Currents - by Bojan Louis (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

It takes only the ring of the opening poems in CURRENTS to realize this book does exactly what one hopes a first book will do, bring alive a new, original voice. It's a voice Bojan Lewis not only sustains, but builds, the way, say, a young Sonny Rollins, might shape and vary a singular solo that flows through song after song: raw, kinetic, authentic, a poetry in which language has in common with music the visceral feel of the breathing body behind it.--Stuart Dybek

Bojan Louis' CURRENTS is piercing and polyglot. From the first stark poem, spoken in the voice of a hard-living construction worker in Alaska who regards the sea and thinks of Jonah ('bowel-held / and undigested'), to the last in the voice of Xipe Totec (Nahuatl for Our Lord The Flayed One, as Louis' useful notes tell us), we are swept into a fierce and sublime poetry, part incantatory vision, part caustic critique of government cruelty and injustice toward indigenous peoples. By turns a protest of the earth's poisoning, and as in the title poem, a prayer offered in the Diné 'tradition and knowing, ' what CURRENTS crystallizes in these taut poetic concentrates goes straight to our souls: 'The prayer, the prayed to, the offering / and the offered; / the bent back and the harvest.'--Cynthia Hogue

CURRENTS is charged and luminous under 'butane flame dawn.' Bojan Louis 'stickframesnightmares' into song -- in attempt to heal and jolt awake stories in blisteringholler above his homelands of pot-holed desert highways andreservation borders. An electrician by trade, Diné poet Bojan Louis'debut is a multilingual ceremony of electricity, earth and memory, where brokenness is the ground from which our stories continuereaching for Hózhó.--Sherwin Bitsui