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…

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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…

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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…

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Reviewed by Keith Mitchell

Douglas, Mitchell. Cooling Board: A Long Playing Poem. Granada Hills, CA: Red Hen, 2009. 112 pp. ISBN 1597091405. $19.95 (paper).

Pavlic, Ed. Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2008. 208 pp. ISBN 0820330973. $19.95 (paper).

The importance of African-American music to literature is pretty much a given; The number of novels, short stories, plays and poems in which African-American music is essential is staggering. Poetry has been particularly ripe for the exploration of connections between music and the genre. Usually individual poems in a collection are devoted to black musical artists. Sometimes, on rare occasions, whole collections are devoted to a particular black musical artist, especially jazz and blues artists. Who can forget Michael S. Harper’s furiously experimental Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1985) or Alexis De Veaux’s heart-rending Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday (1980)? Rarely, however, has an entire poetry collection been devoted to a black musical artist who’s work many might consider certainly slight in light of musical icons John Coltrane and Billie Holiday. Yet, Ed Pavlic’s Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway and Mitchell H. Douglas’ Cooling Board: A Long Playing Poem are two very fine praisesongs for the ’70s and ’80s R&B singer and musical genius, Donny Hathaway. Continue reading this post…

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Van Clief-Stefanon, Lyrae. ] Open Interval [. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2009. 96 pp. $14.95 (paper).

Reviewed by CM Burroughs

Open interval, a mathematical term, refers to a line that has no endpoints. For the book Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon has put forth, I consider the term a reference to the need for unobstructed movement along the spectrum of identity. However, such movement is not always eagerly accomplished or endeavored without anxieties. Continue reading this post…

Ryan, Kay. The Niagara River. Grove Press Poetry Series, 2005. 72 pp. $13.00 (paper).

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Reviewed by Marcela Malek Sulak

The work of the contemporary lyricist may be that of ordering the chaos that swirls around the shell-shocked I.  But Kay Ryan’s long, thin poems are the tempest’s very stir sticks.  And isn’t that a relief sometimes?  Who wouldn’t rather be the two-year-old dumping out a toy box than authority that tidies everything back up?  The Niagara River, Ryan’s sixth book, continues the joyful project of her first five collections, that of unraveling the established order of language and logic, calmly, mischievously. Continue reading this post…

Cooper, Afua. The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. 349 pp. $22.95 (paper).

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Reviewed by Reginald Harris

Poet and historian Afua Cooper’s compelling The Hanging of Angélique recreates and interrogates the story of the enslaved Afro-Portuguese woman Marie-Joseph Angélique, and in doing so provides readers a fascinating look into the history of slavery in Canada. Continue reading this post…

The Sumner School + The American Poetry Museum + Cave Canem Foundation

Harrington, Janice N. Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone. Rochester: BOA Editions, 2007. 85 pp. $15.50 (paper).

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In Janice N. Harrington’s Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, memory is fleeting, constantly trying to fly away. How to pin it down, to gather it into a graspable reach, is then the challenge. What If we do not own or have access to that which we seek to remember: like family history or the stories of our long-ago loves that brought us here? Maybe there is something to be said in our inability to reach those stories through memory, that perhaps this seeming lack—or emptiness—offers us a chance to create, to recreate, to praise what is then created. With this collection, winner of the A Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and the Kate Tuft’s Discovery Award, Harrington creates a praise song to her past. Continue reading this post…

As is currently the case in many sectors, broadcast journalism is scrambling to figure out how to tap into and employ (and exploit . . . hey, it’s capitalism) new media and the public’s relationship to the developing formats. NBC News seems to have found a clue, if not an answer, in their new Digital Reporter Mara Schiavocampo. A Silver Spring, Maryland native, Schiavocampo took some time from her busy “have camera, will travel” schedule to answer a few questions from the road. Continue reading this post…