This is a story about the struggles of a strong, resilient biracial woman during the Prohibition era in the 1920s. We share in her arduous journey as she aims to navigate through a time when greed, power, murder, and romance were highly prevalent in the streets of Harlem. I would like to thank you for letting me share this woman’s life that is fictional but seems nonfictional to me. It comes to me like she’s trying to tell me something. I do not have any proof that this woman even existed, but it comes to me like a ghost in the night twenty-five years ago. I’m finally putting it into words to share with you. Please join me in this ongoing saga of a woman that went through a lot of adversity but somehow overcame because of the strength that lies inside her —Randy R.

Hard not to be florid about this book Devoured in snippets or read straight through. It presents amazing experiences and skills. Because Marc-Charles Nicolas has a brilliantly delicate appreciation for the idea of a sentence in a poem, the juxtapositions of segments in these pages appear essentially to construct entire topics for mediation. Examined along and the dawnings increase and multipy--- inspirations, love, feelings, locations, events hitherto isolated are now all hooks-and-eyes into each other. And because Marc-Charles gets his inspiration from the muse, you feel the exquisiteness and beauty buried in shattered phrases about the "universality of poetry." As a poet he belongs to a life larger than his own. The life of genuine things. And (One more performance worth a word): the poems in his book "Perfumed Paradise" are filled with aboutness'. Put together as they are, they're seen to abound with roots: their laughter or melancholy or ire has discernible reasons. The humanness of poem-writing as a hobby, the splendid unavoidability of it ---that is what this compilation brings together. But floridity was to be kept away. One cloudless day---pace the anti-sentimentalists: life is short I sat in the sun and by a Brook with a friend and passed pages of this manuscript from side to side, reading fragments aloud, laughing quietly or looking grave, occasionally thrilled and bemused. A while back, this was, yet I remember no happier afternoon. The poems were written originally in French 13 years ago in the year 1993, delicious remembrance - fantastic book! Virgo A. Bernice