One Stick Song Book

An enjoyable and teasingly provocative collection of Alexie's poems and short essays which left me feeling like I'd just played an amusing game of intellectual peekaboo. I'd heard many radio interviews with the author around the time I read his novels The Toughest Indian in the World and Reservation Blues about ten years ago. That introductory enjoyment of his style and wit, and my familial and night-life exposure to a Native American/Native Alaskan flavor of human awareness, have left me almost certain that there exists some fundamental conceptual cultural difference that I can feel but not define.

In many of the pieces in this collection, that indefinable something would pop up briefly and make me smile at Alexie's cleverness. This was most notable in the pieces describing the author's experiences growing up on the reservation - I'd be reading along enjoying a juicy revelation from the secret world of unsupervised restless teenage boys when an Indian or reservation reference would re-flavor my experience of the story. Was Alexie teasing me with glimpses of that indefinable something or playfully challenging my stereotypes? It doesn't matter - I was left with s feeling of expanded human awareness.