THE BOY WITHOUT A FLAG: Tales of...

THE BOY WITHOUT A FLAG: Tales of the South Bronx by Abraham Rodriguez Jr. (Milkweed Editions: $11; 115 pp., paperback original). As the title indicates, these powerful, gritty stories by a young Puerto Rican-American writer are set in the slums of New York City. Young men and women lead lives as bleak as their devastated surroundings, caught between the cruel realities of poverty and the glittering fantasies of a society that exalts conspicuous consumption. Rodriguez shows a rare ability to capture the speech patterns of people condemned to suffer in silence by their inability to articulate their pain. This impressive debut collection transcends its specific setting, and Rodriguez emerges as an sympathetic chronicler of the increasingly disenfranchised urban underclass.