Josh Garrett-Davis carries a lot of baggage in Ghost Dances, not the least of which is the hyphenated name he retook after years of emotional struggle with his parents' divorce and subsequent upbringing by his lesbian mother and her partner. Fortunately, he maintains a healthy sense of humor in his meditative memoir of "proving up on the Great Plains." His free-spirited and socially conscious parents abandoned their liberal establishment upbringings in the 1970s and took off for South Dakota, where they eventually married. Their wedding reception says much about the origins of Garrett-Davis's difficultly finding a comfortable place in the world: "With their spliff and a six-pack, they celebrated with their two witnesses in the city park," he writes, "and hung off the back of the same bronze Dodge that, years after the whole thing fell apart, would overheat in Quinn outside the Two Bit Saloon."
Ghost Dances riffs on many facets of the land of "amber waves of grain" from the apocalyptic American Indian ceremony of the title to the extinction of the bison and the long history of transient inhabitants of a "monotonous landscape" where a "latent fury" is constantly "ready to unleash a tornado or a shrill blizzard or a boiling, sulfury geyser if punctured." A lifelong fan of punk rock, Garrett-Davis enriches his memoir with a kind of mixtape of the times; even his schoolboy friends are differentiated by their music tastes--a Geto Boys lover here, a Danzig fan there, an older brother into Depeche Mode and a whole prairie of Christian "death metal" followers. --Bruce Jacobs