Cassells, Cyrus. The Crossed-Out Swastika. Copper Canyon Press, 2012. 83 pp. $16.00.

Cyrus Cassells’ fifth collection of poems is, in many respects, an extrapolation of the last three poems that close his second book, Soul Make A Path Through Shouting. As in all his books—even the paeans to art and artists that suffuse Beautiful Signor and More Than Peace and Cypresses—the ephemeral and eternal, breath and ashes, are intimates. Few American poets have made such celebratory music of mourning. But those final poems in the second book focus specifically on the victims—the murdered and the survivors—of the Holocaust. The Crossed-Out Swastika elaborates this theme. Continue reading this post…

by francine j. harris

The more art moves me, the more I wonder if our conception of art’s intention isn’t flawed. We tell ourselves art brings us closer to the real world, helps us draw a connection between us and others. But as the beauty of art comes in its specificity, sometimes it seems the only thing you can be close to is a particular character, or situation that doesn’t actually exist in real life. We tell ourselves that art creates empathy and understanding by demonstrating a range of human emotion and human experience, but in order to conceive this, we as audience tend to treat those characters, those settings, as representative. Most often, filmmakers, writers, and painters allow and encourage us to do so. We call this making art “believable.” And yet, the minute we all participate in this, the minute we translate those sets of characteristics to any actual people, we have immediately sown the seeds for stereotype, typecast, generalization. To love a character in order to love someone similar to the character is to render invisible the real life subject.

And yet we do it, yet we apparently need to.

I am thinking all of this after coming home from seeing Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild. Continue reading this post…

POST NO ILLS, in partnership with the Hamiltonian Gallery and The American Poetry Museum, presents “Who’s D.C. / Whose Poetry,” the inaugural event in our new Isosceles Poetry Series.

Friday, September 14TH 7:30PM
@ The Hamiltonian Gallery (1353 U Street NW, WDC)

Featured Readers:

Tarfia Faizullah
Brian Gilmore
Dan Vera

Johnson, Dana. Elsewhere, California. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012. 276 pp. $15.95 (paper).

[View title on Goodreads.com]

Reviewed by Ciara Miller

Dana Johnson’s debut novel, Elsewhere, California, largely concerns coming of age during the 70s and 80s when practically no one fits neatly into black and white social boxes. Her narrator, Avery Arlington, is reshaped by white television shows, white friends, white schools, and white romantic interests. Even the mother of one of her childhood classmates blasts Diana Ross in her vehicle but disallows her son to date Avery because she is black (199). Avery’s first known home is on 80TH Street in Los Angeles, where she can’t go trick-or-treating because rival gangs, Bloods and Crips, are at war. There, she witnesses her father punch her mother in the eye and her mother chase her father down the hallway with a butcher knife for returning home from work thirty minutes late (10). When she is nine-years-old, her family moves to a working-class, predominantly white suburb, West Covina. As an adult, she visits a hypnotherapist to cope with her past while fearing she will be viewed as: “A bright and articulate woman.  An affirmative action baby.  A bourgeois snob. A hard worker. A whiner” (11).  She grows up to be an assemblage artist married to an Italian immigrant lawyer and lives in a huge modern house atop a hill in Los Angeles.  Her conflict is negotiating the several identities her life has afforded her. Continue reading this post…

Part One of Four: Joseph Ross’ Meeting Bone Man

Ross, Joseph. Meeting Bone Man. Charlotte, North Carolina: Main Street Rag, 2012. 91 pp. 15.00 (paper).

[View title on Goodreads]

The irony that may immediately come to one’s mind upon finishing such a human book—in its themes and its compassion—is that it is framed by poems in which the speaker observes and contemplates a skeleton, albeit a “live” one. At times a walking memento mori (“In seeing what looks/ like nothing,/ he actually/ shows you everything.// Bone man is inevitable.”) and in other instances a stoic traveler outside of time (“He survives/ in the perfect stillness of bone./ No desert sands shifting./ No ocean waves rolling.”), explaining how Bone Man fits, structurally, in the book is challenging (Pg. 7, 73). It might be easier to think of Bone Man as a metaphorical representation of the speaker’s self-awareness as it evolves over the course of the book. Continue reading this post…

Pollock, Iain Haley. Spit Back a Boy. Athens, Georgia: U of Georgia P, 2011. 78 pp. 16.95 (paper).

[view title on Goodreads.com]

Reviewed by francine j. harris

In his debut collection Spit Back a Boy, Iain Haley Pollock delivers an evocative and graceful body of work tangled in questions about maturity and playfulness, solitude and silence, race and representations of race and the ways in which we recognize what we value. Continue reading this post…

With its name adopted from the lines of Langston Hughes’ impelling poem “Big Buddy,” the Split This Rock foundation will host its third biennial “Poetry of Provocation and Witness” conference March 21st through 25th of this year in Washington, D.C. [Click here to link to the conference schedule.] In this installment of our “Five Questions” conversations with artist-administrators, we caught up with the Sarah Browning, founder and director of the Split This Rock foundation, to discuss the evolution of the organization and her expectations for this year’s event.

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Continue reading this post…

Pariah (2011, Focus) [watch trailer]
1h, 26mins
Writer & Director: Dee Dee Rees
Starring: Adepero Oduye, Kim Wayans, Aasha Davis

Reviewed by Jasmin S. Greene

Ridiculed by peers. Shunned from society. Denied basic human rights. This isn’t a scene from the Antebellum South or even the not so distant Civil Rights Era.  This is the experience for millions of people today who are deemed outcasts simply because of their sexuality. Writer and director Dee Rees pulls at our emotions with her debut feature film, Pariah. Continue reading this post…

Trelles, Emma. Tropicalia. South Bend: U of Notre Dame P, 2010. 56 pp.  $15 (paper).

[View title on Goodreads]

Reviewed by Khadijah Queen

“The beginning should eat the eyes,” opens “How to Write a Poem: Theory #62,” though Tropicalia does anything but. It gives us instead an ultrasensitive pair of eyes in addition to our own—as acutely attuned to color and texture and passion as a painter’s. Trelles writes with a sensibility part emotional and part anthropological, offering a way of seeing first the surfaces and then delving into the poems’ subjects with both heart and precision. Continue reading this post…

Shockley, Evie. the new black: poems. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. 128 pp. $22.95 (cloth).

[View title on Goodreads]

Reviewed by Reginald Dwayne Betts

“You are my shelter from the storm/ and the storm,” writes Evie Shockley in “ode to blackness.” This couplet speaks directly to the conundrum that drives this devastatingly beautiful collection: black as handcuff and as blossom, but always there. Shockley’s the new black is a dismantling of archetypes: a series of poems where black is at times landscape and at times backdrop, righteous fist in the air or questioning glance. These poems are both rebuttal to the idea of post-racial and a reaching for the compendium, for the beautiful and the ugly that Langston Hughes argues is black American life in “The Negro and the Racial Mountain.” The success of this collection is in the manner it widens the scope of discourse. Race is the linchpin but not the quintessence. Continue reading this post…