Bone & Juice (Triquarterly Books)
The poems of Louis's Xth collection construct an aging Native-American alcoholic who stopped drinking 10 years ago as he deals with what it means to be growing old and still in love with a wife suffering from a degenerative brain disease that is most likely Alzheimer's. A poet, a novelist, a newspaper editor, professor at Southwest State University and an enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute tribe, Louis wryly dispatches received cliches of background and nation in "Valentine from Indian Country": "On these plains the plows/ and drums wrestle for centuries/ and marry into resignation./ The old songs scratch the earth/ attempting to release the ancestors./ Digging deeper, John Deere tractors/ unleash the Ghost Dance/ but nobody remembers the steps." He can move quickly from confessional boasting ("On many occasion in my 20s/ I took comfort with several/ women in a single day") to pathetic admissions ("Three days ago I had an affair,/ a quite torrid one I admit,/ with my lonesome left hand"). At moments his speaker is just plain infantile: "Yes, I know the cure for what/ ails me: a kind word or two,/ and, if I'm lucky, a tablespoon/ of woman dew." Mixed in with all this are poems like "Good-Hearted Woman," "Indian Sign Language" and "Turquoise Blues" that are unusually poignant explorations of how to still enjoy loving someone whose mind is deteriorating. Louis is best known for his catalogue poem "Colossal American Copulation," where he denounces much of 20th-century American culture in a catalogue of Whitmanesque lines that each begin with "Fuck" (as in "Fuck, no, double fuck the Vietnam War"). Many of the poems in Bone & Juice lack such vigor (despite calling Bill Clinton a "cockhound" and mocking Maya Angelou's inauguration poem) and have enormous flaws but so, intentionally, does their speaker.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.