The Jamaica that Kwame Dawes creates in A Place to Hide: Stories (262 pp.) is a fevered world of the imagination where psyches shaped by religious fervor, sexual uncertainty, artistic frustration and emotional disquiet seek to find meaning in a lush landscape. A woman whispers to God, “Just between me and you,” as she dips into a rushing river--her baptism (“A Place to Hide”). A man has flown all night and finds himself naked on a hillside, his body covered with welts, his penis grown monstrous with swelling and a woman staring at his shame. (“Flight”). A poet, pickled by too much rum, has nightmares of the wild hubris of trying to make beauty in a unforgiving landscape (“Where Crabs Grow”). Two women sit in a lighthouse--one is using her soft charcoal to draw the contours of the other while in a church on the hill, a prophetess preaches hell and damnation to sodomites with tears and jealousy (“The Lighthouse”). Two vomiting police men stand over the rotting body of a school girl baffled by the mystery of a murder that is steeped in issues of class and color in Kingston (“In the Gully”).