Sherman Alexie has two new volumes: I Would Steal Horses (Slipstream) Old Shirts & New Skins, with illustrations by Elizabeth Woody (American Indian Studies Center, UCLA). The title poem of the UCLA book is in the Slipstream chapbook and exemplifies the almost surreal imaginative energy that distinguishes this enrolled Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian's work:

Love, listen
before I wear the shirt
that will separate us into flame and oxygen.

The first audience for Alexie's work has to be Indian people, especially young people, who will find here someone who tells the truth about what it means to be Indian. The poet bears a heavy responsibility for lighting a path between an ancient and powerful cultural tradition, in danger of extinction, and a place to survive in or beside a social order more often than not corrupt and corrupting. It sounds corny to say it, but these poems (and Alexie's equally eloquent stories) should be an inspiration to a new generation. A second audience should be non-Indians who want and need to correct any illusions they may have about Indian life today. These readers need a strong stomach, because Alexie, like Louis, does not spare his reader the wrenching details. The third audience, overlapping the first two, is the community of tough-minded readers who are thirsty for the strong poetry of the future. Though still in his twenties, Alexie already draws from a deep well. “Poetry = Anger × Imagination” is an epigraph to a section ironically titled “Indian Education.” Not +, but ×. The anger comes out of the well of history: Columbus and Crazy Horse and the Seventh Cavalry and Sand Creek—even the bones the anthropologists covet. Add to it the testimony of daily life: the HUD houses, the bars, the government commodities, the Thunderbird Wine and the dumpster. Then multiply by an imagination that, first, provides an inner life that comprehends the bloody past and inebriated present and translates them into testimonial song. Second, it transmutes the cancerous ironies and the mind-numbing deprivations into mirrors and windows for insight and vision. With this vision, the people should survive. Third, imagination transmutes its sociological and journalistic and anthropological and mathematical and historical raw material into a new music. It is a music of quick drum-beats in one poem, slow long-line chants in another. Pounding repetitions with delicate variations. And most movingly, as in “Horses,” long riffs of syncopation. Without the imagination that marries the historical and contemporary misery to an inner and ultimately hopeful vision, without the lyric inventiveness and control, these would still be good poems. With them, they have the power to dance their readers into a new world.