A new book of poems
by Adrian C. Louis
Savage Sunsets/ 88 pp.
Available September 2012
ISBN 978-0-9826968-7-3
West End Press
PO Box 27334 • Albuquerque, NM 87125
www.westendpress.org
"A mournful howl and raw elegy, sliced through with the razor-flicked wit of an acerbically world-weary jester, Adrian C. Louis’s Savage Sunsets veers between the sacred and the profane, the terrible and the mundane, the lewd and the transcendent in tautly-welded lines that are both searingly elegant and fiercely plainspoken. Savage Sunsets wrestles with destruction, death, and mortality from a geographical and spiritual landscape degraded by the unrelenting kitsch and trash of American capitalism, even while “faces skyward, we all seek/songs in the whirlwinds/that parch our slow lives.” These poems will cut you. These poems laugh at themselves in the face of Señor Skull. These poems take no bullshit."
-Lee Ann Roripaugh
"There is no one quite like Adrian Louis writing in America today. He is full of grief, for his wife, recently passed away after a twelve year battle for her life, for his people, after two-hundred years of struggle against an oppressor, for life in general, which seems a losing battle. But none of these complaints are what make his poems so great. It is the language brought forth in all its power to express the delicate balance between hope and despair, resignation and the will to fight back that brings the collection to its apex and makes me shudder with delight. These poems will teach us something about life, how fragile and precious it is, how worth fighting for whether you win or lose."
-James Tate
"I've been reading the distinctive poetry of Adrian Louis for more years than either of us cares to remember. In Savage Sunsets there is always an emotional complexity and a passion that I admire. By turns, it is raw, scathing, hilarious, irreverent, reverent, mournful, joyful and tuneful."
-Sam Hamill
Watch a Video trailer for SAVAGE SUNSETS:
http://vimeo.com/45367747