One Stick Song

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant satiric perspective on American Indian culture
Review: "One Stick Song" is a superb blend of poetry and prose by Sherman Alexie. The back cover notes that the author is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, and indeed the main topic of this book is American Indian life and literature. Although Whitman is invoked in one of the pieces ("The American Artificial Limb Company"), I found Alexie's voice in this piece to remind me more of Kurt Vonnegut and George Carlin. The book is a mixture of outrage, wacky humor, and tenderness, with some really cutting satiric elements.

Some of my favorite pieces are as follows. "The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me" is an excellent, irony-rich extended prose poem which looks at, among other things, the business and politics of Native American literary production. This piece contains the memorable line, "Poetry = Anger x Imagination." "Open Books" is a satiric poem about poets and poetry itself. In this poem Alexie writes, "Let us now celebrate the lies / that should be true because they tell us so much." "The Mice War" is an unsettling, violent poem that takes place on a reservation landfill. This is just a small sampling of the treasures in "One Stick Song," a book which moves Alexie onto my list of favorite United States poets.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant satiric perspective on American Indian culture
Review: "One Stick Song" is a superb blend of poetry and prose by Sherman Alexie. The back cover notes that the author is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, and indeed the main topic of this book is American Indian life and literature. Although Whitman is invoked in one of the pieces ("The American Artificial Limb Company"), I found Alexie's voice in this piece to remind me more of Kurt Vonnegut and George Carlin. The book is a mixture of outrage, wacky humor, and tenderness, with some really cutting satiric elements.

Some of my favorite pieces are as follows. "The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me" is an excellent, irony-rich extended prose poem which looks at, among other things, the business and politics of Native American literary production. This piece contains the memorable line, "Poetry = Anger x Imagination." "Open Books" is a satiric poem about poets and poetry itself. In this poem Alexie writes, "Let us now celebrate the lies / that should be true because they tell us so much." "The Mice War" is an unsettling, violent poem that takes place on a reservation landfill. This is just a small sampling of the treasures in "One Stick Song," a book which moves Alexie onto my list of favorite United States poets.

Rating:
Summary: best yet
Review: Call me biased, but I consider this Alexie's best colleciton of poetry yet. In it he moves away from his typical sad and revealing descriptions of the life he saw as a child on the res, and moved more into himself, revealing things to us about himself that we only guessed before. This makes his past works make more sense and gives readers a greater understanding of what goes on in Alexie's mind. These poems and stories seem older, wiser somehow. I believe Alexie has jumped a rung in this book, out of the "infantile" works of yore and into something greater. He becomes a Master of the Masters.

Rating:
Summary: in your face reading
Review: From the very first chapter this collection of poems blew me away. Sherman Alexie provides a raw and gritty insight into the contemporary American Indian ideology. His poems jump to life inside your imagination and seem to not want to die. Alexie helps people of all different backgrounds come to a better understanding of how things are in the real American world of misconceptions about American Indians and their beliefs and customs. He also challenges the way some people may view their own cultural lineage. At times his poems are very jovial and lighthearted, and at other times they are stark and quite sad. This is one of the best books i have ever read. I recomend this book to anyone who wants to see a different side to the way old ideas are challenged in new ways.

Rating:
Summary: in your face reading
Review: From the very first chapter this collection of poems blew me away. Sherman Alexie provides a raw and gritty insight into the contemporary American Indian ideology. His poems jump to life inside your imagination and seem to not want to die. Alexie helps people of all different backgrounds come to a better understanding of how things are in the real American world of misconceptions about American Indians and their beliefs and customs. He also challenges the way some people may view their own cultural lineage. At times his poems are very jovial and lighthearted, and at other times they are stark and quite sad. This is one of the best books i have ever read. I recomend this book to anyone who wants to see a different side to the way old ideas are challenged in new ways.

Rating:
Summary: This is truly magical, hypnotic, beautiful reading.
Review: It should come as no surprise to any viewer of Smoke Signals that the writing, almost the singing voice of Sherman Alexie is hypnotic, even addictive. The beauty of the song invites you deeper and deeper through layer upon layer until you are completely immersed in all its glory; then you are belched up with a wry joke like Jonah beached by the whale. All observations may be intact, but you have been to another place, and must see the world differently ever after. No matter how afraid we are of the enlightenment and its obligations, the experience and its effects continue to allow us the opportunity to do the necessary healing work. To call it cathartic seems trite and shallow, even false. It is magical.

