The first Native writer to serve as U.S. poet laureate, Joy Harjo is revered for speaking truth to power with lyricism and compassion in her nine books of poetry and a memoir, “Crazy Brave.” Her new book, “Poet Warrior,” is a hybrid memoir, combining poetry and prose as it returns to the life passages revealed in “Crazy Brave.”

“I have told some of these stories many times,” she writes, but “some stories are demanding.” The father who abandoned her, the stepfather who abused her, the mother who inspired her, the Native friends at school with whom she discovered activism and built community, the mentors and teachers who nurtured her spirit — they gather again in these pages.

Harjo was in second grade when she was given Louis Untermeyer’s “Golden Treasury of Poetry,” and discovered “a refuge from the instability and barrage of human disappointment.”

She thrilled to Emily Dickinson and Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman,” but “Girl-Warrior was lonely for the poetry-talk of the Old Ones” — the voices of Native culture she found scant evidence of until a bit later in her life.

“When I hit puberty,” she tells us, “I was locked to the destiny of physical body. There was no more flying and dreaming in eternal time, there was only here and survival.” Her stepfather, “the monster,” raged against her enjoyment of rock music, forbade her to sing, broke into her diary and mocked her, beat her with his belt.

Harjo became a mother at 17 and soon after moved to Santa Fe with her son to train as a pediatric nursing assistant.

“The hospital work engaged me in a way nothing else had to that point. My innate impulse is healing, which is also standing up for justice, which can heal hearts and nations.”

The connection made here between the healing of the individual and the healing of the collective is central to Harjo’s identity.

Blissfully, Harjo, now a mother of two small children, blossomed in a “brave, brilliant, hilarious” circle of friends.