"Adrian Jawort's edited volumes collecting new voices, voices we've never heard but needed to, are volumes worthy of the world's deepest consideration. The voices collected in Off the Path 1, and Off the Path 2, anthologies of 21st Century Montana American Indian and Indiginous writers are vital, fierce, unafraid of darkness, and elegant in their understanding of human nature. Writers such as Luella N. Brien, Eric Leland Bigman Brien, Cinnamon Spear, Theo Van Alst, Kristiana Kahakuawila, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain and Jawort himself sing of contemporary and ancient darkness even as they circumscribe the mysteries of illumination between people, across cultures, and within worlds so compelling I was left with an experience I'm grateful to have encountered in the life of these two stunning volumes: greater life, more awe at the fear that exists between people, and greater grace." ~Shann Ray, American Book Award Winner and author of American Copper

Off The Path Vol. 2: An Anthology of 21st Century American Indian and Indigenous Writers

Jawort, Adrian L.

Spear, Cinnamon

Louis, Bojan

Redner, Kenneth Dyer

Lone Hill, Dana Lone

Mountain, Sterling HolyWhite

Kahakuawila, Kristiana

Harris, K.M.

Off the Pass Press LLC

About the Author\nBojan Louis is Diné of the Naakai Dine’é, born for the Áshííhí. He is the author of a book of poetry, Currents,which received an American Book Award. He has been a resident at MacDowell and teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona.\nPotent stories that offer a forceful vision of contemporary Navajo life, by an American Book Award winner\nAn ex-con hired to fix up a school bus for a couple living off the grid in the desert finds himself in the middle of their tattered relationship. An electrician’s plan to take his young nephew on a hike in the mountains, as a break from the motel room where they live, goes awry thanks to an untrustworthy new coworker. A night custodian makes the mistake of revealing too much about his work at a medical research facility to a girl who shares his passion for death metal. A relapsing addict struggles to square his desire for a white woman he meets in a writing class with family expectations and traditions.\nSet in and around Flagstaff, the stories in Sinking Bell depict violent collisions of love, cultures, and racism. In his gritty and searching fiction debut, Bojan Louis draws empathetic portraits of day laborers, metalheads, motel managers, aspiring writers and musicians, construction workers, people passing through with the hope of something better somewhere else. His characters strain to temper predatory or self-destructive impulses; they raise families, choose families, and abandon families; they endeavor to end cycles of abuse and remake themselves anew.

Sinking Bell: Stories

Literature & Fiction

United States

Graywolf Press

Poetry. Native American Studies. These poems explore American identity and the powers of myth, faith, doubt, and the environment, and the music of these poems resonate with strains of the English, Spanish, and Diné languages. Louis, who has worked as a construction worker and electrician, moves fluently between the literal and symbolic dimensions of work, as he writes in the poem "Electricity": "Any laborer gathered for a tear-out / agrees the pleasure of opening walls/is the view of what's no longer behind." "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

Currents

Poetry

BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City

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