POST NO ILLS Magazine

09/20/2018

Next Up. Now Up:

Our review of Barbara Jane Reyes' INVOCATION TO DAUGHTERS.

All fill, no ill.

Barbara Jane Reyes’ fifth poetry collection Invocation to Daughters (City Lights, 2017) is a missal for Filipino women, one that uses Western poetic forms to utter an unapologetically transnational feminist poetics. In this collection, Reyes pushes against Spanish and American influences, the two ...

08/26/2018

Review Update: 07/25/2018

Our review of POST TRAUMATIC HOOD DISORDER, the 2018 sophomore collection from David Tomas Martinez / Sarabande Books.

Fitting in, however defined, is a complicated and universal part of life. Whether it be entering a specific community, a job, or something more individual, many feel the pangs of nervousness before we know whether we belong. But what happens after one has entered that space? When one crosses the lin...

08/26/2018

Review update, 08/25/2018

"A Mind Unwinding, Rewinding"--a review of P. Scott Cunningham's debut full-length collection YA TE VEO from University of Arkansas Press.

Ya Te Veo by P. Scott Cunningham begins with the poem “Giles Corey.” This poem retells the story of a victim of the Salem witch trials who is executed by pressing, or slowly laying increasing weight on the victim until they die. During the poem, the townspeople continue placing more and more sto...

06/10/2018

New on POST NO ILLS:

"Man Making Tales"
A Review of Jamel Brinkley's Debut Collection A LUCKY MAN

03/19/2018

An Open Letter to the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities Regarding the Selection of The District of Columbia’s Next Poet Laureate

01/04/2018

NewestLatest for the New Year: A D.C. crosstown review of recent books by Sarah Browning and Kim Roberts.

Roberts, Kim. The Scientific Method. Cincinnati: Word Tech Editions, 2017. 104 pp. $19.00 (paper). [view title on press page]

11/10/2017

New on PNI: "Of Place, Color, and Abdel Halim Hafez: A Review of Safia Elhillo's THE JANUARY CHILDREN"

04/23/2016

New illin'.

From the start, Phillip B. Williams’ Thief in the Interior situates the reader in sensorial language both abject and beautiful, horrific and tender. Leading with salt, sweat, breath, the body’s automatic excretions; threading in “a great system of clouds” (1), water, dew; injecting blood, earth, the…

01/06/2016

Happy No Ills!

Our first of the year:
"Seeing Secrets: A Review of David Nicholson’s Long-Awaited Debut FLYING HOME" by Brian Gilmore
http://www.postnoills.com/main/?p=1005

"FLYING HOME presents stories from the “secret city,” that part of Washington D.C. (or the scattered components and history) chronicled by historian Constance McLaughlin Green in her 1969 book SECRET CITY: A HISTORY OF RACE RELATIONS IN THE NATION'S CAPITAL. That history is the city’s relationship to its black citizens, many of whom Nicholson pays tribute to here with a series of colorful tales about ordinary people."

09/26/2015

Newest Latest

"[Beth] Bachmann’s newest collection, DO NOT RISE, continues the poet’s interest with the interior landscapes of trauma, but the bodies have moved. Instead of train tracks, Bachmann shows rusted oil d***s, fields of dead animals and dead men, a garden filled with 'a hundred hummingbird drones,' as she writes in '(army) trumpeter (flower)' (pg. 49). This is the painted interior of post traumatic stress—the fallout of our desert wars."

Beth Bachmann’s 2009 collection of poems, Temper—her debut—is a fascinating book: a true-life murder mystery twisted with familial tragedy, pressed down on all sides by the dark and rich presence of a lyric interior. The facts of the case seem clear, but the lyric imagination of Temper is anything b…

09/18/2015

New on PNI:
A Personal Reflection on Ta-Nehisi Coates' National Book Award Nominated BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME.

"I believe those times together and since, enabled me to fully understand my friend and comrade. He is a realist as a writer and is guided at least partially by Richard Wright’s “naturalist tradition.” He does not drink from the cup of empty idealism, though, like James Baldwin, he believes deeply in humanity."

“It is important that I tell you their names,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of the poets who influenced him in his standout book Between the World and Me. “That you know,” he continues, “that I have never achieved anything alone.” One of those “older poets” he names is Brian Gilmore, a fixture of the bur…

06/19/2015

NEW ON PNI

"I have always been particularly drawn to the aspect of Black feminist thought that has been about reassuring Black women that we aren’t imagining things. That we haven’t lost our minds. Giving real historical context to Black women’s embodied experiences can be helpful, but it is a double-edged sword."
~Bettina Judd, Author of PATIENT

There might be an quiet expectation for a debut poetry collection to serve as a charming introduction to the world of the author, but, even if poetry aspires towards serving as a venue for sincerity and vulnerability, it is an act of bravery for a poet to begin her or his career with a collection ro…