SOURCE: “Gayl Jones's Oraliterary Explorations,” in African American Review, Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 141-45.

In the following review of Liberating Voices and White Rat, Wilentz states that while Jones's academic writing may be flawed, her commitment to first-person narrative has allowed her to discuss aspects of identity and experience perviously unexplored.

Gayl Jones is one of the most forceful voices in contemporary African American literature, but until recently her major works were out of print. Her violent use of language and sexual/scatological images have challenged notions of what women write, and when first published, critical reception was based on shock. Acceptance of the multivocal nature of Black women's experience as well as a poststructuralist age which is more open to the language of fragmentation have led to renewed interest in Jones's work in critical circles. And now her 1977 collection White Rat has been reissued by Northeastern University...