Currents

Author: Bojan Louis

Publisher: BkMk Press (2017)

"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

"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

Winner of the American Book Award