Harris, Reginald. Autogeography. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2013. 62 pp. $16.95 (paper), $16.95 (e-book).
(Winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Book Prize — website)

*_____*_____*

Reginald Harris, former IT Manager for the Enoch Pratt Library, has moved on up to the big(ger) city of New York to become Poetry in The Branches Coordinator and IT Director at Poets House. Autogeography, his latest poetry collection which arrived more or less with his departure from Baltimore, shows that at least one of Harris’ feet will remain planted firmly on Charm City soil. Autogeography is, if anything, a book that travels—be it formal trips across the entirety of the page, psychological jaunts across the boundaries of gender norms, or family reunions convened on alternate timelines. “Do NOT let him drive you” Harris writes in the opening poem “The Poet Behind the Wheel.” “Buckle up and hours later/ who knows where you’ll arrive.” While no poet can guarantee where her or his work will lead a reader, Harris was kind enough to answer some of our questions about how he prepared for his book’s journey. Continue reading this post…

Laymon, Kiese. How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Evanston, IL: Agate Bolden, 2013. 144 pp. $15.00 ($9.99 epub).

[View title on Goodreads.com]

Reviewed by Daniel Peña

In his debut collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Kiese Laymon opens with a series of letters to his Uncle Jimmy, the first of which recounts scenes from the last day of his uncle’s life.  Uncle Jimmy, seemingly rehabilitated after cleaning up his life and kicking a drug habit, brings his mother a pack of meat with the words, “This Mama’s Meat,” scrawled in “loopy black letters” over the bloodied wax butcher paper (p. 15).  Eight days later, the family makes its way to Mapp Funeral home where Laymon’s mother, Jimmy’s sister, is asking the funeral director to change her brother’s shirt.  Eulogizing Jimmy, Laymon’s Aunt Sue says he “wasn’t that different from anyone in this church [. . .]. No better or no worse.  And that’s what we have to accept . . . He was all of our brother” (p. 17).  It’s a sobering pivot toward Laymon’s own narrative,  a book-length meditation on black masculinity and the threads which make up the fabric from which Laymon is cut:  his own family but also, Jackson, Mississippi, ritualized violence, Hip-Hip, and above all, insecurity in the most cosmopolitan sense of the word. Continue reading this post…

by Elizabeth Hoover

Few white poets write about race, and when they do, they mostly write about racism by exploring historical wrongs or gazing at the Other. In her new project, tentatively titled “Frayed,” Joy Katz explicitly takes on whiteness.

One of her inspirations was her adopted son, who was born Vietnam. She saw other white parents ignore their adopted children’s race and instead raise them as white. To avoid this, Katz—author of All You Do Is Perceive, The Garden Room, and Fabulae— wanted to understand what raising a child “as white” means, a difficult task when white culture is rarely discussed or explored.

Although the spark for this project was personal, the resulting poems engage whiteness in the broadest sense and employ structural innovation to “fray the fabric of whiteness” that Katz says surrounds her life. “The alternative is to keep writing unaware within whiteness,” Katz writes in her contribution to Claudia Rankine’s Open Letter Project. “And that seems impossibly limiting.” Continue reading this post…

Reviewed by Nijla Mumin

Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013, Quat’sous Films / Wild Bunch)

2h, 59mins

Director: Abdellatif Kechiche

Writers: Abdellatif Kechiche, Ghalia Lacroix

Starring: Léa Seydoux, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Salim Kechiouche

Recovering from an intense love affair can be difficult. Just ask the director and lead actors of French drama Blue Is the Warmest Color, who’ve engaged in a public feud over the last months about the arduous process of making the film, which also won the Palm d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Based on the 2010 graphic novel Blue Angel by Julie Maroh, the film follows Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a precocious French high school student, who falls deeply into a passionate affair with an older art student named Emma, (Lea Seydoux). Experiencing sexual fulfillment for the first time, Adèle forges a strong connection with Emma, but the line between love and lust blurs as they struggle to remain bonded. Continue reading this post…

Dimitrov, Alex. Begging for It. New York, NY: Four Way Books, 2013. 96 pp. $15.95

Reviewed by Stephen Zerance

[View title on Goodreads]

The image that adorns the cover of Alex Dimitrov’s Begging for It—a photograph from “Rimbaud in New York,” one of David Wojnarowicz’s first major series of works—is an interesting introduction to this first collection of poems. It asserts that the reader will shortly be living through Dimitrov’s saison en Enfer of sorts—the sadness of the outsider in a new society (Dimitrov having emigrated from Bulgaria to New York City), but the cover also suggests that this text will be a melange of politics and queerness. Continue reading this post…

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…