Twelve brief fictional statements reflecting on the experience of young Haitian-American women. “When I am walking in the streets of Brooklyn, I feel like I am walking in a curve, back to the past...I imagine everyone walking in a curve toward and away from each other, in and out of each other’s life. We are all part of this Coriolis effect, I say. We are the wind and ocean currents that move one another from joy to happiness and back to pain.”

In 1999 I had the pleasure of working with a poem by Edwidge Danticat for the Hungry Midnight Broadside Series. It was a poem about writing, beautifully crafted and colored, and it contained one word with an accented “e”. I set the poem in Bernhard Gothic, and not having an accented “e” available, I used an ordinary “e”. While signing the edition Danticat, with a black pen, carefully added the accent to all 90 copies. Later, in immediate response to my inquiry, she sent a series of twelve short pieces of prose inspired by lessons in an English-as-a-second-language workbook, “The Coriolis Effect”. One again I was delighted with her work. —G.S.