Elegy Written On A Crowded Street

(Paperback)

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Description

A young black woman, Mary Anderson, is faced with second-degree murder charges for killing her boyfriend in self-defence. He was a police informant in the Fillmore district - the Harlem of the West Coast. April Jones owns Universal Jail, a bail bond agency whose motto is 'Your Freedom is Our Job'. April gets Mary out of jail - but that's when her troubles with the police truly begin. Peter Plate drives a poetic narrative of gentrification, conscience, good clothes and bad cops in a world where there is only one choice - life, or the everlasting proximity of death.

Reviews

[Plate] can write, and he certainly knows his terrain ... try to catch him at a spoken word event or reading, where he often recounts his stories from memory. It's clear they are intertwined with his life. San Francisco Chronicle

Author Bio

Named a Literary Laureate of San Francisco in 2004,PETER PLATE taught himself to write fiction during eight years spent squatting in abandoned buildings. He is the author of many novels, beginning withBlack Wheel of Anger(1990) and continuing through his seven neo-noir "psychic histories" of San Francisco, where he still lives and writes today.