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Booklist

Review of One Stick Song
by Donna Seaman
September 1, 2000

Alexie, author most recently of the short story collection The Toughest Indian in the World, expresses an anger as large and molten as the earth's core; but like the earth, which conceals its heat beneath forests and oceans, he cloaks his with mordant humor and a rough-and-ready lyricism. In this bracing collection of poems and poem-tight prose pieces, he targets lies and hypocrisy. Alexie mocks the mealymouthed cant of the politically correct and, in a lashing poem titled "Open Books," the arrogance of a certain ilk of poet, then, elsewhere, tempers his rage with tenderness. His hard-hitting poems are loosely knit and suitable for performance, but his prose pieces are constructed as diabolically as barbed wire, especially the clever yet emotionally resonant essay "The Warriors," in which musings on baseball segue into thoughts on friendship and such frank disclosures as his confession that although television once had him convinced that white women were sexier than brown women, life taught him the truth about love.