Now ain't she cute!

Miss Universe--

with her flat ass

to the musings of Jeffrey Walker about the Orestiaen legend and American tyrants in "After-Dinner Reading." There are reactions to Harvard, to lovers, to grandmothers, to the question "what's hapnin." There are two tightly-constructed and vivid short stories, as well as an eloquent review of James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk. There is even a short play about the emotions preceding a slave revolt in Virginia in 1800, the prologue of which affirms passionately, emphatically "freedom's all I'll ever need."

There are angry poems, nostalgic poems, cynical about the dregs of like poems, ethnic tales, and dreams. Like any publication, there are failures, but most of these words-put-together share successfully what Roberts' opening editorial calls "an attempt to liberate black from the confines of its sound, to bury stereotypes in porcelain blankets, where they belong, to move freedom past the dissolvement of exterior to the cultivation of interior--where differences multiply and thrive."

Diaspora is a big magazine--52 pages of expression. What this briskly trotting publication needs now, in the desert that still is the Harvard-Radcliffe literary scene, is oases--Diaspora ("a dispersion as of people of a common national culture into other countries") is crying out for reading.