Alexie contrasts his most recent collections of poetry, The Summer of Black Widows, with his earlier volume, The Business of Fancydancing. . . . The earlier collection of stories and poems was very popular in Indian country, presenting direct and often raw depictions of reservation life. Its realities are stark and troubling, guaranteed to disturb any preconceived notions readers might have about Indian America. And the poems and stories are told with engaging strategies of oral storytelling traditions, including the humor and epigrammatic statements that sum up centuries of struggle.

In Sherman Alexie's title poem, black widow spiders, appearing on the Spokane reservation in miraculous numbers, become a metaphor for stories. The summer is full of spiders and thus rich in stories, and even after the spiders disappear, their evidence is found in every corner of a place that remains rich in poetic possibility.

For prolific poet and novelist Sherman Alexie . . . "Indian" culture is not a frozen set-piece, but a field of vital, co-mingling influences that includes playing basketball, watching for Sasquatch or admiring Fred Astaire. . . .

Reading this latest offering of poetry and short prose pieces from Native American writer Alexie (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven), it's easy to see why his work has garnered so much attention. Working from a carefully developed understanding of his place in an oppressed culture, he focuses on the need to tear down obstacles before nature tears them down. Fire is therefore a central metaphor: a sister and brother-in-law killed, a burnt hand, cars aflame.

As with his earlier work, the thematic center of First Indian on the Moon lies within modern Indian life in and around Spokane—the city and Indian Reservation--as well as those areas in between. Unlike many of his predecessors--writers of the so-called Native American Renaissance, including Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch and N. Scott Momaday—Alexie . . . grounds his work nearly exclusively in the present, a world of drive-ins and Laundromats, HUD housing and 7-11s, and, of course, bars with names like the Breakaway Bar and the Powwow Tavern.

In truth, Sherman Alexie's literary output can't be circumscribed by a label focusing on its racial themes. An elegant little chapbook of love poems titled Water Flowing Home (1996) by itself belies such a description:

but I have salmon blood from my mother and father and always ignore barriers and bridges, only follow this simple and genetic map that you have drawn in my interior, this map hat always leads back to that exact place where you are         (from "Exact Drums")

Alexie . . . here emerges as a Native poet of the first order. He captures the full range of modern Native experience, writing both with anger and with great affection and humor. Detailing the continuing deprivation and colonialism, the poet pointedly asks, "Am I the garbageman of your dreams?" and defines Native "economics": "risk" is playing poker with cash and then passing out at powwow.

The Canadian artist Paul Kane, 1810-1871, whose oeuvre consists largely of sketches and paintings depicting landscapes and scenes of Indian life in Canada and the Pacific Northwest, plays a central role in Alexie's "Scalp Dance by Spokane Indians," named after Kane's painting of the same title. Much like Wendy Rose's "Truganinny," the poem begins with a quoted epigraph and subsequently takes on the voice of the woman portrayed in Kane's painting.

William F. Cody "Buffalo Bill" (1846-1917)

In a life that was part legend and part fabrication, William F. Cody came to embody the spirit of the West for millions, transmuting his own experience into a national myth of frontier life that still endures today.

Paul Kane devoted a lifetime to recording a wilderness world known as the 'Great Nor-West.' From 1845 to 1848, Kane crisscrossed the northwest quadrant of North America, sketching and painting everywhere he went. Kane's travels are the stuff of legend. He endured extremes of heat and cold, suffered dangers and braved adversity, and forced himself to the limit time and again in order to document the lives of Native peoples of North America.