For more than twenty-five years Ray A. Young Bear has offered the world a voice rich in his Meskwaki traditions, forceful in its individuality, and articulate and original in its poetic treatment of political and cultural questions. (His tribe's name is also spelled Mesquakie, but Meskwaki is the spelling Young Bear prefers.) The quietly compelling but radical imagination that animated his early work in the late 1960s has increased in intensity, and he has emerged as a master poet and novelist, one of the major Native American voices of the late twentieth century. Few of his Native American contemporaries -- perhaps only Gerald Vizenor -- so reshape the English language to fit so singular a voice. Young Bear challenges his readers to use language in new ways, to break away from habitual forms of knowledge, to accept new terms for reading across cultures. It is probably because of...