[In the excerpt below, Ricks focuses on Cliff's representation of isolation, alienation, and loss in several stories of Bodies of Water.]

Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid, two writers from the Caribbean islands of Jamaica and Antigua, respectively, have crafted works that expertly and eloquently address themes of isolation, alienation, and loss. Kincaid's novel Lucy and Cliff's collection of short stories Bodies of Water adeptly introduce the life of the "other" navigating the customs, attitudes, and social contracts that define life in America. Included are the anonymous brown women seen on urban streets handling white children; the displaced Vietnam veterans, forced back into a society that no longer welcomes nor accommodates them; or a carnival's self-styled Hottentot Venus.

In Bodies of Water, Michelle Cliff draws from both historical and modern sources to zoom in on the individual as outsider in the United States. Her stories are spare, their rhythm staccato. The details sometimes overlap in stories and offer multilayered passages that are slowly peeled away as the narrative progresses.

In "Columba," the only story to take place in the Caribbean, the story's unnamed narrator relates the tale of Columba, a fourteen-year-old sold by his mother as a house servant, to Charlotte, a middle-aged woman of means. Charlotte shares her home with her one-time lover Juan Antonio, a Cuban expatriate. Living frugally in dilapidated splendor, Charlotte spends most of her time in bed, in a room that reeks with the smell of urine, bay rum, and wet sugar from the tamarind balls she favors.

Although forbidden to talk to the servant, the narrator and Columba develop a friendship during Charlotte and Juan Antonio's absences. Columba is hungry for news from the States and asks and asks the narrator, a former New Jersey resident, pointed questions that show his infatuation with American pop culture. Questions like: "every detail about Duke Ellington, Marilyn Monroe, Stagger Lee, Jackie Wilson, Ava Gardner, Billy the Kid, Dinah Washington, Tony Curtis, Spartacus, John Wayne." And "What is life like for a Black man in America? An ordinary Black man, not a star?" The narrator, who has lived in a cloistered bourgeois community, does not know how to answer him.

Columba has found a 1930s Rover on Charlotte's property, located off in the fields, that is now populated with doves. It is there that he spends his free time, sitting amongst the birds. When Charlotte needs to repair her car, she remembers the abandoned Rover in the field and sends Juan Antonio for a replacement part. Juan Antonio chops his way through the overgrowth to Columba's sanctuary only to return with the tale of the doves. Charlotte, pleased with the news that once again her property has shown itself to be full of bounty, orders Columba to kill, pluck, dress, and freeze the doves. "Columba" ends with "'Sorry, man, you hear?' he said softly as he wrung the neck of the next one. He was weeping heavily. Heaving his shoulders with the effort of execution and grief. I sat beside him in silence, my arm around his waist. This was not done."

In "A Hanged Man," Cliff uses two historical details to tell the story of a slave's flight to freedom. One is the story of a man who hung himself in a building used to punish slaves. These whipping houses, as they were called, were typically situated along the periphery of the plantation so that when northern Abolitionists came south to investigate reports of the owners' brutality to their slaves, they would not find the physical evidence. The second is the story of Peg-leg Joe, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, which is used to relate how a slave follows the tracks of a human foot and the circle of a peg to freedom. This unseen companion in front of her and the lifeless presence of the hung man behind propel her in her journey.

"A Woman Who Plays Trumpet Is Deported," is dedicated to Valaida Snow, a concentration-camp survivor who played the trumpet. It begins with abrupt, terse prose, its rhythm analogous to a solo trumpet riff. "A woman. A black woman. A black woman musician. A black woman musician who plays trumpet. A bitch who blows. A lady trumpet-player. A woman with chops."

In language that is piercing, clear, and fluid, the story follows the progress of this woman musician from America to Europe. Happy for the solitude and the opportunity to play, the woman is eventually picked up on a Copenhagen street in 1942 and lined up with other women and children with her trumpet clasped to her side.

The story of the book's title, "Bodies of Water" opens with Jess, an older woman fishing on a frozen lake. She is singing to attract the fish and to keep herself awake. Recently widowed by her lover and companion, Jess ultimately reflects on a childhood incident that continues to haunt her.

Michelle Cliff's writing whooshes like the breeze through autumn leaves, making the air crackle and the leaves quiver. Her stories are sometimes rich in details, other times painfully bare but always full of humanity, feeling, and truth. Cliff successfully weaves the divergent themes of oppression and empowerment, with all of the many shadings in between, into an enriching literary endeavor.