My Mother and Mitch

Part Two includes the short stories “My Mother and Mitch,” “Chicago Heat,” “Bourbon for Breakfast,” “Victoria,” “Sketch,” “Innocence,” and “Five Years Ago.” The story “Innocence” (2000) combines terse declarative Hemingwayesque rhythm with a magical realism where dreams and reality merge (similarly to Reflex and Bone Structure as well as many of the poems included in the volume). “Chicago Heat,” wherein the concurrent horror and humor of African American experience rings painfully true—so many complications that death is not necessarily a prioritized development but rather just one more aggravation thrown on the daily mountain of life’s obstacles—unfoldes as a one-sided phone call. “My Mother and Mitch” centers of 15-year-old Tommy who lived in a Chicago apartment with his divorced mother, Jayne.