit came to us rains came in from the Pacific to bless/ Clouds peered over the mountains in response to the singing of medicine plants.” In urgent, lyrical lines, U.S. poet laureate Harjo, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, follows an Indigenous family in gathering to welcome an infant. Thickly stroked, muralistic paintings by Garcia (Remembering) open with a figure in the sky smudging a desert house. Within it, a woman labors, while outside, horses—“hundreds of them”—run the land “to accompany you here, to bless.” A rainbow soon appears over the home, and family gathers bearing myriad gifts (“tobacco and cedar, new clothes, and joy for you”). As fluid, saturated images dotted with horses and rainbows follow the infant’s maturation, refrain-like lines urge the child to remember the source of life’s gifts (breathing, walking, running, laughing, crying, dreaming), then offer suggestions for how to move through the world. Visualizing Indigenous traditions and underlining values of family and interdependence, it’s a profoundly loving blessing of a book for anyone in a place of becoming. Ages 4–8. (Apr.)