Rumpus Original Poetry: Four Poems by Maggie Smith
What do we do? We birth the new citizens / & answer their bodies with our bodies. // We rock the new citizens to sleep. / We clothe them with skin & stamp // their passports with milk. ...more
Posts Tagged: poetry
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Gabrielle Calvocoressi discusses her new collection Rocket Fantastic, the fluid nature of gender, and the reader as collaborator with the text. ...more
Why I Chose Kamilah Aisha Moon’s Starshine & Clay for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
A look at next month's Poetry Book Club selection. Subscribe today! ...more
Let Us Be Singing Fools: Norman Finkelstein’s The Ratio of Reason to Magic: New & Selected Poems
If poetry is to remain a bulwark against the flagrant coarseness and cruelty at work in this moment of history, Norman Finkelstein’s work belongs right here with us. ...more
Visitations: Gwendolyn Brooks at One Hundred
A visitation is how I describe the past weeks walking with Gwendolyn Books. It is like she is just around every corner. ...more
A Tour de Force of Grief: Sun & Urn by Christopher Salerno
The winner of the 2016 inaugural Georgia Poetry Prize, Sun & Urn is gloomy and luminous, nostalgic and hopeful, moribund yet brimming with life. ...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #100: Jennifer Colville
From the tender age of eight, Jennifer Colville has known herself to be a visual artist. ...more
Rumpus Original Poetry: Four Poems by Elizabeth Schmuhl
I am the storm in my front porch and I am moving, / a threat to this home and everything in it. ...more
Coursing Byways and Biographical Thoroughfares: Karin Roffman’s The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life
I’ve long found that when reading Ashbery’s poetry it’s easy to lose track of just who the poet is. ...more
Words as Events: A Conversation with Jeff Wood
Jeff Wood discusses The Glacier, his genre-bending book combining novel, poetry, screenplay, and collage, how heritage has become a brand, and the American Midwest. ...more
Radiant with Terror: Lowell and the Uncertain Country of Love
I found comfort in the way that Lowell’s poems frequently explore the landscape of mental illness and blur the lines between the self and the world. ...more
Finding the Finally: Alice Anderson Discusses Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away
Alice Anderson on her memoir, Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away, drag, and motherhood. ...more
Glimpsing the Colors of the World: Nancy Chen Long’s Light Into Bodies
As a white mother of biracial children myself, this book became for me an opportunity to glimpse, for a moment, the colors of the world, and of skin, as my children might. ...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #98: Nicky Nodjoumi
Though some readers of The Rumpus may not have heard of Nicky Nodjoumi, in his native Iran he has achieved the status of a rock star. ...more
Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Dean Rader
Let’s admit it: we have all been vacillating between hindrance and drawback, / but that doesn’t mean our languor is our own. ...more
Entering an Open Doorway: Marjorie Agosín’s Las Islas Blancas / The White Islands
Agosín’s poems, though quiet and seemingly simple, linger with an interior elasticity that does not break. ...more
Why I Chose Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
When I read one of Kaveh Akbar's poems, I often find myself entranced by the beauty of his lines and marveling at how both the lines and the poems contain incredible strength in seeming delicacy. ...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #97: Peg Alford Pursell
Peg Alford Pursell discusses SHOW HER A FLOWER, A BIRD, A SHADOW, openness, brevity, lyricism, and the benefit of dwelling in our emotions. ...more
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Iris Dunkle
Iris Jamahl Dunkle on her new collection Interrupted Geographies, writing against the pastoral tradition, the power of persona poems, and the town of Pithole. ...more
The Possible Absence of a Future: Talking with Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham discusses her latest collection, Fast, the terrifying destruction of our planet, a happy formal accident, and how to live in times of world crisis. ...more
Fighting the Erasure of Poet Liu Xia
Liu Xia is a Chinese poet. Her husband, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Laureate and dissident, died recently in prison. Liu Xia, who has been under strict house arrest for ten years, remains unable to speak or travel freely. Friends who have tried to contact her have failed.
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A Reluctant Chronicling: Natalie Shapero’s Hard Child
“I typically hate discussing the past,” the speaker admits in the title poem, “Hard Child,” then a few poems later, a little more defensively—“I swear to God I hardly think of the past." ...more
Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Frank X Walker
But I am not trading in fear. / I am only afraid / that they have been in captivity / so long they won't recognize my scent. ...more
In Between the In-Between: Talking with Jenny Zhang
Jenny Zhang discusses her story collection Sour Heart, trying to escape the past, collective versus individual responsibility for trauma, and love as imprisonment. ...more
More Than Vicarious: Conflation and ALOHA / irish trees
In this intimate, auditory format, you can hear the poets’ pages crinkling as they turn them—such a reassuring sound—turning pages instead of scrolling screens! ...more
Both Beauty and Horror: Water & Salt by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Tuffaha harnesses the legerdemain of lyric to link love and grief, anger and hope. ...more
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
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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