Hicks, a citizen of the Osage Nation, has written a kick-ass collection of fiction. The story details a night of dances and the sudden violence that occurs outside a three-star Ponca casino. This story expands and contracts, its use of time finely consolidated. I love how Hicks’s work interweaves the myriad aspects of Native life, specifically the Osage, but I can relate to the differing characters and cultural makeup of a community. The cousins/siblings who live off the reservation, the ones who stayed and try to ignore the people from high school, the troublemakers, gangsters, and drug dealers. Everyone enacting their mode of survival and existence. Violence is a part of life for a lot of Native people, for a lot of non-Native people, for people everywhere and it’s refreshing to see how it is survived in this wonderful story.
Collected in A Calm and Normal Heart: Stories, The Unnamed Press 2022
A Personal Anthology 