[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). [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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[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 [...]

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[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, [...]

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VISIT THE DC PLACE

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Reviewed By Nijla Mumin Mississippi Damned (2009) [ Movie Website ] Written and Directed by Tina Mabry Runtime: 120 Minutes

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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 [...]

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[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 [...]

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[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 [...]

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