[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). [...]

continue reading.....

[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 [...]

continue reading.....

[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, [...]

continue reading.....

[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 [...]

continue reading.....

[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 [...]

continue reading.....

[View Titles on Goodreads.com: pavlic -- douglas] 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 [...]

continue reading.....

[View Title on Press Catalog] 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 [...]

continue reading.....

Ryan, Kay. The Niagara River. Grove Press Poetry Series, 2005. 72 pp. $13.00 (paper). [View title on Goodreads.com] 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 [...]

continue reading.....

Harrington, Janice N. Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone. Rochester: BOA Editions, 2007. 85 pp. $15.50 (paper). [View title on Goodreads.com] 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, [...]

continue reading.....

One of the signature features of POST NO ILLS Magazine is our (Inter/Re)view where we invite two artists to sit down for a live conversation about one work, as there is something about the vulnerability and casual wisdom which comes through in a dialogue that is difficult to capture in a written review. For our [...]

continue reading.....