Description
The world of acclaimed Native American poet Adrian Louis is harsh and full of pain—the blizzard-blasted plains and dusty towns of the northern Midwest, the hopeless barrenness of the Reservation, and a bleak interior world of loss, illness, and despair. Louis’s poems bring us to a place where ghosts hitchhike and the traditional pow-wow becomes an affirmation of bitter survival, where the lives of the young end too often in acts of meaningless self-destruction, and where his own existence becomes a daily battle with his cherished wife’s decline into the dementia of Alzheimer’s disease. Louis is a writer of extraordinary courage and skill, and these powerful, moving poems, wrested from the harsh experience of the Rez and his own lonely struggle with a merciless illness, will awe their readers with their brilliance and desperate humanity.

Reviews
"Adrian Louis's hard-bitten, homegrown (and marvelously learned) tongue speaks hard-won truths of North America, from Boston to Seattle, and his own Native American Nevada and Pine Ridge roots. His steady, fine-tuned stanzas, cutting and compassionate, tough and funny, shine a hard light on everything—including himself. Sex, loss, failure, poverty, spirit, and amazing strength. The Bad Medicine got stirred in with the Good, but Louis has somehow alchemically got the Good to (mostly) prevail. Here is an extended prayer we can all learn from, and a Poet's Curse on the stupidities of this century. The whole sequence is a poem of deep love for his wife. Elegant and crafty, passionately honest, Ceremonies of the Damned is a quiet victory." —Gary Snyder

"Louis weaves with symbolism and attacks with truth. Pure rage and agony are his tools." —William John Pollett, Western American Literature, Winter 2000

"In these new poems, Adrian Louis writes the purest kind of elegy. In a voice that ranges from curse to prayer, often in the same breath, he mourns for the ghosts he walks among: his own past selves, and the multitudes lost to death, love, drink, and the virulent sad politics of America. Among these are the most tough-minded and moving poems on Alzheimer's that I've ever read. As always, Louis is bent on tripping away whatever is not the truth, be it personal or political, so that the present can be fully understood. If you're sick to death of decorative, palliative poetry, read Adrian Louis." —Chase Twichell

"Ceremonies of the Damned is like a quiet voice in the night." —Howard Meredith, World Literature Today, Summer 1998

"These are not pretty, spiritual, Native American songs, but poems haunted by a hope so hard it has to be real . . . All the blood, crud, lust, and loss simply guts you with its beautiful refusal to give in." —Heid Erdrich, Rain Taxi, Spring 1998

"Adrian Louis channels the energy of anger into poetry with as much incendiary power as any poet writing in this country today. But he is also a poet of extraordinary compassion, whether for the 'endless army of broken Skins' on the reservation or for his wife in her tragic struggle with Alzheimer's disease. Ultimately, he is a poet of hope in the midst of despair, a poet of honest prayer who can see 'Wild Indian ghost cars' and ask if love is still possible. The damned have no more eloquent voice than Adrian Louis. Listen." —Martin Espada

"With invective, irreverence and imagination, Louis looks right through our preconceptions of where, and what, the West is." —Andrew Smith, "West of Here: Four Poets, Four States"

"Adrian Louis writes of this world in the only way a truly brave man can—with ferocious honesty, anger, humor and unrelenting compassion. His poems bring us to a place where ghosts hitchhike and the traditional powwow becomes an affirmation of bitter survival, where the lives of the young end too often in acts of meaningless self-destruction, and where his own existence becomes a daily battle with his cherished wife's heartbreaking decline into the dementia of Alzheimer's disease. Louis is a writer of extraordinary courage and skill, and these powerful, moving poems, wrested from the harsh experience of the Rez and his own lonely struggle with merciless illness, will awe their readers with their brilliance and desperate humanity." —Chiron Review, Spring 1998

Contents
Contents

One: Petroglyphs of Serena
Petroglyphs of Serena

Two: Earth Bone Connected to the Spirit Bone
Earth Bone Connected to the Spirit Bone

Three: This Never-Ending Farewell
Alzheimer's
This Ends with a Frozen Penis
To Jim in Sawyer, Minnesota
To Bill in Minneota, Minnesota
Note to a Young Rez Artist
Coyote's Circle
Dead Rez Land Dream
Medicine Song
Good Morning America
Star Quilt in a Pawnshop
Ceremonies of the Damned
Black Crow Dreams
A Colossal American Copulation
Black is this Night of Love
It Has Come to This
Getting a Second Opinion
Shall We Gather at the River
For You, These Flowers
Mario Savio
This Is the Rez