Composed like a dark novel-in-verse, Dominican Moon is the second book in Ken Norris’s travel trilogy. With Dante as his guide, he leaves behind the predominantly European terrain of the first book in this series, Limbo Road, and finds himself in the “terra incognita” of the Caribbean Sea.

On his own contemporary voyage of discovery of the island of Hispaniola, the “new world” Columbus discovered in 1492, Norris encounters seductive lovers and moon-haunted tropical nights, dark Dominican rum and winter baseball, sugar cane fields and “the city of shortstops.”

At the heart of the book is an unsettling story of the deficiencies of love—of a perhaps not so divine comedy of those who didn’t love enough—steeped in a clash of cultures wherein the third world willingly, even perversely, offers itself up as a farm-team for the first, fuelled by the cataclysm of that other third world export, cocaine.