Editorial Review:
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Poetry. Native American Studies. Sherman Alexie's poems, fiction, and essays have won him an international following since his first book, THE BUSINESS OF FANCYDANCING, was published to great acclaim in 1992. SMOKE SIGNALS, the film he adapted from one of his stories and coproduced, enlarged his audience still further. Alexie's honors include awards from the NEA, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation, and the Washington State Arts Commission, and a citation as One of the 20 Best American Novelists Under the Age of 40 from GRANTA magazine. An enrolled Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, Alexie lives in Seattle with his wife and son.
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Reader Reviews for One Stick Song:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: An excellent poet
Comment: This book is filled with feeling! So Strong , So Sad, So Funny and So Right On!!!!!I highly recommend it----- As well as his other books. His soul is old and he truly speaks for the Indian.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Poet for the Rest of Us
Comment: Sherman Alexie is a poet, he says. But not just him. The New York Times says he's a poet and so does the Harvard Review. I read his work and I think less about poetry and more about essential truth. There's not much form or structure except that which makes the words fit into interesting columns on the page - yet I read him and love the words, feel the emotion he's conveying. If that's what a poet is, then I agree. But it's not that his words are beautiful, or that he scours the thesaurus for the perfect metaphor, because he can't. Not him. He just can't. I envision him sitting down and writing about a subject - water, women, old trucks - and then looking at what he wrote and feeling relieved that it's out of his head and now other people will have to read it while he can forget it. He lets it go into the world, freeing himself of those constraints.
If that's poetry, then he's my favorite.
As he says, Indian writers sell less copies than Mixed Blood writers and they sell less than Non-Indian writers writing about Indians. Non-Indian writers say "Great Spirit," "Mother Earth," "Two-legged, Four-legged, and Winged." Mixed Blood writers say "Creator," "Mother Earth," "Two-legged, Four-legged, and Winged." Indian writers say "God," "Mother Earth," "Human Being, Dog, and Bird."
He's right. Sherman Alexie writes simply, directly. He's the combination of simplicity reminiscent of Hemingway and the frank truthfulness filled with biting irony reminiscent of Mark Twain. He's the direct vision into the lives of today's Indians - as they are, not as they might be perceived to be.
Great book.
- CV Rick
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good prose when not cut up into little lines.
Comment: Sherman Alexie, One Stick Song (Hanging Loose Press, 2000)
I have been avoiding reading Sherman Alexie's work for years. An acquaintance of mine is quite fond of his work, and it's one of those cases where I generally avoid, out of hand, anything this guy recommends. But eventually, the name stayed in my head long enough that I decided I had to at least try; after all, what if this were the one occasion where my acquaintance turned out to be right?
Well, suffice to say he wasn't. Not completely, anyway. Alexie's short nonfiction is the strong point of this collection, and some of it is exceptionally strong. (I find it hard to dislike any piece of writing that starts with the sentence "I hate baseball.") It's avant-garde without being too avant-garde, accessible without pandering. It walks a fine line, and it's fun stuff.
The poetry, or what passes for the poetry, in the collection is the weak spot, and unfortunately, what passes for poetry makes up the bulk of the collection. I've said it a thousand times before and I will likely say it a thousand times again before I die: if the message takes over the medium, what you have is not poetry, it's political screed chopped up into short lines for no apparent reason. That is the case with, unfortunately, every poem in this collection.
Pick it up, read the prose, ignore the poetry, you'll have a far better time with it than I did. **
Customer Rating:
Summary: A brilliant satiric perspective on American Indian culture
Comment: "One Stick Song" is a superb blend of poetry and prose by Sherman Alexie. The back cover notes that the author is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, and indeed the main topic of this book is American Indian life and literature. Although Whitman is invoked in one of the pieces ("The American Artificial Limb Company"), I found Alexie's voice in this piece to remind me more of Kurt Vonnegut and George Carlin. The book is a mixture of outrage, wacky humor, and tenderness, with some really cutting satiric elements.Some of my favorite pieces are as follows. "The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me" is an excellent, irony-rich extended prose poem which looks at, among other things, the business and politics of Native American literary production. This piece contains the memorable line, "Poetry = Anger x Imagination." "Open Books" is a satiric poem about poets and poetry itself. In this poem Alexie writes, "Let us now celebrate the lies / that should be true because they tell us so much." "The Mice War" is an unsettling, violent poem that takes place on a reservation landfill. This is just a small sampling of the treasures in "One Stick Song," a book which moves Alexie onto my list of favorite United States poets.
Customer Rating:
Summary: in your face reading
Comment: From the very first chapter this collection of poems blew me away. Sherman Alexie provides a raw and gritty insight into the contemporary American Indian ideology. His poems jump to life inside your imagination and seem to not want to die. Alexie helps people of all different backgrounds come to a better understanding of how things are in the real American world of misconceptions about American Indians and their beliefs and customs. He also challenges the way some people may view their own cultural lineage. At times his poems are very jovial and lighthearted, and at other times they are stark and quite sad. This is one of the best books i have ever read. I recomend this book to anyone who wants to see a different side to the way old ideas are challenged in new ways.
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