Relocations of the spirit

the long version

In this collection's opening autobiographical essay entitled "In the Light of Likeness - Transformed," Leon Forrest tells us that he came from a lower-middle-class Negro household on the South Side of Chicago. My father was a bartender on the Santa Fe Railroad and Daddy would read to me and my mother when he was at home. My mother read to me constantly. My great-grandmother lived with us until I was ten, and I used to read the Bible to her, mainly the Old Testament.". Leon Forrest's lifetime love of words shines forth in the essays, articles, and book reviews that comprise this volume. We share his fine-tuned, careful perceptions in essays on the moment of epiphany in the black Baptist church, on Michael Jordan, on Toni Morrison's novel, Sula, on William Faulkner, on Billie Holiday, on the sculptor Richard Hunt, among many others. Book reviews address James Baldwin's Just Above My Head, Joyce Carol Oates' Son of the Morning, Rita Mae Brown's Six on One, and The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges. In each, we learn something new, about literature, about life, about ourselves . The pieces in Relocation of the Spirit traverse twenty years in American culture. Leon Forrest was there as witness - and we are wiser for his observations.