Emily Kendal Frey’s compact, laconic poems from her first collection, The Grief Performance, outwit, outlast, and, eponymously, outperform not only death, but failure, ennui, and despair.

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The book’s strongest moments are often its quietest, as when the complexity of the speaker’s engagement with himself and the world is repulsed or rerouted by automatic prompts and alienation. …more

Biddinger’s repeated returns to haptic perception as a legitimized approach to the divine, or a sense of peace or benediction, amounts to an aesthetic necessity, alongside the necessity of putting iconicity and holy writ in relationship with narrative, reality, and the arbitrary nature of violence, accident, and error. …more

The speaker of The Trees Around navigates the empty spaces on the page with as much deftness and resilience as he does the empty spaces in our universe (perceptual and actual). …more

The voice that animates The French Exit is smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn’t so much distort as endless “reveal,” like the panopticon eye of a camera. …more

Lina ramona Vitkauskas asks, and her collection stands as an intrepid answer, the question as to why haute couture, avant-garde and post avant-garde cinema, Derrida, and marine life should be at odds, offering her reader startling juxtapositions vis a vis an unmistakable voice that sounds out as often as it retracts in the act of listening. …more

Green’s debut collection American Fractal picks up where scientific discourse leaves off, exhibiting a rare display of confidence in this integral unity, as a metaphor for poetic practice, and as manifest in varying degrees in Nature, each individual, and humankind. …more

As with much French poetry, the idée fixe of King of a Hundred Horsemen concerns the problematics of desire, and several of the passages are so euphonic in the original that quoting from the translation may lessen the overall effect for a potential reader. …more

Many of the strongest poems in this poetical homage politicize Sylvia [Plath], showing her to be less a victim than a citizen of her time, whom history can misrepresent but not silence.

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The speaker of The King doesn’t play into the randomly generated poems and discursive ironies of her generation; she lifts the curtain to the production, exposing the history of language’s (and romanticism’s) disintegration.

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How do you supersize a Rumpus Original Combo? That’s easy—just take a book review and an interview with the author, and add a Rumpus Original Poem to it!

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In a place where names are lost like household objects, and white noise supplants meaningful distinctions between voices and people, why the need for singularity (or personhood) at all? …more

A post-romantic poet not content to wax sentimental on idealized Nature, a la Mallarmé, Andrew Michael Roberts has staked his tent in her decimated domain.
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