SOURCE: McFarland, Ron. Review of One Stick Song. Wicazo Sa Review: A Journal of Native American Studies 16, no. 2 (fall 2001): 158-63.

In the following essay, McFarland offers a review of One Stick Song.

Nine years have passed since the warm reception of Sherman Alexie's first collection of mingled very short stories and poems, The Business of Fancydancing (1992), which was also published by Hanging Loose Press. One Stick Song is similar in nature, with respect both to genre blending and voice. Poetry, as he reminds us in the first piece, “The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me,” is still the result of an equation in which Anger is multiplied by Imagination (20). And, as from the first time he employed this equation, it remains an oversimplification. What he fails, or perhaps refuses, to factor in is the element of irony, wit, or humor that makes it all palatable, or if that is too...