One Stick Song

Sherman Alexie

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.