Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. On their face, the two books we've got for you today are about motherhood. One is Joy Harjo's poetry collection, washing my mother's body, dedicated to her late mother. And the other is Ruthie Ackerman's nonfiction book, The Mother Code, about her ambivalence towards motherhood. But really, both books are actually about

being a daughter, what it's like to receive stories, gifts, baggage, and grace from your mother

as you decide how to move through life. At first, Harjo speaks with Empires-Lelah Fadil about the

importance to her of the ritual of washing a body after death and what it meant to not be able to do this for her mom.

That's ahead.

Joy Harjo is an internationally celebrated poet of the Muskogee Nation, and it is with words that she processes this life, joy, hardships, and in a new book, Grief.

It's called Washing My Mother's Body, a ceremony for grief, and it is dedicated to her late mother.

When I spoke with Harjo, the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate, about this work, she started by reading the first lines of her poem.

I never got to wash my mother's body when she died. I return to take care of her in memory.

That's how I make peace when things are left undone. I go back and open the door. I step in to make my ritual, to do what should have been done,

what needs to be fixed so that my spirit can move on. Joy, this poem washing my mother's body

and these first few lines, how did they come to the page for you? That's always a mystery.

That's a mystery with anything, you know?

Where does it come from and how does it get there?

And I was in the middle of writing something totally, you know, my father's family and

removal from the southeast and history.

And this poem just interrupted and elbowed its way through.

And there I was writing about wanting to wash my mother's body but not allowed the

opportunity.

And the poem showed me, well, if you couldn't do it in person, you can go back and wash her body in a poem.

Can you describe the importance of that ritual to wash your mother's body before she was laid to rest?

Yeah, it's about acknowledging the story that her spirit inhabited in her body.

...