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"  Once a popular school couple, two well-to-do middle-aged Jamaicans square off in a restaurant: He, now a British-educated lawyer who&amp;#039;s returned home with an Irish bride, seeks some kind of reconciliation; she greets him with the implacable hauteur of an Egyptian queen...then ends up helping him bury his mother and seeing to it that his foolish young Deidra doesn&amp;#039;t purchase a mortifying wardrobe for life on the \u00ADisland. A roadside \u00ADflower seller whose mother and step\u00ADfather ran him off two years ago at age 11 dreams of the \u00ADgovernor- general&amp;#039;s wife rolling down the window of her Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud and inviting him to live in her home. In 22 \u00ADstories that range across the whole of island \u00ADsociety, Jamaican author Lorna Goodison, who teaches writing at the University of Michigan, gives us a matchless \u00ADmosaic \u00ADportrait of a rapidly vanishing post\u00ADcolonial time and place in By Love \u00ADPossessed (Amistad)\u2014a \u00ADperfect \u00ADcomplement to her evocative, widely \u00ADadmired \u00ADmemoir about her family&amp;#039;s heritage, From Harvey River. The voices come vividly off the page, unerring in their Carib\u00ADbean \u00ADcadence\u2014especially those in thickest patois. A mother tired of her daughter&amp;#039;s coddling of a wedding-shy baby-daddy says, &amp;quot;Me a one independent woman. Me no haffi put up with foolishness from man, as them bother me two time, I run them backside&amp;quot;; a striving wife working in New York City who&amp;#039;s trying to placate her fed-up, wandering\u00AD-eye husband back home writes, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m just trying to make it so that you and me and the children can live a better life and stop having to box feeding outta hog mouth.&amp;quot; Goodison keeps a tight focus in all her stories on the hopes and delusions that sustain rela\u00ADtionships as they warp and buckle \u00ADunder the contingencies of fallible choices and fateful events. In doing so, she taps deeply into universal experience and \u00ADoffers up these lives with brutal honesty and \u00ADpoignant humanism. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a14231/the-vivid-voices-of-by-love-possessed-655903/?click=smart&kw=ist&src=smart&mag=ELM&link=-SMT-ELM>