SOURCE: "A Dancer at the World's Rim," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 12, 1992, p. 10.

Glover is a Canadian writer, educator, and critic whose short story collection A Guide to Animal Behavior was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award in 1991. In the following favorable review of Black Eagle Child, he praises Young Bear's ability to discuss Mesquakie culture without betraying tribal secrets.

Albert E. Stone, in his foreword to [Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives], calls this book an experimental autobiography. But the reader quickly discovers two things: This tale is not factual—it is full of composite characters and fictionalized events—and it is only tangentially about its author, the Mesquakie Indian poet Ray A. Young Bear, who eventually disappears behind a series of changed names, false leads, alter egos, digressions, epistories and myths.

Young Bear is a poet who makes his aesthetic home between two...