Currents
Subtitle
Poems
Winner of the American Book Award.
These poems explore American identity and the powers of myth, faith, doubt and the environment, and the music of these poems resonate with strains of the English, Spanish and Diné languages. Louis, who has worked as a construction worker and electrician, moves fluently between the literal and symbolic dimensions of work, as he writes in the poem "Electricity": "Any laborer gathered for a tear-out/ agrees the pleasure of opening walls/ is the view of what's no longer behind."
Bio
Bojan Louis earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing degree at Arizona State University in 2009. He is currently an instructor for the ASU College of Integrative Sciences and Arts and serves as poetry editor for RED INK International Journal.
Praise for this book
'Currents' is charged and luminous under 'butane flame dawn.' Bojan Louis 'stickframesnightmares' into song — in attempt to heal and jolt awake stories in blisteringholler 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 Hózhó.
Sherwin Bitsui
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 Lewis 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
