I ONLY MAKE LOVE IN MONTREAL

A volume of short stories and poems explores the vitality—and occasional brutality—of the human condition.

The exceptional always arises in the midst of the mundane. That’s one of the themes in Ramah’s stories, which document moments of confusion and epiphany on the island of Trinidad and Tobago and beyond. In “Dogla,” a group of boys comes to resent the mean older woman who has the best fruit trees but refuses to share. During a nighttime raid, one of the boys lights her fig trees on fire, though when she dies a couple of years later, he realizes he has complex feelings about the woman. In “The Abattoir,” a boy who feeds the pigs at the slaughterhouse returns on Saturday to see them butchered. In “It Is Not a Poodle,” a man moves to Vancouver and dives into the gay dating scene, but a potential connection is ruined by his confusion about a dog’s breed. The poems—there are only three of them—are short and have an almost folkloric sensibility. “Live,” in its entirety, goes: “Live Evil / For Evil is Live. / And the Devil has Lived.” Ramah’s prose, while generally straightforward, nevertheless invites readers to search for deeper meaning. Here, the boy who set fire to the fig trees describes the day the woman died: “The sun was shining. The sky was Caribbean blue. Like any normal day. Then, out of the blue, the rain started to fall. Everyone in the village came out to look at the sky. The rain looked like falling diamonds. Everyone waited for the news.” The six stories do not have traditional narrative arcs, and several of them, like “The Abattoir,” are essentially vignettes. Some are more experimental. “When Black Men Kiss” mixes the narrator’s homoerotic awakening with a reimagining of the Stations of the Cross as images from chattel slavery. While the writing is often powerful, the tales never cohere into larger statements, and readers will frequently be left scratching their heads. The same is true for the book as a whole. Just six stories and three poems, totaling 83 pages? Ending on an enigmatic quote about Montreal? The point, whatever it was supposed to be, must have gotten lost in the rain.

A sometimes engaging but often confusing collection of fiction and poetry.