cover image Black Maps -Awp

Black Maps -Awp

David Jauss. University of Massachusetts Press, $27.5 (168pp) ISBN 978-1-55849-033-8

Jauss's collection of nine finely worked stories charts with a reasonable degree of success the tricky shiftings of human life on the brink. The boundaries crossed include a father's madness and a son's silent betrayal of him in ""Glossolalia""; a newsman's sin of omission as he willfully ignores and editorializes a stranger's pain when confronted in a fast-food restaurant (""The Late Man""); a woman's distant acquiescence to a second marriage and her secret ache for a life somehow bypassed (""Beautiful Ohio""); a foster child's confused pairing of his alcoholic mother's slip into detox and his own hidden crime of throwing rocks at the school's windows (""Firelight""). Jauss's strongest writing appears in ""The Bigs,"" narrated in slightly pidgin English by a minor league pitcher from the Dominican Republic who must choose between his wife and child's happiness or his own need to make the majors before he can return to his home country a hero. In ""Freeze,"" a young soldier in Vietnam steps on a mine that fails to explode and finds himself battling with the weight of living with a strange salvation, on borrowed time. Despite a slightly redundant style and themes, the small, sharply seen worlds Jauss creates do much to prove--as the opening quote by Milan Kundera attests--that ""the border beyond which everything loses meaning... is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch."" (June)