[View title on Goodreads.com]

Petrosino, Kiki. Fort Red Border. Louisville: Sarabande Books, 2009. 88 pp. $14.95 (paper).

Reviewed by DéLana Dameron

From her statement in the collection’s acknowledgments, Kiki Petrosino wants to make clear that her poems in Fort Red Border “describe things that are entirely imaginary [and] do not describe [...] actual persons” (Petrosino, x). In making this claim, Petrosino attempts to create a greater separation between the speaker’s voice and that of the author, despite any assumed similarities. This distance is echoed by the book’s epigraph that quotes Brigit Pegeen Kelly who writes, “a thing like me, / but not the thing I asked for, a thing by accident or / design, I am now attached to.” This epigraph seems to be set in place to dispel readers’ impulses to assume that the “I” in the poems that follow this introduction is not a dramatic “I” but the speaker herself. One must also consider the “thing” Kelly refers to—that Petrosino adopts as her door into her collection—to be both the author’s body and maybe life. The body given is a “thing like [Petrosino], / but not the thing [she] asked for.” Fort Red Border explores the idea of inheritance, what we do with what we’re given and how do we come to terms with the marriage of the two, even when they are potentially at odds. Continue reading this post…

Literary scholar and poet Carmen Gillespie asks us to consider the significance of the United States capital in African-American literature at a time when America is still learning how to read its first African-American lead political protagonist. Dr. Gillespie also discusses the role that poetry can play in reshaping the perception of national traumas such as the 1978 Jonestown massacre (which is also the thematic focus of her forthcoming poetry collection).

Continue reading this post…

By Miles Marshall Lewis

As an occasional fiction editor, I’ve seen my share of short stories starring female protagonists variously described as black versions of the Icelandic avant-garde singer, Björk. In the real world outside the land of literature, the closest thing we have to that ideal in R&B is Dallas’s own Erykah Badu, as evidenced most recently by her fifth studio album, New Amerykah Pt. Two (Return of the Ankh). Performance artist, African fetishist, hiphop nostalgist, cultural nationalist and self-described ”recovering undercover overlover,” Badu proves on her latest effort that her best work is not yet behind her. Continue reading this post…

[View title on Goodreads.com]

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…

[View title on goodreads.com]

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…

[View title on Goodreads.com]

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…

[View Title on Goodreads.com]

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…