The techniques pointed out most frequently by critics include the book's dramatic monologues, its vignettes and its staccato prose style full of shocking images and metaphors. Phillips carefully selects images of disease, of loss, of physical and emotional pain. In addition, her highly-crafted style requires the attention due to poetry. The stories which concern the dispossessed — strippers, prostitutes, pornographers, dope addicts, and murderers — are told in the first-person in a series of startling images. Phillips takes a fairly ordinary plot and skewers it by sifting it through the highly-charged consciousness of an outsider. Such a technique results in a stylized voice, bits of street slang textured with a carefully sculpted literary style.

Phillips is never interested in social realism in her "outsider" stories. The working methods of the oral historian or of a street-wise writer like Nelson Algren do not concern her so much as the...