Lorna Goodison’s first book of short stories provides a fine example of the poet and memoirist’s brand of simple storytelling mixed with Jamaican patois. The stories feature characters possessed as much by the spectre of loss as by love. Take the book’s Pushcart Prize–winning title story. Dottie, “tall and skinny and ’dry up,” finds love with a young, handsome man after having resigned herself to single life. When her lover leaves in a show of hyper-masculine pride, Dottie revisits the place where they first met, hoping to see him again; she eventually relinquishes all the other things that once gave her pleasure: her spotless rooming house, her manicured yard.

Even the stories that end happily enough have a haunted aspect. “Jamaica Hope” ends with a long-sought-after engagement, though it comes only after the hold-out, Alphanso, nurses his cousin through a stroke. Alphanso finally proposes to Lilla with the cloud of mortality hanging over him; as one friend says, “Jamaican man married because them tired.”

This collection is not just about love and loss; it’s also about memory and place. Each story, even those set in the Jamaican expat communities in New York, Massachusetts, and B.C., has its heart in the old country, where Goodison herself was born and raised. One of the book’s most striking features is the specificity with which the island nation is portrayed, not just through descriptions of the landscape or the use of Creole slang, but through biting observations of persistent economic and political divisions. “House Colour” introduces us to “DBPDs” (“de brown people dem”) – wealthy, light-skinned Jamaicans who treat their darker-skinned compatriots with disdain. “Henry” depicts child poverty through the eyes of a 12-year-old protagonist who, abandoned by his mother and stepfather, sells flowers on the street and comforts himself with fantasies of rescue and homicide.

Stories that centre on the relationships between former revolutionaries (Marxist, pan-Africanist) now living comfortably among the middle-classes (“The Helpweight,” “Don’t Sit on the Beauty Seat,” “For My Comrades Wearing Three-Piece Suits”) serve as counterpoints to “Bella Makes Life” and “Mi Amiga Gran,” in which families are often dispersed by the need to earn a better living and send remittances back home.

More than just a series of snapshots featuring tender but mundane relationships, Goodison’s masterfully rendered stories offer a real sense of the challenges facing the inhabitants of postcolonial nations both at home and abroad.