Currents

by Bojan Louis

It takes only the ring of the opening poems in Currents to realize this book does exactly what one hopes a first book will do, bring alive a new, original voice. It’s a voice Bojan Louis not only sustains, but builds, the way, say, a young Sonny Rollins, might shape and vary a singular solo that flows through song after song: raw, kinetic, authentic, a poetry in which language has in common with music the visceral feel of the breathing body behind it.
—Stuart Dybek, Streets in Their Own Ink, Paper Lantern

Bojan Louis’ Currents is piercing and polyglot. From the first stark poem, spoken in the voice of a hard-living construction worker in Alaska who regards the sea and thinks of Jonah (“bowel-held / and undigested”), to the last in the voice of Xipe Totec (Nahuatl for Our Lord The Flayed One, as Louis’ useful notes tell us), we are swept into a fierce and sublime poetry, part incantatory vision, part caustic critique of government cruelty and injustice toward indigenous peoples. By turns a protest of the earth’s poisoning, and as in the title poem, a prayer offered in the Diné “tradition and knowing,” what Currents crystallizes in these taut poetic concentrates goes straight to our souls: “The prayer, the prayed to, the offering / and the offered; / the bent back and the harvest.”
—Cynthia Hogue, In June the Labyrinth

Currents is charged and luminous under “butane flame dawn.” Bojan Louis “stick-frames nightmares” into song— in attempt to heal and jolt awake stories in blistering holler above his homelands of pot-holed desert highways and reservation borders. An electrician by trade, Diné poet Bojan Louis’ debut is a multilingual ceremony of electricity, earth and memory, where brokenness is the ground from which our stories continue reaching for Hózhǫ́.
­ —Sherwin Bitsui, Shapeshift, Flood Song

Genres: Poetry, Literary Fiction

72 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is actually a re-read for me. These poems are, as the book's title suggests, charged and full of light. The meditative voice is somber and insightful. The images are stark and brave. Some of my favorite lines:

The stars went off and on, as if wired
by to-hell-with-it electricians.

There is no other bad than what I say's bad.

Parents gone the way of worms.

[J.S.A. Lowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book to read and reread, and then reread again. The subtle achievements here are dizzying, and I'm not at all sure how the author manages to be both so formally precise and at the same time so raw and unexpurgated; the trilingual control of diction and syntax is modernist but the unhesitating observation of political realities is postmodern: pre-biocide, post-carbon, mid-apocalypse. These tercets come at you, come for you, won't let you hide:

The morning roundup's
a current leaking to earth
without interruption or fault.

Above busted street lights the sun
buzzes to a cuffed line of deportees;
the sheriff's imbalanced authority.

There are currents of electricity, water, family and lineage; currents that are repetitive cycles from within which the poet labors, not to escape but to transform. There's as much Rimbaud and Baudelaire in here as Levine or Levis, and plenty of rich earthy dirt to chew on. Finally, Simon Ortiz is right about the endnotes, lyrical in their own right ("awareness makes sure you are current"). This is a real book of real poems and you shouldn't fucking miss it.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 3 out of 5]

While it certainly had its charms and vulnerabilities, the book was ripe with this concurrent dynamic of bodily frustrations and sexual inability. There were not-so-minor tones of misoginy mixed with the general theme of rage within the book.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection I’ll come back to—rich and dense in the best way, this collection thrums with electricity (a bad pun?! But also appropriate!). Gorgeous and direct; I really enjoyed this.

[Sara Sams · Rating 5 out of 5]

American book award winner.

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much here. The triptych on Arpaio, Seagal, and Brewer is priceless