My husband Joe is someone who turns on the television when he comes into the house and leaves it on as background noise even when he’s not watching it. I am someone who wouldn’t have a TV at all, if I could help it. But Joe is a firefighter and a hard-working man, and I try not to begrudge him whatever he needs to unwind. …more

When I was younger and lonelier and knew more about other people than I did about myself, I thought what I wanted was to be pretty. I thought of it as an existential status, pretty. I thought: if I know all the right lipstick shades and I can walk in heels that will be it. I will have checked off all the boxes. …more

While the personal narrative poems still maintain a steady voice here, they are interwoven with lyric landscapes, fragments of historical documents and redacted government files turned into clever erasures, and meditations on the dangers of scientific hubris.

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“She looks like a Babylonian Gorgon,” a reviewer once wrote of Alice Bag in a show review. Her then-band, the Bags, was at the forefront of the late seventies punk scene in Bag’s native Los Angeles.  …more

When I was five years old, my grandfather Irving Rosenthal, who lived in the Bronx, came out to California to visit us. One morning I asked him for a dollar. …more

To Yang, poetry is capable of communicating the consumed during. It is a “library tablet found underground,” whose immediacy is not buried by the passage of time.

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A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “Deep Trouble.”

Edited by Susan Clements. …more

In America, good dinner etiquette entails avoiding certain contentious topics, particularly politics. Whether it has more to do with possible digestive disorders developing from unpleasant –isms or a predilection towards harmonious dining, I do not know. …more

This is exactly what happens. An editor writes to say, “would you like to write for my publication? About being a Dad? Something interesting, please,” and being interesting sounds like a challenge you’re up for, …more

Week 39, Day 5

So it’s the middle of the night and I hear screaming. It’s the baby, trapped in E’s watermelon belly, and she’s not happy. Ear pressed to this taut flesh-bubble, I can’t tell if the little squib’s yelping “let me out” or “who fucking stuck me in here?” …more

Kristina Marie Darling’s is a shadow box collection of antiques, each holding other worlds and histories.

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On Christmas Eve, I arrange the carrot sticks on half of my mother-in-law’s narrow scalloped dish, stack pale ribs of celery on the other side.

Last time. …more

Hey ladyfriend, are you going through a breakup? Is your job really hard right now? Is your life nothing more than all-consuming darkness and regret? …more

In The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, Paul Russell imagines the life of the not-famous Nabokov and delivers a novel that lives outside the legacy. …more

Jeremy Thal, who serves as a band leader for Briars of North America, is one of my oldest friends. We took Suzuki violin lessons together in Madison, Wisconsin, and our first instruments were fruit roll-up boxes with rulers taped on them. …more

THE INVISIBLE MAN
★★★★★ (2 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing the Invisible Man. …more

James Vance Marshall’s 1959 book Walkabout tells a unique story of two stranded children who are rescued from the Australian outback by another young boy on a wilderness quest. …more

I moved to New York the week I turned twenty. I lived on the fifth floor of an East Village walk-up with a boyfriend I was too young to realize I shouldn’t have been with, and I got a job waiting tables in Union Square. A year and a half earlier, during my freshman year at a tiny liberal arts college in Vermont, my mother died of cancer. …more

An Epidemic of Hidden Fat – The Week headline, April 20, 2012
“A 55-year-old woman who looks great in a dress could have very little muscle
and mostly body fat, and a whole lot of health risks because of that.”
– Dr. Eric Braverman …more

Certain writers cast shadows of incredible length and darkness, and Yeats is one of them. His poetry has a way of crowding out the sun. As a teenager I fell for that poem of his that begins, “When you are old and grey and full of sleep,” and reminds its object that “one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.” It was the most romantic thing I’d ever read; how anyone could refuse this man was a mystery to me. …more

WEEk 39, DAY 5

Jesus, this fucking waiting! It’s like, if I were paranoid, I would actually be wondering if this baby-to-be kind of hates us. Or, more accurately, hates me. …more

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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Dita von Teese, burlesque superstar, author, actress, costume and lingerie designer, and formidable businesswoman, is idolized by many who might not otherwise fancy themselves enthusiasts of burlesque, let alone openly admire a star of “adult entertainment.” …more

Dear Sugar,

My mother left my father the month I was born. She remarried and had my brother two years later. My stepfather (the only father I knew) committed suicide when I was five years old. My mother became a raging alcoholic following his death. …more

Joseph Masheck’s lively new essay collection Texts on (Texts on) Art traces artistic influences from unexpected corners. …more

In December 2010, The Museum of the City of New York made available over 100,000 digitized images, many of which had never been seen publicly before. …more

WEEK 39, DAY 4

So, we’re back in the OB/GYN waiting room. Our baby still hasn’t come. The suspense, as they say, is killing me. …more

When I was young, my parents took our family to Haiti during the summers. For them, it was a homecoming. For my brothers and I it was an adventure, sometimes, a chore, and always a necessary education on privilege and the grace of an American passport. …more

A review of The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller — a live documentary by Academy Award-nominated director Sam Green, with performance by Yo La Tengo, Tuesday, May 1, 2012, at SFMOMA. …more

In this collection, Fisher focuses on the tensions of bringing a child into a world of war— of living your regular, daily experience while knowing that others die by violence, both down the street and across oceans.

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