SOURCE: "Introduction," in The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems by Sherman Alexie, Hanging Loose Press, 1992, p. v.

In the essay below, Kuo describes the wide range of cultural references in Alexie's prose and verse.

Sherman Alexie's territory, as he describes in these forty poems and five stories [in The Business of Fancydancing], ranges from the All-Indian Six-Foot-And-Under Basketball Tournament to ESPN to the politics of geography and family to powwows to Indians "not drinking enough." Alexie's work has escaped the pervasive influence of writing workshops, academic institutions and their subsidized intellect, and has instead focused on reservation and border realities in his eastern section of Washington state.

Central to this landscape inhabited by family, friends, and a wild coterie of reservation cops, seers, Buffalo Bills, Crazy Horses, and of course, fancydancers, is the absence of self-indulgence. The characters in Alexie's work have actual identities whose faces have...