In his latest collection, Random Exorcisms, Adrian C. Louis writes poems with the rough-edged wit and heart-wrenching sincerity that make him one of the seminal voices in contemporary American poetry. Deeply rooted in Native American traditions and folklore, these poems tackle a broad range of subjects, including Facebook, zombies, horror movies, petty grievances, real grief, and pure political outrage. In a style entirely his own, Louis writes hilarious, genuine, self-deprecating poems that expel a great many demons, including any sense of isolation a reader might feel facing a harsh and lonely world. In the poem "Necessary Exorcism," the speaker exorcises himself, more or less, of his grief for his deceased wife. "I made my choice so easily & picked red drama, the joyous pain of it all," he writes. "Minor Exorcism: 1984" is one of a series of poems that contemplates the memories of small, simple mundanes, like catching a fish, until, "My old heart is thrashing with / long-forgotten boyhood joy." "Dog the Bounty Hunter Blogs" confronts some of the cruel absurdities of reality TV, while "Naked, Midnight, Sober, Facebooking" expels a great many fearful things, including the fear of growing older. These are poems that make you laugh and cry, nod appreciatively, and then laugh just a little more.

Random Exorcisms: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

Literature & Fiction

Louis, Adrian C.

Poetry

Pleiades Press

Wild Indians &amp; Other Creatures is a stunning book that will startle readers who harbor romantic notions of contemporary Native American life. In these interrelated stories, most animals speak and most humans drink. A number of these irrelevant stories of Indian life are reworkings of traditional Trickster talescomplete with horny humanesque coyotes, randy ravens, and mystical bears - which transcend that form and become something new and arresting. Set on and around the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota, these unsettling, often politically incorrect stories almost function as a novel. Many are laugh-out-loud funny, while others are stark and sad, yet grimly human and powerful. Many more stories and lives are interwoven in these sometimes bawdy but always moving and memorable tales. In Wild Indians &amp; Other Creatures, Adrian C. Louis, one of the leading American Indian poets, presents an unblinking look at the social ills of reservation life while at the same time speaking of hope and survival for native peoples.

Wild Indians And Other Creatures (Western Literature Series)

United States

University of Nevada Press

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.

Ceremonies Of The Damned: Poems (Western Literature and Fiction Series)

Wild Indians & Other Creatures is a stunning book that will startle readers who harbor romantic notions of contemporary Native American life. In these interrelated stories, most animals speak and most humans drink. A number of these irrelevant stories of Indian life are reworkings of traditional Trickster talescomplete with horny humanesque coyotes, randy ravens, and mystical bears - which transcend that form and become something new and arresting. Set on and around the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota, these unsettling, often politically incorrect stories almost function as a novel. Many are laugh-out-loud funny, while others are stark and sad, yet grimly human and powerful. Many more stories and lives are interwoven in these sometimes bawdy but always moving and memorable tales. In Wild Indians & Other Creatures, Adrian C. Louis, one of the leading American Indian poets, presents an unblinking look at the social ills of reservation life while at the same time speaking of hope and survival for native peoples.

Wild Indians And Other Creatures (Western Literature and Fiction Series)

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. cross tops 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, a member of the Paiute tribe, 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.

Ancient Acid Flashes Back: Poems

Fire Water World: Poems

West End Pr

poetry, foreword by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Among the Dog Eaters: Poems

SKINS is Adrian C. Louis's realistic novel of life on Pine Ridge Reservation, the story of two brothers--one a rez cop, the other an alcoholic--and their relationship with each other, with their people, with their environment. Chris Eyre's film version of SKINS is scheduled for release by Firstlook Pictures in August 2002. 
A cloth edition of SKINS was published by Crown in 1995. It is now out of print.

Skins

Ellis Pr

This collection of hard-edged prose poems takes no prisoners. Louis walks the tightrope between the sacred and the profane with humor, anger, and compassion, all dispensed with a startling clarity of vision. These poems, written from 1999 to 2004, derive from Louis’s self-imposed exile in the rural deadlands of southwestern Minnesota.

Evil Corn

Ellis Press

In his twelfth poetry collection, Adrian Louis slays Indian Country's centuries-old demons and confronts his own grief upon losing his wife to Alzheimers, revealing a writer at his peak and a poet unafraid to take chances. There is no room for misinterpretation; his diction is as clear-cut as a logged forest. In "Archaeology," Louis writes about the Anglo invasion of Indian Country and its loss of Native traditions, language, and history. In "Savage Sunsets," he writes candidly about his wife's battle with Alzheimers and how the disease steals away their waning days together. As the sun sets on his wife's life and on Indian Country, Louis remains stalwart, a bold emissary who has lived to tell.

Savage Sunsets

West End Press

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Books by Louis, Adrian C.