There is an incantatory grandeur to the poetic prose work of the
Bronx-born, Jamaican-rooted writer Thomas
Glave, whose hefty short story/novelette collection Whose Song?
has been heralded by the appearance of his work over the past decade in
such disparate anthologies as Men on Men 6, Best American Gay Fiction
3 and Children of the Night: Best Short Stories by Black
Writers.
A lot
of well-deserved "bests," indeed. Where to start the praise for these
nine sturdy stories? There's the title story, a terrible telling of a
woman's rape. The opening story, "Accidents," is a searing
descent into a man's sad madness. "Commitment" is a gentle lament for
one black man who loses
another to marriage. Then there's "Flying," a rueful story of love not
meant to be; "The Pit," a
wailing keening and dissection of bloody politics; and "Their Story," an
elegy for love found late in the lives
of two men. All six are sublime.
Every story, in fact, is worthy of praise, with their gay voices and
male voices, white voices and women's voices, black voices and straight
voices. Glave's perfect pitch for tone and character, cadence
and idiom, is remarkable. His ability to express the most brutal of
images with exquisite lyric courage is fierce and
astonishing. His work isn't light entertainment, but it will captivate
any smart reader.
-- Richard Labonté
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