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personal narrative poems still maintain a steady voice here, they are interwoven with lyric landscapes, fragments of historical documents and redacted government files turned into clever erasures, and meditations on the dangers of scientific hubris.

…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.

…more

Our April poet, Carmen Giménez Smith, was featured on NPR’s NewsPoet series. (NewsPoet has featured Rumpus Poetry Book Club poet and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith as well.) Check it out.

And if you’d like to become a member of the Poetry Book Club–we’re talking about Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s collection The Ground right now–click here.

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.

…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.

…more

Vol. 1 Brooklyn converses with Michael Robbins about his recently released poetry collection, Alien vs. Predator. Other topics of discussion include his hatred of Mississippi, Dadaism, suberversion in music, Occupy, and the police.

“The stuff that interests me is dangerous, and it’s not always designed to suggest the proper ameliorations, you know. Art is contradiction. It’s not something that’s going to conform to our nice, liberal values.”

Time

is a curve

with a caveat. …more

Tanning’s poetry is as unique as the artwork she’s produced over the years. It’s real and vibrant, even at the end of her life. This last book of poems is a simple treat – an embrace.

…more

At her best Lehmann exhibits a depth of sympathy and uncertainty paired with keen observation.

…more

Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans is a reissue of an anthology first published in 1975. Sacred Clowns won’t jump off the pages, but you will be reminded whose land you may be parked on—if you arrived after Columbus, that is.

…more

This brings us to the end of our National Poetry Month project, one poem short of a sestina’s worth. We close out this year with a poem by Mary Jo Bang, whose forthcoming translation of Dante’s Inferno will be our Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection for the month of August. You can find links to all the poems we’ve run during this project here. Thanks for reading along with us this month.

A Room In Cleopatra’s Palace

Flies and a fan and a pillar
in this or that arch of the empire. …more

Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog, reports that poet Joshua Clover and 11 students at UC Davis are potentially facing a $1 million fine and up to 11 years each in prison. Their crime? Peaceful protest.

A petition is circulating which demands that UC Davis drop all charges, and if I hear about any other plans to pressure the UC Davis administration, I’ll update this post to reflect them.

Well I got to keep it going keep it going full steam.

Two Lyrics from “Rondo”

The boys pawing the ground are horses.
They will drag you between them.
Come, give them your arms! …more

Was National Poetry Month over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

The Lover’s Field Guide to Lesser Coinage

There are eight stycas in a penny, two pennies in a farthing, three farthings in a nearthing, and eight nearthings in a positutely. …more

So maybe you’re following our National Poetry Month project and you want to know who else is going to be featured. You’re following, right? I mean, sure you get the tweets from Rumpus Poetry and The Rumpus, and you regularly check the Rumpus and Rumpus Poetry Facebook pages, but what you really want, what you yearn for, is a link list of this month’s poems, updated daily.

I’ve got what you need. …more

In restoring the words of Jesus to their rightful poetry, and making an excellent case for this necessity, Barnstone brings their music, passion, ethics and intellectual rigor into a more complete view.

…more

We decide when National Poetry Month is over.

A Double Sestina on Happiness

Part 1:

I should never be happy, the Samsung Chairman’s eldest daughter Eunhee thought
as she picked up a capsleeved dress in Seoul’s only Marni boutique, and paid …more

Don’t miss this poem from Sherman Alexie’s forthcoming collection, Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories.

“Until he became an elephant, Sheldon referred to his left hand as ‘my hand’ and to his right hand as ‘my brother’s hand.’”

Because thirty days just isn’t enough National Poetry Month for us.

Death is a Hysterical Dynasty

Tonight we shall read from my personal book of lamentations,
sit shiva in a room lit with those overly perfumed candles as thick
as the aluminum bat I used just last week to flip away the possum
carcass I’d found collapsed against the house. Forensics tell us …more

Her new collection’s… perspectives are varied but unified by intense focus, much like the eyes of bees. Hive is a word that recurs, and the nervous energy of the poems gives the reader a non-alcoholic buzz.

…more

No tyrannical calendar will define National Poetry Month for us!

Carpal Seeple

I want to get Augustan
pass the mustard
make it matter make it …more

We’re never satisfied with the thirty days that April allots us for National Poetry Month, so we’re extending it a bit. Enjoy!

Zoo

Unbridled, the sick pony
traverses listlessly a circle. …more

Howell surprises by not trying to surprise at all…. Once a reader takes these poems on their terms, the poems become really intricate and beautiful.

…more

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Linda Hogan about her poetry collection Indios. …more

We’re never satisfied with just the 30 days that April offers for National Poetry Month, so we’re keeping it going for a little while longer.

Machine Song

I Xerox what I need to keep
(a sheaf of papers, taxes, real estate),
everything that once was ours. …more

Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April.

From “Sungone Noon”

One raised
goats; …more

Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April.

A Children’s Story

One snowflake was a lantern, the other
a shellfish. They were unnatural enemies. …more

The promised west in The Oregon Trail IS The Oregon Trail is an amalgam of bootstrap romance, wilderness bordered by suburban sprawl, death, and the ferocity of natural processes.

…more

Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April.

Nine Out of Ten Dentists Agree I Am Not an Octopus

I think I am an octopus.
Nine out of ten dentists agree
that I am not an octopus. …more

It’s the project of the impossible, then, that makes Yau’s new collection so provocative and provoking, so worth reading, even for a reader’s or poet’s temperament that might be different from Yau’s.

…more