An Open Letter to the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities
Regarding the Selection of
The District of Columbia’s Next Poet Laureate
Dear Director Espinoza, Commissioners and DCCAH Staff,
In the wake of the passing of our long tenured and highly respected Poet Laureate Dolores Kendrick, many in the poetry and writing community have wondered about the process by which her successor will be selected. Continue reading this post…
Elhillo, Safia. The January Children. Lincoln,NE: U of Nebraska P, 2017. 72 pp. $15.95 (paper).
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As a writer who was born in Cameroon, a place imagined and conceived by Europeans, I continue to reflect on the impact of the encounter between those who named it and those who actually occupy it, and have grown to claim it.
Often, I have imagined them milling around a room in Otto Von Bismarck’s mansion, the Wilhelmstrasse; animated with the clipped chatter of diplomats and translators, a crude antiquated map of Africa spread out in the middle of an imperial sized table crammed with accoutrements of the era: delicate china, two giant elephant tusks, a mounted tiger, rose-filled clay pots, and gold-coated candleholders. Continue reading this post…
Hopper, Ailish. Dark~Sky Society. Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues, 2014. 97 pp. $15.00 (paper).
Reviewed by Ellen Hagan
“The flash-/ bulb pops; the splash/ kerosene/ [door behind]/and then the flint/ the arcing match—/ flame” ends Ailish Hopper’s opening poem: “Self Portrait as Smoke,” in her first full-length collection, Dark~Sky Society (12). As a reader, I was immediately pulled into the heat of this moment, pushed in an instant towards facing it—a larger society and the speaker’s place within it, violence, the body: “Terrible,/ I say, & change/ the subject, as if my body were/ diffused” (11). Hopper is relentless in her language—experimental, eccentric at times, cocky even as it bumps up against different expectations of what a poem should do. This collection often feels like a tight wire, so taut with a collective and personal grief and so weighed down by our shared and revolting history of race in America. Continue reading this post…
Allo, Viola. Bird from Africa. Brooklyn, NY: Akashic Press, 2015.
Reviewed by Kangsen Feka Wakai
Viola Allo’s chapbook Bird from Africa is part of Akashic Books’ 8 New-Generation African Poets chapbook box set, which also features works from Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola. Edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, the “new-generation African poets” series is in its second edition and, according to Dawes, aims to “publish seven to ten chapbooks by African poets each year” while ensuring that the poems in the series are “first rate, representative, and new.” The need for originality that Dawes speaks of is echoed by co-editor Abani who points out that unlike their predecessors of the “independence” and intermediary SAP (Structural Adjustment Programs) generation, the works of these “new-generation African poets” represent a “negotiation of a kind of modernist thought on the continent that the early rush to nationalism and to nationalize nascent states interrupted.” Continue reading this post…
Williams, Phillip B. Thief in the Interior. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2016. 82pp. $15.95 (paper).
Reviewed by Khadijah Queen
From the start, Phillip B. Williams’ Thief in the Interior situates the reader in sensorial language both abject and beautiful, horrific and tender. Leading with salt, sweat, breath, the body’s automatic excretions; threading in “a great system of clouds” (1), water, dew; injecting blood, earth, the moon—the book has an elemental quality that anchors the poems firmly into that ancient conversation about what it means to be human in a particular time and place. And, specifically, what it means to be a certain kind of body, one labeled “queer” and “Black” in a country with a long history of unjust and often unchecked violence toward such a body. Continue reading this post…
Nicholson, David. Flying Home: Seven Stories of the Secret City. Arlington, VA: Paycock Press, 2015. 147 pp. $12.95 (paper).
Reviewed by Brian Gilmore
In the 1937 essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” Richard Wright wrote that “no theory of life can take the place of life.” It is, according to Wright, “the task of the writer to plant flesh upon those bones out of his will to live.” Considering Wright was writing what James Baldwin and others once deemed “protest literature,” the effectiveness of his writing was rooted in his ability to make his characters come to life in a meaningful way.
Though Washington, D.C. writer David Nicholson did not choose Wright’s burden of making protest literature soar as art, Nicholson does take Wright’s words to heart in Flying Home: Seven Stories from the Secret City, his debut collection. Nicholson’s characters and their troubled, complex lives, become flesh and bones but also rich and meaningful. Many of us know characters like Tyson, the former Negro League ball player in Nicholson’s “Seasons.” Here, “flesh” does get placed “upon those bones” and what happens to Tyson becomes important—one of the key components of accessible storytelling. Continue reading this post…
Bachmann, Beth. Do Not Rise. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2015. 72 pp. $15.95 (paper).
Reviewed by Will Byrne
“The dead we__________burn; the living we bury in our faces.”
_____~From the poem “shell”
Beth Bachmann’s 2009 collection of poems, Temper—her debut—is a fascinating book: a true-life murder mystery twisted with familial tragedy, pressed down on all sides by the dark and rich presence of a lyric interior. Continue reading this post…
(L to R: Joel Dias-Porter, Brian Gilmore, Kenneth Carroll)
Photo Credit: Brandon D. Johnson
“It is important that I tell you their names,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of the poets who influenced him in his standout book Between the World and Me. “That you know,” he continues, “that I have never achieved anything alone.” One of those “older poets” he names is Brian Gilmore, a fixture of the burgeoning poetry scene in Washington, D.C. at the time that Coates was beginning to understand himself as writer. With the plethora of reviews of and commentaries on Between the World and Me on the media (POST NO ILLS not excluded), we also wanted to create some space for a personal response to this major American book, and who better to provide that context than one of those who Coates’ himself cites in the text as a mentor. Continue reading this post…
There might be an quiet expectation for a debut poetry collection to serve as a charming introduction to the world of the author, but, even if poetry aspires towards serving as a venue for sincerity and vulnerability, it is an act of bravery for a poet to begin her or his career with a collection rooted in painful and dark histories—especially so for African-American women who, four-hundred years into the American experiment, must still question the basic weight of their lives in the country’s moral consciousness.
“In 2006 I had an ordeal with medicine . To recover, I learn why ghost come to me. The research question is: Why am I patient?” This conclusion to the opening poem in Bettina Judd’s debut collection Patient (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) speaks to the emotional uncertainty that results from the collision of personal and public history as related to the “black” female body—as medical subject, as specimen, as spectacle. Far from a feel-good subject, the eye-opening book affirms the fact that some of our worst wounds must first be opened and examined in order to properly heal.
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