BLOOD WHISPERS VOLUME 2: L. A. Writers...

BLOOD WHISPERS VOLUME 2: L. A. Writers on AIDS edited by Terry Wolverton (Silverton Books/The Center/1625 N. Hudson Ave./Hollywood, CA 90028: $9.95; 144 pp., paperback original). The stories, sketches and poems in the second anthology from the Los Angeles Gay And Lesbian Community Center’s Perspectives Writing Program distill some of the unnumbered tears shed in the pandemic. Although the quality of the writing varies considerably, some of the pieces are genuinely moving. In David Varnon’s “Jesse James Meets the AIDS Virus,” a man tells stories to his lover’s niece in an attempt to explain the death of someone they both loved; James Carroll Pickett recounts the efforts of a dying man to reconnect with his family in the elegiac “Plainsong.”