Evil Corn

This collection of hard-edged prose poems takes no prisoners. Louis walks the tightrope between the sacred and the profane with humor, anger, and compassion, all dispensed with a startling clarity of vision. These poems, written from 1999 to 2004 derive from the poet's self-imposed exile in the rural deadlands of southwestern Minnesota. An Ellis Press book.

“Like fresh voices of any era, Adrian C. Louis’s work requires a second look; the poems are often outside the comfort zone of what is currently stylish or “in.” He is daring, but I don’t really think he is reckless. He has created a persona, a speaker who looks squarely at the world and who processes what he sees through a sensibility that can be gently comic, severely satirical, outrageously iconoclastic, and sometimes disarmingly self-revealing. The voice, which sounds so nonchalant and casual at times, always manages a musical intensity. The way Whitman’s voice did. Or Allen Ginsberg’s at his best. There is consistently a wry and forgiving smile curling through even his most cantankerous poems. Adrian C. Louis is an original and untamable genius.”

“Adrian C. Louis is a one-man wrecking crew who will change the face of poetry until we all wake up and honor him. No poet does what he does. No poet attempts what he attempts. His poetry is everything we were educated to turn our backs on because of the fear of facing American truths. His visions and choice of words are rhythmic, defiant, and timeless.”

ME AND SIMON SEND SMOKE SIGNALS ON THE GREAT AND GASEOUS INTERNET
	.
	ME.
“Hey dog, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I had a dream you were in the other night. Yeah, I know it's weird. I dreamed that you and I were sitting in a bar and you were trying to get me to drink and I kept saying no, and finally I started drinking and got shit-faced. Then we staggered down this dirt road to an old run-down motel, a puke-smelling dump like I stayed in on the outskirts of downtown Gallup one week many moons ago. We walked into the motel room and visible from the doorway was the bathroom. The tub was full of water and there was a young Indian girl, maybe 15 or 16 totally submerged in the water—dead, and we both ran away from there like chicken-shit drunks. I woke up shivering. That's about all I can now recall of the dream, but it was very strange and kinda scary. I don't know what it means, cuz.”

	SIMON.
“Yeah, that’s strange and scary. Such dreams, such stuff scares the shit out of me. And you hear and see shit like that in and around Gallup, Holbrook, Albuquerque, Vancouver, Rapid City, and Phoenix. Hellholes our land has turned into. I used to be afraid, and still am I guess, to go into Gallup. Now I just pass by fast on the Interstate and don’t look back. Well, look in the rear and side mirrors for the cops! Years ago once walking with a Navajo-Ute guy through a dark and dangerous-looking parking lot outside Milan’s, a dive northside bar across “the Purky,” we stumbled upon a guy with a knife stuck in him. Oh shit, what we gonna do? What am I gonna do? You don’t know what the fuck to do, you just walk away fast muttering, cussing, and checking all the dark spots around you. Shit, man, you don’t why, how, what, or nothing, a kind of panic you can’t just push aside, no way. You get kind of brainless too. Sometimes I think you just end up cussing yourself for walking that way, being there, just being there, you blame yourself, in other words, you know, like it was your fault for crissakes, cussing yourself and the guy with the knife in him, cussing and blaming yourselves for being Indian, geesus.”
from EVIL CORN, Copyright© 2004 by Adrian C. Louis and Simon Ortiz

A SHORT REVIEW FROM "OPEN BOOK"

Evil Corn, by Adrian C. Louis (Ellis Press $18) This at once comic, heart-breaking, and beautiful collection of short prose pieces shows Mr. Louis to be his same clear-eyed, straight-talking, fearless self. An enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute tribe, he has edited Native newspapers and taught on the Pine Ridge Reservation. However 1999 found him needing to take a teaching position at the "College of Corn" in Minnesota -- "But something about the place gives my bones the heebie-jeebies. Left to the sun and rain, this land of quaint squares of dark soil sprouts a bright uniform green from road to road that murders anything natural. This is subjugated land, strangely industrial and rural at the same time." He rents a farmhouse, periodically making the long drive back to the nursing home where his wife is dying of Alzheimer's -- "Sweet, fractured woman,.take these sorrowful dances of ragged memory; take these merciless dandelions, these laughing, yellow songs of toughness mounting weakness." His critical eye spares no one, certainly not himself, and not his fellow teachers, his students, America, even God, who is "senile too. His white beard is caked with Campbell's Chunky Chicken Soup." This is a fierce and gentle book. One of his beloved dogs recently dead, he stands with the other on a frigid Minnesota night -- "We're two old curs, palsied by the foul scent of ghosts, but we are still alive. Despite graveyard blues, despite lonesome boners, we can still snarl and on some ethereal, yet-to-be stolen prairie, our ancestors smirk."

A half-breed Indian, Adrian C. Louis was born and raised in northern NV and is an enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute Tribe. From 1984-97, he taught at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation of SD. Prior to this, Adrian C. Louis edited four Native newspapers, including a stint as managing editor of The Lakota Times and later Indian Country Today. He currently lives a reptilian existence in the cornlands of Minnesota. Since 1999 he has been a professor of English in the MN State University system.

Adrian C. Louis has written ten books of poems including Fire Water World, winner of the 1989 Poetry Center Award from San Francisco State University. He has written two works of fiction: Wild Indians & Other Creatures, a collection of short stories, and Skins, a novel. Skins was produced as a feature film, directed by Chris Eyre, and had its national theatrical release in the summer of 2002. Louis has won various writing awards including a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Bush Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation.

ISBN 0-944024-52-1
Perfect bound
128 pp. $18.
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