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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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…

Browne, Jenny. The Second Reason. Tampa: U of Tampa P, 2007. 85pp. $12 (paper).

[View title on Goodreads]

Reviewed by Yvette Neisser Moreno

Jenny Browne’s latest book, The Second Reason, opens with a quote by Fernando Pessoa: “Be plural like the universe.” Her book fulfills this daunting mission. Browne’s poems—which are highly original and defy easy categorization—take inspiration from the most surprising subjects, including a “man who gives bad directions” and a check for five dollars made out to a restaurant called “The Open Road.” Her poems also reference literary, historical and popular figures ranging from Bruce Springsteen to Cicero to Benjamin Franklin, often incorporating their quotations into the poems. Not only are many of her poems original in subject, but perhaps more importantly, her style of writing is refreshingly distinctive. Continue reading this post…

Math and theatre are two things many Americans aren’t too keen on, but add to the mixture a little hip hop and you’ve got Paige Hernandez—teacher, dancer, playwright, actress and performer of the one-woman show Paige in Full. Hernandez’s show tells the story of a multiethnic (Cuban, Chinese and Afro-American) girl growing up in Baltimore with an overwhelming love for hip hop. The effect that the live mixing and dance routines has on the one-hour show is uniquely gripping, and the way Hernandez has integrated  hip hop into her professional life should serve as a model for others to emulate. Continue reading this post…

Reviewed by Raina Leon

Martínez Pompa, Paul. My Kill Adore Him. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. 66pp. ISBN:  9780268035181. $15.00 (paper).

Story, Julia. Post Moxie Louisville: Sarabande Books, 2010. 77pp. ISBN:  9781932511840. $14.95 (paper).

[ View titles on goodreads (My Kill Adore Him) (Post Moxie) ]

One might define agency as the realization of the power to affect change and the action to do so.  Post Moxie (2010) by Julia Story and My Kill Adore Him (2009) by Paul Martínez Pompa stand at opposite ends on the agency continuum.  Despite the kinetic energy of the speaker or lack thereof, the poems within each prize-winning collection (the 2009 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and the 2008 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, respectively) thrill in their dedication to their distinct poetic missions:  one embraces detachment while the other throbs with a visceral engagement with the world. Continue reading this post…

Night Catches Us (2010, Simon Says / Gigantic)
1h, 28mins
Writer & Director: Tanya Hamilton
Starring: Anthony Mackie, Kerry Washington, Wendell Pierce, Jamie Hector

Reviewed by Jasmin S. Greene

Exposure to artworks exploring the black power movement with vivid imagery of black panthers is not completely uncommon. Many have become familiar with free breakfast programs, activism, COINTELPRO, and slayings of Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, and other party members. Still, most stories only tell of the rise and then tragic fall of the Black Panther Party and its people. Debut writer/director Tanya Hamilton raises the question of what happened afterwards.
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___As a man, a man lucky enough to have a number of female friends and associates, I am often amazed and perplexed by the amount of time women spend trying to ascertain what goes on inside the minds of men. It is fairly simple, as far as I’m concerned, but rather than opening my assessment of the male mind to criticism, let me introduce you to the Man’s Guide to Love project. Basically, MGL travels around the country posing one question to random men they encounter: “If you had one piece of advice to give another man regarding love, what would it be?” Mine would be, “Prenuptial Agreement,” but this isn’t about me. It’s about Abe Greenwald, one of the filmmakers behind MGL, who was kind enough to answer five questions about their endeavor.

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By Reginald Dwayne Betts

This is not a review, more appreciation than critique. The poems in John Murillo’s debut collection Up Jump the Boogie represent a mashing of craft and life—where the eye is brave enough to make art out of memory and anguish, the beautiful and the scarred. There is an awareness in this poet, an understanding that marks life as “never measured/ in beats, but beat-downs. not line breaks, just breaks” (pg. 49). Continue reading this post…