"The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven"

For me, it was a fight just to understand what was going on. The poetry was too abstract/confusing for my taste.

Summary:

The Spokane Indian Reservation is filled with stories. This poetic collection captures just 22 short stories of the comedic yet tragic lives of people battling for hope and survival in a world defined by race and status.

Verdict: 2.5/10

After The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (a novel by Sherman Alexie which I loved), I expected more from this. I expected an understandable narrative and got a jumbled timeline instead. I expected the story to follow one or two people - by the end, I had no idea who was talking or how the stories connected. I expected to learn about the plight of modern Native Americans, which I got in part... but the harsh reality was overly intermixed with dream sequences and visions to the point that I couldn't tell what was "real" and what was imagined.

Poetry is an art form that I am still learning to appreciate. And like art, there are varying levels of realism from still life to abstract. Where A House On Mango Street is George Seurat's Sunday in the Park, this book is Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory. Both use similar techniques, bringing together small details and individual pieces to build a bigger picture/theme. But like Dali's artwork, I feel lost reading this.

I felt as if I need an explanatory guide to understand any of this. Maybe I'm trying to bring too much logic into the poetic, but I just really didn't connect with this one. The themes were important ones: race, trauma, sexism, addiction. So I appreciate what he's trying to do... but I didn't get it.