SOURCE: A review of Bodies of Water, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 11, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 317-18.

In the following review, Frost applauds the characterization and style of Bodies of Water.

A nun avenges seventy-five years of abuse by torching her family's Winnebago; a black woman bleaches herself into a checkerboard sideshow freak; a Vietnam vet wearing a hat of yesterday's news wanders in a forest of shell-shocked men: such is Michelle Cliff's landscape of fragmented souls in her short story collection, Bodies of Water.

Jamaican-born Cliff has shifted her focus from the West Indian setting of her outstanding novel No Telephone to Heaven (1980) to America. Just as Cliff herself has relocated to and "adopted" the U.S., her characters move as visitors in a strange land, not quite at ease with their surroundings or understanding their circumstances. The ten stories in Bodies of Water show remarkable...