Face (review)

"It is difficult to forgive the poem / That spends its time in search of the next joke" (73). If Sherman Alexie means to ask our forgiveness in this conspicuous footnote to his new poem "Comedy Is Simply a Funny Way of Being Serious," he needn't bother; anyone who knows his work and has come back for more probably enjoys his "Funny Grief" (30). Face, his first collection of poems in nine years, blends humor and sadness through a wide range of topics—including insomnia, circumcision, basketball, marriage, father-son relationships, and the intertwined fates of bees and humans—in a collection that is self-conscious, sarcastic, sincere, and clearly written for Native and non-Native readers. Face is, in short, vintage Alexie.

Alexie dubs this poetry "ragged and rugged formalism," and rightly so; his relatively complicated forms, like the sonnet, villanelle, sestina and terza rima, seem purposefully rough around the edges (128). He confounds poetic form as often as he adheres to it, interspersing footnotes, stories, expository prose, and even multiple-choice quizzes with his verse. While some of these intertextual escapades are more compelling than others, Alexie is always entertaining; he fearlessly puns, curses, talks dirty, misquotes, and directly challenges his readers. Even if his sophomoric toilet humor and brash sex talk are, well, in your face (he declares himself the "Mayor of Masturbation City" at one point), Alexie never succumbs to juvenile delinquency for long. With few exceptions, he is able to successfully combine low-brow laughs and serious content. This can lead to some surprising trajectories. In "March Madness," a missed shot initiates musings on the "Shakespearean comedy / And tragedy of the NCAA," which provides a segue to emotional couplets about the narrator's (presumably Alexie's) deceased father (138–39). Other poems, like "Ten Thousand Fathers," skip the low-brow and are just plain lovely.

Although Alexie disdains the label "regionalist" (he warns, "once they call you a regionalist, your career is fucked"), readers of western American literature will notice familiar themes and issues (103). "Vilify" (a villanelle, of course) interrogates the tendency to mythologize the West—and often, by extension, American history—in monuments like Mt. Rushmore. Animal studies scholars will also find provocative material in this collection. Echoing comments in interviews in which he speculates that the universality of suffering might bridge racial divides, Alexie imagines what mosquito mourning would look like in "Volcano." Through the opening poem, "Avian Nights," Alexie wonders "What is the difference between / Birds and us, between their pain and our pain?" (13). Alexie's post-9/11 humanism now seems to include an interspecies ethic.

In keeping with his disavowal of tribalism, Alexie's "attack" on Elizabeth Cook Lynn in "Tuxedo with Eagle Feathers" condemns her "ugly fundamentalism" and defends cross-cultural hybridity (80). Since Alexie was "reborn inside the collision of cultures" brought about by colonialism, he does not see his autobiographical writing as a betrayal of the tribal sovereignty she advocates (80–81). Alexie wants to "claim all of it," his Native heritage and his non-Native literary influences, even if that means "(imperfectly) mimic[king] white masters" (82). While the poems in Face may be imperfect, they are not mimicry. Alexie remains one of a kind.