Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
Patrick James Dunagan reviews Ana Božičević’s Rise in the Fall today in Rumpus Poetry.
...morePatrick James Dunagan reviews Ana Božičević’s Rise in the Fall today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreRobin Morrissey reviews Paul Hoover’s Desolation: Souvenir today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreMarisa Siegel reviews Carrie Olivia Adams’s Forty-One Jane Doe’s today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreIn Body Geographic, Barrie Jean Borich charts the route by which she came to be located in middle age, in the Midwest, and in long-term love with Linnea, a spouse who occupies the middle space of gender. Through jazz, photography, travel, sex, and lineage—including several generations of coffee pots—Borich tells of her individual journey towards full, adult consciousness, towards certitude of self and place.
...more“What we know about the undead so far is this: they return to the familiar.” Thus begins Bennett Sims’ debut novel A Questionable Shape. The subject matter of this brilliantly sensitive, whip-smart new novel is at first glance almost overbearingly familiar.
...moreWeston Cutter reviews Lauren Shapiro’s Easy Math today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreBarbara Berman reviews Joseph Ceravolo’s Collected Poems today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreI like Patricia Vigderman because she likes jickjacking. She describes in “A Writer’s Harvest”, an earlier piece in Possibility: Essays Against Despair, how the sight of that slangy word, in two distinct (but linked) stories—one by Mary Karr, the other by David Foster Wallace—motivate her toward personal tangents and pleasures.
...moreJason Storms reviews Dan Boehl’s Kings of the F**king Sea today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreAn Elegy for Mathematics, Anne Valente’s first full-length release, is a wonderful little book. Checking in at fewer than fifty pages, it’s a quick but deeply layered and poignant collection of material, most of which was previously published online. (She has a forthcoming story collection coming out from Dzanc Books.)
The collection is comprised of thirteen stories, mostly only a few pages in length.
...moreSome novels defy gravity, spanning years and crossing ruined landscapes and entire solar systems of characters while still maintaining an ethereal, almost impossible lightness. Anthony Marra’s debut novel is one of them, and it does indeed call to mind an astronomical marvel.
...moreOn the year anniversary of its publication, Anna March contemplates the impact Jürgen Fauth’s Kino made on her.
...moreJoe Winkler reviews the Collected Poems of Marcel Proust today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreAutumn Elizabeth reviews Henry Williams’s seasons smooth and unperplext today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreA multi-generation novel is a risky thing. What gives it that unity that distinguishes a novel from a book of linked short stories? How does an author handle the passage of time or the death of her protagonist as one generation cedes to the next and the next?
...moreJulie Marie Wade reviews Jan Beatty’s The Switching Yard today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreIf the theories in Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now are true, you may have a hard time finishing this review. In the interest of the perpetual now, I’ll cut to the chase: you should read this book.
...moreWhile a short story collection can be knitted together in a lot of different ways—character, theme, setting, subject matter or tone—how tightly it should be woven is less defined. Some collections are so knotted that all the life is wrung out of them.
...moreMichelle Salcido reviews Kelly Davio’s Burn This House today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreBrynn Downing reviews Nick Courtright’s Punchline today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreRichard Hell – underground poet, critic, and one of the chief architects of New York’s punk scene in the 1970s – begins his long-awaited autobiography with a snapshot of childhood in 1950s middle America: “Like many in my time, when I was little I was a cowboy,” he writes.
...moreJosh Cook reviews Patricia Lockwood’s Balloon Pop Outlaw Black today in Rumpus Poetry.
...more“It is the job of literature to confront the terrible truths of what war has done and continues to do to us,” novelist Colum McCann writes in the foreword for Matt Gallagher and Roy Scranton’s new collection of wartime short stories, Fire and Forget. “It is also the job of literature to make sense of whatever small beauty we can rescue from the maelstrom,” he continues.
...moreTova Gardner reviews Hadara Bar-Nadav’s Lullaby (with Exit Sign) today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreReleased from Coffee House Press in September 2012 and recently honored as one of four PEN/Faulkner Award finalists, Laird Hunt’s Kind One is a crushing and beautiful book. Taking place over the span of a century, 1830-1930, Kind One weaves together the lives of Linus Lancaster, his second wife Ginny, and his five farm and house hands, following how they brawl and bend from Indiana to Kentucky, through death and abuse, and into a future loaded with loss, defiance, and perseverance.
...moreKent Shaw reviews Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreWhen we are young every decision seems weighted with extra meaning. A teenager can trace the exact steps that lead from the missing of a ski trip to the life of an outcast. Not being allowed to date a certain boy means remaining single forever.
...moreOn August 3, 1846, the day Abraham Lincoln won election to his only term in Congress, the gangly, 37-year-old country lawyer was unknown outside his Illinois district. America was a country of 28 states, largely unsettled west of the Mississippi. Political divisions were framed by non-regional differences on economic issues—tariffs, the national bank, the federal government’s role in infrastructure—much as it had been since the party system first developed 50 years before.
...more