The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Achy Obejas
Achy Obejas discusses her new collection, The Tower of the Antilles, what she's learned from translating works of others, and why we should all read poetry every day. ...more
Posts Tagged: poetry
A Poethead’s Guide to the Galaxy: Talking with David Hernandez
David Hernandez discusses his most recent poetry collection, Dear, Sincerely, working across multiple genres, and why the act of making anything is a kind of optimism. ...more
Rumpus Original Poetry: “PatRIOT” by Xavier Cavazos
When all gods are dead & Allah means the same as Christ on the Cross / & Christ on the Cross means the same as detonation— ...more
Why I Chose Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s Rocket Fantastic for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s third collection, Rocket Fantastic, is a beautiful book which asks the reader to live in a world where gender and language are both fluid and linked together in a dance which swings, sways, and surprises at every turn.
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At the Intersection of Personal and Political: Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now edited by Amit Majmudar
American writers have a long, distinguished history of calling out injustice. ...more
Beauty Undercut by the Possibility of Terror: Afterland by Mai Der Vang
Precariousness is an essential condition of life for the people who populate Vang’s poems, especially the Hmong refugees on whom the poet’s eye most lovingly lingers. ...more
#SuicideGirls: Why I Teach Sylvia Plath
But let’s not forget: feminism is, at least in part, about choice, and portions of life are play, not politics. Play and relationships and creativity and whatever we want. ...more
Rumpus Original Poetry: “Mewl” by Sarah Lyn Rogers
Still, something tells me God’s chosen // weren’t hate-mongering gropers (or worse). Just a hunch. A woman’s / intuition. ...more
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 15): “Southern History”
We can’t hide from our history and we can’t pass it on to future generations. ...more
On the Front Lines
When you pick up a pen instead of a rifle, you’re fighting an entirely different battle. This is my duty. This is my patriotism. ...more
Color Is a Language in Itself: Mahtem Shiferraw Discusses Fuchsia
Mahtem Shiferraw discusses her debut collection, Fuchsia, how she uses color to understand the world and to communicate, and why her work continually addresses displacement. ...more
Reclaiming the Language of Pop Culture: Reversible by Marisa Crawford
Marisa Crawford’s Reversible is an evocative collection, showcasing the ways in which pop culture saturates us with meaning, and how it teaches us to become. ...more
A Funny Inevitability: In Conversation with Siel Ju
Siel Ju discusses her debut novel-in-stories, Cake Time, the difference between our online selves and real-life selves, and who she hopes will read her work. ...more
What Is Being Charted Here?: Talking with Jennifer S. Cheng
Poet and essayist Jennifer S. Cheng discusses her collection House A, working "in the dark," and the idea of home. ...more
The Impossible Question: Vagrants & Accidentals by Kevin Craft
How are we to live when loss—personal, environmental, and political—is heaped upon loss? ...more
VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Lisa Factora-Borchers
Lisa Factora-Borchers talks about being a Catholic feminist, writing across genres, and pushing back against a singular narrative about New York. ...more
(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Kirsten Irving
The pressure to prove ourselves can have a distorting effect, causing us to doubt our instincts in favor of following others we perceive to be experts or “genuine.” ...more
Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Eileen G’Sell
At best, life is hard. / At worst, life is easy. / I believe it is true. / I would like to believe / I believe it is true. ...more
Why I Chose Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s Interrupted Geographies for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
I still remember the time many (many) years ago, as an undergrad, when my professor dropped Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and Sir Walter Ralegh’s response on the class and launched into a discussion of the pastoral tradition.
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Earnest, Funny, and Fun: Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities
What makes Chen’s poetry so exhilarating is that these poems always have a center of gravity—the self—that keeps the many subjects they explore in orbit. ...more
Poetry That Makes You Nearly Miss the Plane: The Complete Works of Pat Parker edited by Julie R. Enszer
In other words, sometimes we need to be jolted out of our predictable behaviors and routines. We need the kind of reading that scatters us, pulls and weaves our cerebral, emotional, and visceral chains. ...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #87: Kai Cheng Thom
Rarely is birth silent for anyone involved. Silence, instead, is a learned phenomena. Unlearning silence can become its own birth, as it seems in Kai Cheng Thom’s debut poetry collection a place called No Homeland, opening with, “diaspora babies, we are born of pregnant pauses.” Pausing for readers to meet her at this natal location of identity and origin, Thom finds traces of her voice scattered across a map of a place she’s constantly retracing.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 14): “Some Grass Along a Ditch Bank”
...being on the edge of the natural world is like being on the edge of time. ...more
Controlled Burns: Meadowland Take My Hand by Pamela Hughes
It's old news that there’s poetry in decomposition, but welcome news that Jersey has such an astutely musical young voice. ...more
An Ambitious Atlas of Fears: Catherine Pierce’s The Tornado Is the World
Pierce’s poems approach danger from surprising angles. Do you fear the tornado? Then come inside it and hear it speak. ...more
On Grief and Inheritance: A Conversation with Brionne Janae
The poet Brionne Janae discusses her debut poetry collection After Jubilee, intergenerational trauma, and writing her way into historical personae. ...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #85: Elizabeth Metzger
I have known the poet Elizabeth Metzger since kindergarten—and ever since I have known her, she has been a poet. When we played the The Game of Life, a board game, she wrote small lyrics about the futures we ended the game with; when I had a crush, she wrote light verse about the boys I swooned over; when I was reading Redwall and Lord of the Rings, she was reading Emily Dickinson.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 13): “Letter to Simic from Boulder”
"Wherever you are on earth, you are safe,” writes Richard Hugo. Really? ...more
The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #29: Poetry Is an Affliction
On Thursday night, May 25, an amazing event will take place outside a BART train station in the Mission District of San Francisco, as it has every Thursday night for the past fourteen years.
If you were to pass by, you might not even notice what is taking place.
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A Very Great Scoundrel: The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volume III: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks
In hindsight, it’s sometimes difficult not to read more than a bit of sadomasochism into Hopkins’s inner passions and the ways in which he resisted them. ...more