Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Whiting Award winner Allen's distinctive and potent debut, the novel Rails under My Back (1999), aligned him with the likes of Toni Morrison and John Edgar Wideman, and his first short story collection is equally powerful. Profoundly interiorized and subtly otherworldly, each tale is electric with the rising tension that proceeds stormy weather; each tale is a veritable boxing match, as characters trapped in impossible situations feint, jab, and retreat. A number of tales are relayed through the questioning mind of various characters named Hatch. Young Hatch watches his mother like a hawk, surmises that his grandmother is a phony, and spies on his brother, Cosmo. There is much to mull over about race, poverty, language, lies, desperation, and liberation as Allen assembles just the right sensuous and psychological details to bring into focus a city resembling Chicago and a brooding southern setting. Extreme cold and heat, family strife, troubles over money and sex, all is in play, all is mysterious, dangerous, and urgent. With pitch-perfect dialogue and centrifugal force, Allen's stories pull you down into the misery of the daily hustle and spit you out on the lonely crossroads between reality and myth, where the archetypes roam and trust is but a dream.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Allen melds gritty urban life and magical realism in his first collection (after the novel Rails Under My Back). At times, the combination works--in the title story, full of contemporary slang, a character grows wings, but instead of ethereal white feathers, they are dried up and brown and crusty, like some fried chicken wings. In It Shall Be Again, more of a prose poem than a story, characters open their mouths to catch a thick dirty rain of pennies. Some stories lack cohesiveness, and although Allen isn't attempting to write traditional pieces, the stories would benefit from coherency. Even in the weaker entries, though, Allen delivers striking images--two brothers chewing on wads of toilet paper, a scalp that looks like watermelon meat chewed down to the rind. It is these images, rather than particular events or characters, that leave the strongest impressions. Though scattered cultural references and spot-on dialogue root these stories mainly in the present, they have a distinct feeling of being outside of time. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Chicago native Allen, author of the acclaimed novel Rails Under My Back and a poet and professor of African American literature and creative writing (Queen's Coll., New York), here offers a collection of ten short stories set mostly in inner-city Chicago and the rural South. Allen writes in a somewhat experimental style that favors edgy poetic language and occasional surrealism over conventional plot and a linear story line. Among his mostly angry, violent characters, there is someone named Hatch who appears in several stories, but as a different person each time. These stories don't try to meet us half way; they jolt us like a blast of rap heard from a passing car, and it takes a leap of the imagination to make sense of them. This collection will probably be more at home in a library's African American literature collection than on the shelf with popular fiction.--Leslie Patterson, Brown Univ. Lib., Providence, RI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The lives of black Americans, shadowed by the surreal and shot through with violence, are the focus in these ten stories from poet and novelist Allen (Rails Under My Back, 2000). Violence erupts in the third sentence of "Same," when Glory Hope Lincoln severs her husband's penis in revenge for his "wandering eye," an act inspired by Jesus, "the only white man she liked." The story is about her son Lincoln Roosevelt Lincoln, who has inherited his father's sex drive and his mother's determination in planning the seduction of a grieving widow; she and her husband had been fans of Lincoln's hugely successful war-porn novels. The story shows Allen's strengths and weaknesses: It's compellingly readable yet wildly undisciplined, with a messy ending. Violence is also the backdrop to Lee Christmas's life in "Shimmy." Back in Mississippi, before Lee moved north and made his fortune, his mother, a devout Christian, murdered his abusive father before killing herself. Up north Lee encounters the paranormal, a ghost making love to his wife. Later, in another messy ending, the hitherto powerful Lee is bested by the psychic power of a seven-year-old midget. In the title story, the power belongs to the white cops who bust a black turnstile-jumper; there's a too-long wait before the sight of a prisoner with wings marks a sharp turn to the surreal, while in the muddled "The Green Apocalypse" the power belongs to a demonic teenager. The other memorable stories are "Bread and the Land" (a child tries to figure out adult duplicity) and "The Near Remote" (police superintendent and unhelpful civilian witness in a power struggle). All these stories are spiced up by terrific dialogue: Allen would make a fine playwright. Only in "Mississippi Story" is the dialogue deliberately bland, to contrast with an unresolved racial fury pulsing beneath the surface. A striking talent ill at ease with the short-story form. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
