I'm probably not in the natural audience for Alexie's poetry; my favorite poets - W.H. Auden, Constantine Cavafy - favor a dry, witty, ironic mode. In contrast, Alexie's poems often merge anger with profane humor, attempting to unlock insights by violating standard poetic forms and by referencing gore, sexuality, or bodily wastes. There's nothing wrong with that, but I generally find Rabelaisian comedy tedious rather than funny, so those poems don't work for me. Occasionally Alexie fumbles as he's trying to go from coarse to profound, and in 'Inappropriate', Alexie seems genuinely wounded by an anonymous critic who calls him funny but shallow. On the other hand, I loved several of the poems: Volcano (about the death of mosquitoes after the eruption of Mt. St. Helen); Mystery Train (a conversation with an autistic boy on a passenger train); Independence Day (on the temptation to abuse power); Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World (on grief); and, far and away my favorite, the Oral Tradition (on poetry, sex, casual cruelty, and grace). Alexie's poems are at their best when they focus on other people's stories, or on Alexie himself as a fallible but sympathetic human being, rather than as a self-conscious artist. ( )

A gorgeous, funny, irreverent, heartbreaking collection of poetry-prose (and I'm not generally a poetry fan)