I knew a man who drowned

in three inches of water collected in a tire track.

I wish I could name him here but tribal laws forbid me

to name the dead. These laws are aboriginal

and more important than any poem.

But I want to give him a name

that means what I say so I name him Hamlet, King Lear Othello, Noah, Adam. from Water 3, One Stick Song.

Nancy Lorraine, Reviewer

Rating:
Summary: Most Personal Work to Date
Review: One Stick Song is Sherman Alexie's most personal work yet. In these poems and stories, he reveals a side of himself that he has never truly exposed before... possibly even to himself. It is obvious that Sherman is finding the deepest parts of his soul in recent years, probably helped along by the birth of his as revealed by the final poem in the book "Sugar Town."

I have read all of Alexie's works to date, and mostly in the order they were written and I have enjoyed reading the growth of this truly great writer.

Rating:
Summary: Most Personal Work to Date
Review: One Stick Song is Sherman Alexie's most personal work yet. In these poems and stories, he reveals a side of himself that he has never truly exposed before... possibly even to himself. It is obvious that Sherman is finding the deepest parts of his soul in recent years, probably helped along by the birth of his as revealed by the final poem in the book "Sugar Town."

I have read all of Alexie's works to date, and mostly in the order they were written and I have enjoyed reading the growth of this truly great writer.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, although not Alexie's best
Review: Sherman Alexie's _One Stick Song_ offers more of what readers are learning to expect from one of the most talented young writers in the United States. Alexie's poetry offers comic perspectives toward contemporary Indian life in America. His writing exposes the twisted logic of stereotypes that infect liberal romanticism, challenges and reconstructs basic national, civil, and religious myths, and plays-in a most serious manner-at the edges of our language.

Alexie is the master of the one-liner, and every book has many memorable lines. He also does exceptional work with poetic form. Some of his poems have enlivened such old forms as blank verse, sestinas, sonnets, and epics. Yet his poetry remains accessible to readers who find the poetry taught in schools stale and obtuse. (Now, of course, Alexie is fast becoming one of the poets taught in schools.) In my teaching, I have had many students tell me they cannot read poetry, and then become seekers of poetry after exposure to a few of Alexie's poems.

Alexie's poetry is not for readers who are insecure in their beliefs. His approach-on the page, and in person-is aptly described as in-your-face. In _One Stick Song_ he offers lines that had me cheering his attack on a liberal scared cow that I've been afraid to confront with the profanity he employs (perhaps the only reasonable response). But he does not leave my own cherished delusions safe, driving me to reexamine basic assumptions.

The four-star rating I've given this book does not reflect the strength of the book when measured against other living poets. 4.8 stars would be more accurate. Rather, the rating reflects my disappointment in this book compared to Alexie's _Summer of Black Widows_. The earlier book is Alexie's best poetry. _One Stick Song_, on the other hand, is a poetic companion volume to _The Toughest Indian in the World_, his new collection of short stories. In this set, the prose offers more of the innovation that is becoming Alexie's trademark.

Rating:
Summary: Good prose when not cut up into little lines.
Review: Sherman Alexie, One Stick Song (Hanging Loose Press, 2000)

I have been avoiding reading Sherman Alexie's work for years. An acquaintance of mine is quite fond of his work, and it's one of those cases where I generally avoid, out of hand, anything this guy recommends. But eventually, the name stayed in my head long enough that I decided I had to at least try; after all, what if this were the one occasion where my acquaintance turned out to be right?

Well, suffice to say he wasn't. Not completely, anyway. Alexie's short nonfiction is the strong point of this collection, and some of it is exceptionally strong. (I find it hard to dislike any piece of writing that starts with the sentence "I hate baseball.") It's avant-garde without being too avant-garde, accessible without pandering. It walks a fine line, and it's fun stuff.

The poetry, or what passes for the poetry, in the collection is the weak spot, and unfortunately, what passes for poetry makes up the bulk of the collection. I've said it a thousand times before and I will likely say it a thousand times again before I die: if the message takes over the medium, what you have is not poetry, it's political screed chopped up into short lines for no apparent reason. That is the case with, unfortunately, every poem in this collection.

Pick it up, read the prose, ignore the poetry, you'll have a far better time with it than I did. **