"Well-versed jazz fans will recognize the title of Sanchez's book-length poem as something sax and flute virtuoso Rahsaan Roland Kirk said. That musical association is appropriate: this is a musical poem, cast in the voices of a woman, her half-brother, his mother, their father, and, in the last of its four sections, ancestors, including distant African forebears. The story the poem's seven-line stanzas (rhymed ababbcc and appearing one per page) unfold is one of wayward men and familially faithful women. Father cut out when the son was little, and the son, when a teenager, left to pursue a faster life in New York City. But the son, who, we gather from hints in the imagery, is gay, has become mortally ill--with AIDS, further images hint, though neither sickness nor sexuality is named. His crisis brings the family voices together, and Sanchez's brilliant imagery, more evocative with every reading, makes them resound with life and emotion. The last stanza, in which ancestral voices call the son's spirit home to Africa, is designated 'To be sung.' The whole poem sings and would make a splendid theatrical performance--with music." --Booklist