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114 the minnesota review of the late seventies, has allowed herself the luxury of providing commentary on her work and writings from the early sixties on. As a result, the book gains not only a certain formal coherency—in the sense that the works fall together in formally coherent ways, the way paintings in a retrospective exhibition might—but a narrative and historical coherency as well. This book is not merely an anthology of various "actions" undertaken in the name of art (which is, I think, what a collection of Acconci's performance pieces would turn out ot look like), but a lifelong art action undertaken in the name of women's liberation and, in the end, personal freedom. As a result, More Than Meat Joy is a powerfully instructive book, detailing the difficulties as well as the triumphs of a politically engaged art. As a work of art in its own right, it seems to me as historically persuasive and timely a document as any around today. Also to its endless credit—and this is not something one can say about very many works of fine art —it is readily available and even affordable (the address ofDocumentext is Box 638, New Paltz, N.Y. 12561). This availability and affordability, it goes without saying, is a direct function of its historical sense of its self. HENRY SAYRE John Domini, Bedlam. Fiction International, 1981. 135 pp. $6.95 (paper). Harold Jaffe, Mourning Crazy Horse. Fiction Collective, 1982. 211 pp. $5.95 (paper). Natalie L. M. Petesch, Soul Clap Its Hands and Sing. South End Press, 1 98 1 . 206 pp. $6.50 (paper). In a dark time, the desire to create playful and harmonious works of art is problematic. In a world where torture, rape, and oppression are all too common, of what do the singers make their songs? Domini, Jaffe, and Petesch choose to make their subjects violence, despair, and rage. Unified and playful, Jaffe's work abounds with characters undergoing transformations into one another and into new versions of themselves . Petesch's stories are often insightful, but the characters remain in the stories where they began. Unlike Jaffe, she does not play with violence, making the violence against women in her work seem to happen to people like ourselves. Domini's stories fall between the two extremes as he creates extraordinary characters, such as devil growing bored with torturing sinners, and a jellylike creature who turns to iron as she finds herself in music. Domini's stories don't have the dense interconnections that Jaffe's transformations provide, but then Domini's world is bedlam; connections are hard to make. Despite the violence and pain they see, these three writers are optimistic in their different ways. With Jaffe, Domini, and Petesch, there are different reasons for hope. Jaffe points to something résiliant in us. Crazy Horse can be murdered, but when conditions are favorable, renewal is possible. In "Mourning Crazy Horse," the narrator quotes from a field guide: "Certain of these species have a wild vitality, a kind of plant patience and persistence that has brought their kind through countless weather cycles and natural disasters. Most of them are profligate with seed .... Some will lie dormant, awaiting a favorable season, for a century or even longer." Jaffe demonstrates this vitality in his stories. In the first story, a man dies, refusing to cry out for help, while Rosen, the humpbacked Jewish dwarf, watches. Next, in the title story, we see a petroglyh on a cliff wall of "a humpbacked shaman dancing, playing a wooden flute." This appears to be Rosen as we see him in the final story, playing a harmonica in the badlands of Crazy Horse. In Mourning Crazy Horse, people have a part in one another. They become one another, as they take on one another's characteristics. In a central story, the man who kills Rosen at 115 reviews Christmastime says, "Indians are related to the lost tribes ofZion. The Jew as Indian." It's as if Crazy Horse were being killed again when Rosen dies. No explanation is necessary when Rosen comes back from the dead; his death is as allegorical as is his...

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