ABOUT THE BOOK

As noted by N. Scott Momaday, “Adrian C. Louis reaches to the core of contemporary Native American life. An equation of anger and survival, of acceptance and defiance brought into delicate balance. It is work of profound honesty and ought to be read by everyone who cares to know the American heart.” No other contemporary poet has taken such an unflinching and explosive look at the intersection of the sacred and the profane. The re-publication of Fire Water World (1989) and Among the Dog Eaters (1992) is a literary event to be witnessed and celebrated.

"Adrian C. Louis has been studying people over four decades of published books, and he knows us in our delights (‘The first time I kissed you the daffodils / throbbed as you breathed in the dark.’) as well as in our despairs (‘You died from a long, good time: cirrhosis at thirty.’). But more specifically than people, Louis knows a people, the Lakota (and associated tribes), and much of his writing career has been a kind of mourning—sometimes angered, sometimes broken and sad, sometimes filled with a pride for what’s been lost, sometimes simply bewildered: a complicated mourning—that brings a many-sided vision to his subject. ‘I lower a frayed rope into the depths and hoist / the same old Indian tears to my eyes.’ It’s an important American field of exploration, and his voice is a poignant addition to it." 

—Albert Goldbarth

ABOUT ADRIAN C. LOUIS

Adrian C. Louis was born and raised in northern Nevada and is an enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute Tribe. From 1984-1997, Louis taught at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. Currently, Louis is Professor of English at Minnesota State University in Marshall. He has written twelve books of poems and two works of fiction: Wild Indians & Other Creatures, short stories, and Skins, a novel. Skins was produced as a feature film with a theatrical release in 2002. Louis has won various writing awards, including fellowships from the Bush Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation. His 2006 collection of poems, Logorrhea, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

248 pages | 5.5 x 7.5 in.
ISBN-13: 978-1-935635-36-9 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-935635-37-6 (hardcover)