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Rosal, Patrick. My American Kundiman. New York: Persea Books, 2006. 65 pp. $13.95 (paper).

Reviewed by Jonas Holdeman

The attraction of our primordial cycle of pain-and-release—like a child probing a loose tooth—is what pulls me into the poems in Patrick Rosal’s second book, My American Kundiman.  Reading “Beast” from the first section of the collection, and one gets an intense, imagery-dense introduction to the poem’s subject:

___________________This Beast who is six-foot-four and speaks
five versions of Pound-and-Pummel In South Philly
I’m watching him play summer league where Beast thinks
he’s a poet even when he hauls down a brick
off the defensive boards and there’s four other
black men on the court calling to him
Beast! Beast! Beast! He answers them
with all the sensitivity of a cretic foot: a quick
pivot mid-court that knocks the opponent’s skinny
two-guard off the gawky pair of iron
skillets grown out of the poor kid’s ankles and projects him
like an old neurosis across the crud-ridden gym floor. (6-7) Continue reading this post…

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Williams, Crystal. Troubled Tongues. Detroit: Lotus Press, 2009. 75 pp. $18.00 (paper).

Reviewed by L. Lamar Wilson

Shake it loose, baby, double head, double tongue.

By the time readers get to guidelines thirteen and twenty-four from Crystal Williams’ “How to Become a Black Woman” in the final section of Troubled Tongues, they’ve likely run the emotional gamut. They’ve chuckled at the insolent resolve of her spurned subjects and speakers and empathized with the anger and despair caused by deferred dreams in the nondescript, hardscrabble, settings often taken granted or actively ignored: the nail salon, the rundown apartment building, the perfect park perch, the Boys & Girls Club, the playgrounds and porches and MLK Boulevards on the other side of the tracks. If, perchance, these places are foreign or indeed forgotten, Williams’ poems evoke in them a cinematic resonance. She limns the heart of what moves her speakers and subjects to signify and sass as they are prone to do and immerses readers in moments that words rarely fully render. Williams not only makes these spaces real but also leaves her readers pondering what can be mined from their own past and present lives, homes, loves and losses. Continue reading this post…

VISIT THE DC PLACE

Reviewed By Nijla Mumin

Mississippi Damned (2009) [ Movie Website ]
Written and Directed by Tina Mabry
Runtime: 120 Minutes Continue reading this post…

by Dan Brady

“Evolution favours what is good at replicating itself, rather than what is good.”
Culture and Prosperity by John Kay

Natural selection tells us that organisms will choose their mates based on traits favorable to the success of the species. In theory, each consecutive generation is better adapted to the environment than the generation before. The economic downturn has created a new environment for arts organizations. In recent months, arts coverage around the country has focused on the uphill climb faced by arts organizations as they see their endowments plunge with the stock market, donors refocusing on personal finances, corporate funding dry up and audiences staying home. Arts organizations will be forced to perform their own kind of natural selection—analyzing programming and services to determine what can be replicated on a regular basis, establishing the carrying capacity of an audience and squaring ambition with budget. Continue reading this post…

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Dove, Rita. Sonata Mulattica: A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009. 240 pp. $24.95 (cloth).

Reviewed by Reginald Harris

It is harder to play long
than fast. It’s more than stretching
a line—suspension is
what we yearn for,
that delicate fulcrum between crash
and sheer evaporation, a dissipating breeze.
to levitate strands of melodic sound
across all the mired avenues
we barge along, daily—this shining wire
so light, so strong, we can just make out
(there!—there it goes) and follow,
slip note by note along
and fly—float—
in that radiant web. (from “Polgreen, Sight-Reading” pg. 113)

In recent years, many African-American poets have adopted the form of the book-length biography in verse, mixing fact with imagination as a way to investigate and interrogate the past. Some, such as Marilyn Nelson in Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), or Tyehimba Jess with leadbelly (2005), bring us into the lives of well known figures; others—A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (2005), or Frank X Walker’s Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York (2004), for example—revive lesser known figures. In these works, each poet covers key biographical points, but also delves into the zeitgeist of their times, the consciousness of the central figure, and explores how he or she was seen by others. Continue reading this post…

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Prufer, Kevin. National Anthem. New York: Four Way Book, 2008. 82 pp. $15.95 (paper).

Reviewed by Reginald Dwayne Betts

There are poets writing who know a poem is also place, a crowded room where one can be whomever he or she desires, who understand that to be able to write a poem is a form of freedom. The publication of National Anthem shows Kevin Prufer to be this kind of writer. In this collection, the voices are myriad and unexpected: gunfire, a shopping mall, young girls in heaven, history, and the American West all speak. And yet the collection’s preoccupation is not with voices, but with the idea of nationhood—how it crumbles and how people love while it crumbles. Continue reading this post…

[View Titles on Goodreads.com: pavlic -- douglas]

Reviewed by Keith Mitchell

Douglas, Mitchell. Cooling Board: A Long Playing Poem. Granada Hills, CA: Red Hen, 2009. 112 pp. ISBN 1597091405. $19.95 (paper).

Pavlic, Ed. Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2008. 208 pp. ISBN 0820330973. $19.95 (paper).

The importance of African-American music to literature is pretty much a given; The number of novels, short stories, plays and poems in which African-American music is essential is staggering. Poetry has been particularly ripe for the exploration of connections between music and the genre. Usually individual poems in a collection are devoted to black musical artists. Sometimes, on rare occasions, whole collections are devoted to a particular black musical artist, especially jazz and blues artists. Who can forget Michael S. Harper’s furiously experimental Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1985) or Alexis De Veaux’s heart-rending Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday (1980)? Rarely, however, has an entire poetry collection been devoted to a black musical artist who’s work many might consider certainly slight in light of musical icons John Coltrane and Billie Holiday. Yet, Ed Pavlic’s Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway and Mitchell H. Douglas’ Cooling Board: A Long Playing Poem are two very fine praisesongs for the ’70s and ’80s R&B singer and musical genius, Donny Hathaway. Continue reading this post…

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Van Clief-Stefanon, Lyrae. ] Open Interval [. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2009. 96 pp. $14.95 (paper).

Reviewed by CM Burroughs

Open interval, a mathematical term, refers to a line that has no endpoints. For the book Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon has put forth, I consider the term a reference to the need for unobstructed movement along the spectrum of identity. However, such movement is not always eagerly accomplished or endeavored without anxieties. Continue reading this post…

Ryan, Kay. The Niagara River. Grove Press Poetry Series, 2005. 72 pp. $13.00 (paper).

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Reviewed by Marcela Malek Sulak

The work of the contemporary lyricist may be that of ordering the chaos that swirls around the shell-shocked I.  But Kay Ryan’s long, thin poems are the tempest’s very stir sticks.  And isn’t that a relief sometimes?  Who wouldn’t rather be the two-year-old dumping out a toy box than authority that tidies everything back up?  The Niagara River, Ryan’s sixth book, continues the joyful project of her first five collections, that of unraveling the established order of language and logic, calmly, mischievously. Continue reading this post…