Description
Ancient Acid Flashes Back is the true story of one who was there—and remembers—through the cloying marijuana haze, around the jagged edges of L.A. crosstops and crystal cranks, on wild windowpane trips, in the sweetness and sweat of tangled young bodies, in the stench of stale vomit and fresh garbage, in the raucous laughter of desperation and fear. In this remarkable collection of poems, Adrian Louis beams us back to the Haight during the Summer of Love and beyond on an inimitable tour of the wild side of youth, freedom, and possibility.

Reviews
"Ancient Acid Flashes Back is not a random collection of poems, but a single long poem, a meditation on American history observed through the prism of a young half-breed’s odyssey to the Haight in the days when it was a prime American metaphor. It is, indeed, a kind of small epic—not a song of self-indulgent complaint, but a Homeric journey downward into the roots of our national conciousness. The news Louis finds is not good, but it is bracing, and, I think, true. There is a kind of strange beauty in the rugged, unsentimental honesty of this book." —Bill Holm

"There is no border in these poems between the politics of the heart and the politics of the land. The music that fills this body of stories is direct and ancient. Still, it sounds like no one else’s." —Andrei Codrescu

"I’ve admired the poems of Adrian C. Louis for many years. No other American poet sings better than he does. No American poet knows how to grieve or rage better than he does. Ancient Acid Flashes Back is a beautiful and terrifyingly true book." —Thomas Lux

"Louis may be the best vernacular poet in America. He uses harsh, slangy, obscene language with unself-conscious mastery and the authenticity of coming from harsh and obscene circumstances. A self-characterized "half-breed," Louis grew up and has often lived amid the squalid poverty of Indian reservations that he has pondered in several collections, most recently in Ceremonies of the Damned (1997). His new book recalls one of his generation's defining experiences, the hippie 'summer of love' and its aftermath in late-'60s San Francisco. He was there, scoring drugs and chicks, including the Chinese-American girl he fell for, who became a heroin addict well before they parted. Every punchy, profane line of these poems rings true, in the youthful idealism they recount as well as in their scary stories of street scrapes and bad trips. Louis leaves no doubt that he was in love—a goofy love, perhaps, but sensual and searing, too—and that the hippies' 'illusory hope for a better world / has lasted inside him for thirty years.' If you were there but can't remember the '60s, they come back powerfully in Louis' bitter, affectionate poems." —Ray Olson, Booklist

Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Prayer Opens the Floodgates
The Boy Hears Distant Drums from Across the Sierras
Bad Orange Sunshine Flashback
On Love Street
Reductio Ad Absurdum
A Few Indians Are Around
Love Strikes
Maya Wu's Eyes
Head Lines
Aquarius
Panhandler's Picnic
Desperate Days
Brautigan: 1967
Kaufman: 1968
Speed Freaks on Stanyan
Dark Circle
Sharon, A Pretty Blond Cheerleader
At the Coffee Gallery
She Speaks, He Listens
Listening to The Doors
Higher Than Holy Rollers
Peyote Dream
Free Maya Wu
Shoshone Boots
Maya Wu's Works
Indian Girls on Polk Street
Paiute Girl
Psychedelic Buddha
Comanche
Chasing a Ghost
The Boy Distinctly Remembers
Girl from Outer Space
Glossolalia
At the Freight Yards
Blind Hippie Girl
Mescaline
The Whipping Snake Dream
The Boy Runs into Maya Wu at Morningstar Commune
Pacific Highway: 1968
Mission Street Crash Pad
San Francisco: 1969
His Unsent Letter to Maya Wu
Ancient Acid Flashes Back
April 24, 1971
Requiems for Dead Dreams
Vanilla Fudge
Trees, Rush Limbaugh, & the Failed Exorcism of Maya Wu's Ghost
It Was a World of Ideas
Postscript: A Case Study
About the Author