Customer Reviews

Woe Shirt: Caribbean Folk Tales

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This book contains 13 short folk tales collected from Paule Barton - originally a Haitian goat herder. They are accompanied by drawings by Norman Lalibene who has captured the spirits of the stories. The stength of this book is that it has kept an oral flavor and oral structure while being sufficiently literary to make the stories easy to read and enjoyable - this is not an easy feat.

In the tales you will see a card-shark outwitted, a man unwilling to make a decision,a duck handler mistrusting a witch, bargains with ghosts ... in short, bits of Caribbean life.

If you enjoy folk tales, give this volume a chance.

These short prose poems are completely startling and odd, unlike most faked suburban surrealism from writer's workshops, these have a rough great edge. I can't quite understand them but I have read them all a hundred times in wonder at their charm, their strangeness, and their hallucinogetic power. I wish they were still in print, as I'd like to teach them.