The Pecos Poet


Home

The Sacred Clown’s Modern West Trilogy, by Rick Voorhees

The Sacred Clown’s Modern West Trilogy by Rick Voorhees. Irreverent. Barbed. Subversive. Humane. Myths, absurdities, and deities collide — history never stood a chance. Satire with teeth — and a heart.
Buy on Amazon — Paperback & Kindle A novel in three parts
#43 on Substack’s Rising Fiction list Paperback $15.99 · Kindle $6.99 Free with Kindle Unlimited Pecos Poet Publishing

The motif

The gods have never been subtle, and neither is the truth.

The sacred clown does everything in reverse, laughs where others bow, and tells the truth nobody else will say out loud. This book works the same way. It mocks what passes for sacred so you can see what actually is.

A self-aware narrator breaks the fourth wall, Odin and the old Plains powers trade notes on the living, and history gets told the way the people who lived it remember it.

Cover of The Sacred Clown’s Modern West Trilogy by Rick Voorhees

Three stories, one volume

Inside the book

Part One

Rez Ball Gods

Elbowoods, 1942. The best team North Dakota ever saw plays by the rules and loses the trophy to a team that didn’t. Sixty years, one flooded homeland, and a pair of half brothers later, the trophy comes home.

Part Two

Sitting Bull’s Mutual Funds

Sitting Bull dies with his integrity intact, betrayed by Buffalo Bill and Major McLaughlin. A century later, a council member chasing the chief’s supposed five-billion-dollar portfolio meets his Waterloo.

Part Three

The Pecos Poet

A dharma bum sells “Free Poetry for Texans” on the Santa Fe Plaza, wins a Texas election, and loses it all when his name turns out to be Buddah, not Bubba.

“I spent five decades chasing the Ghost Dance across two continents — through the Amazon’s uncontacted tribes, through the cloud forests of Oaxaca, back to the Sicangu Lakota on Rosebud, where I helped to bring the true buffalo back home. I know what it is to carry sacred history into a world bent on erasing it. The Sacred Clown’s Modern West Trilogy carries that same weight, but it dares to laugh while doing it. That laughter is its own kind of medicine. Voorhees writes with the same instinct I’ve spent my life chasing: the old stories never actually left, they just found new machinery to haunt — the internet, the multiverse, the news cycle. This book knows exactly where those ghosts went.”
Michael Stuart Ani, author of The Ghost Dance: An Untold History of the Americas

The author

Rick Voorhees

Rick Voorhees grew up on the Standing Rock, Rosebud, and Fort Berthold reservations, in a childhood full of basketball, dance celebrations, and friends for life. The people of Little Eagle gave him the name White Butterfly, Kimímela Ská, and he later taught eighth grade there before moving on to Standing Rock Community College.

After an award-winning career in higher education scholarship, he turned to fiction: mythic satire set in the modern West. He writes and photographs from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Rick Voorhees

The Imagist

The West, seen backward

@pecospoetimagist on Instagram

Infrared turns summer trees white and skies strange. It is the clown’s eye in a camera: everything reversed, and somehow truer.

Join the Pecos Poet on Substack

New stories, infrared photographs, and dispatches from the Santa Fe Plaza.