You Can't Get Away from the Business,

1992

<p>In <em>You Can’t Get Away from the Business</em>, the repetition, movement, and interaction of tigers and human women saturate the paper’s surface with a lyrical play on gendering. Part alter ego, part symbol of black manhood, Dial’s tigers also carry political resonance. He has associated them with the Black Panther Party and with Perry L. "Tiger" Thompson, a black labor organizer and fellow worker at the Pullman Standard Plant in Bessemer, Alabama. Dial’s women and tigers dance, contort, and fade as if to dramatize the complex entanglements of sex, love, harm, and betrayal. This is just one example of what the poet Amiri Baraka described as the "fearful symmetry" of Dial’s works on paper "that will shake you once you are fully, or more fully, hip to it."</p>