SOURCE: Berner, Robert L. Review of The Summer of Black Widows, by Sherman Alexie. World Literature Today 71, no. 2 (spring 1997): 430–31.

In the following review, Berner offers a positive assessment of The Summer of Black Widows, commenting favorably on Alexie's portrayal of the true Native-American cultural experience and his use of dark satire.

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.

The Summer of Black Widows includes some of the most powerful poems in our literature about the experience of living on an Indian reservation surrounded by the world its tribe has lost. Consider three examples: a poem about Spokane Falls, “That Place Where...