By Love Possessed
Stories
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- $199.00
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
These beautifully crafted stories will introduce readers to the fiction of one of our literary bright lights – Lorna Goodison, the internationally renowned poet and award-winning author of the memoir From Harvey River. In sensuous language textured with the cadences of Creole speech, these stories vividly evoke a world where pride, injustice, love, and unexpected changes of fortune leave their mark but cannot extinguish the human spirit.
When her past lover returns to Jamaica with his Irish bride, a successful businesswoman must contend with her old flame’s renewed courtship. A well-known chanteuse with humble beginnings tells a young female reporter the tale of her life’s great turnaround. In the Pushcart Prize-winning story “By Love Possessed,” Goodison reveals the melancholy and resilience of a woman whose illusions about her dream man come to a disturbing and abrupt end.
With warm humour, empathy, and an unsentimental and perceptive eye for the foibles of human relationships, Goodison immerses us into the lives of an unforgettable community of people as they face challenges both intensely private and universally recognizable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Love, pride, loneliness, and poverty are set to the rhythms of Jamaican life in 22 short stories by acclaimed poet and writer Goodison (From Harvey River, a memoir). In "Bella Makes Life," Joseph doesn't know what to make of his wife, Bella, who returns from Brooklyn dressed like a Checker cab and newly obsessed with making money; she's tired of "box feeding outta hog mouth" the lowest level of existence. An ex-Communist prisoner uses breathing exercises learned from a fallen comrade to get through each day, in "For My Comrades Wearing Three-Piece Suits." Anna, in "Mi Amiga Gran," wonders if she'll become a "worthless, bruk-down skettel," living on the street if her mother fails to send the rent money from America. Sylvie, seven months pregnant, questions the ethics of attending church to receive food and clothing she desperately needs, in "God's Help." Wonderfully colorful Jamaican patois is interspersed throughout, reflecting subtle changes of class and origin in each character's voice. Stories of love are overly precious and lack the frank sincerity that Goodison exhibits when writing about poverty, despair, and the illusions we create that can become our salvation or our demise.
