Review of TBLWTB - The Edge

To Be Left With the Body
Reviewed by Kevin Scott Hall
EDGE Contributor

To Be Left With the Body is the third in a series of publications issued by AIDS Project Los Angeles and designed to bring attention to the HIV/AIDS crisis among black gay and bisexual men.

It is a crisis that needs to be addressed. According to a 2005 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HIV rates among gay and bisexual black men is more than twice the rate of that for whites, 46% to 21%. Sadly, the rate of infection in recent years has been spiking upwards again.

As Vallerie Wagner puts it in the Foreword to this collection, "As the ’hidden’ face of AIDS became more public -- a black and brown face -- silence, stigma, and denial have become the inevitable result of inequity."

Despite the subject matter, the cumulative effect of the essays, poems and stories presented in this collection creates a tone of feistiness, radical creativity, and a will to not only live, but to transcend the illness (emphasis mine - sgf.)

Read more...here.