Bone and Juice (review)

In the poem "Indian Sign Language," Adrian C. Louis recounts the understandings of a woman and a man; the man grasps futilely at the trailing mind of the woman, and sorrow sprouts from aging soil to poetry. With beautiful sound, Louis details the struggle of two lives in a landscape of the reservation plains. An antelope pauses before them, skittering on the road, and the metaphysical becomes incarnate in words: Its eyes were dark, fluttering hearts that jumped out and kissed our eyes. An ancient song of blood rang out and snapped our human minds. In an instant of lucidity, you whispered, Spirit, it's a spirit, and neither one of us laughed. Many of the poems in the collection Bone & Juicering with that same spirit, full of a sorrowful wisdom, crackling with the dryness of wit like parched plains grasses. I must admit, I still don't know how to speak adequately of Louis's most recent collection of verse, but the poetry within it delineates a powerful and confrontational song, forcing the reader with melodic reality to acknowledge the depths of Louis's deaths and love. His love is Colleen; his deaths are the death of her mind and the death of the spirit of his world. It is as much a book of deterioration as of commitment. The rubble of America is kicked at in this collection, the macabre reality of daily life is nakedly described, and the humor is subtle yet distressed and darkened with the exacting harshness of the [End Page 322] diction. But through the dust-storm energy of Louis's poetry, the character of Colleen deepens and walks, and the thrust of his voice grows as the poems progress to focus a candid description on the state of his love for his wife as she endures Alzheimer's disease. Louis confronts the realities of mid-life with a cutting tongue and satirical remarks. However, the humor in this collection is mostly just a sardonic mask laid thinly over his realities and sorrows. Through the slight twistings of language and rhyme, he forces readers to feel and brings them face-to-face with his reality. Louis manipulates sound masterfully and focuses on this element at the end of several poems in order to drive home his point. For instance, in the poem "The Moon, the Moon-ee-o!," the speaker addresses Colleen and recounts how he encountered a flirtatious nurse at Colleen's hospital whom he disgustedly rebuked as being cheaply sympathetic, but writes: Later that night, alone in bed, I reach for the moon and shudder and glower and thrash in the glow of a brief liquid gloom in a womanless room. The dark intensity present in much of Louis's writing is juxtaposed brilliantly against the emotion of his repeated reappraisals of his love for Colleen as her condition worsens. In the poem "Turquoise Blues," the speaker compares the love he shared with Colleen to a dead coyote, "lifeless, but still / fanged and demanding attention" before ultimately recommitting himself to her in "The Promise." These poems certainly aren't lifeless, and their fanged, grim demeanor demands reaction from even the most reticent reader. Louis runs his rez-darkened fingers through each of the poems, soiling them with the plains and the repercussions of government-induced poverty. He plants reality into his words and throws them down like seeds. Louis attacks his truths with blunt, hard language, rhyming his horrors in stark, careful words that are full of force. There is a presence which looms dark and brooding behind these poems, making certain that you read every word, making certain that every word rolls heavily into your mind and mouth and drags truth from your own perceptions. The bladed honesty of the poems in Bone & Juicedistinguishes them from others' works. Louis uses this component to create some very good poems, iridescent in crystal language and full of the intensity of obsidian. In "This

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