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From Stephen Elliott
Looking for some awesome new books to read this summer? The Rumpus Book Clubs have some great new fiction, non-fiction and poetry selections lined up for members over the next three months. No matter the weather, beachy warmth to, well, whatever you call the middle of the year in San Francisco, and everything in between, here’s what you’ll have a chance to read if you’re a member of the Rumpus Book Club or the Rumpus Poetry Book Club.
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But grace is what I found in River Inside the River. Grace in abundance.
...moreRumpus Book Club and Poetry Book Club members have one great advantage over readers everywhere else: you get to read new work before anyone else (except some reviewers) gets to. (You can join at any time.) You get to talk about those books with a host of online members all during the month (around 350 between the two clubs) and best of all, chat with the authors online at the end of the month.
...moreApril Fools and the beginning of National Poetry Month? Seems like a killer day to us!
...more[April 1] marks the start of National Poetry Month, the monthlong celebration of the verse inaugurated in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. The April initiative aims to highlight the legacy and achievements of America’s poets, and is among the largest literary celebrations in the world.
This is an edited transcript of the Poetry Book Club discussion with Camille Guthrie.
...moreThe Book Clubs are rocking right now with this month’s selections, George Saunders’s Tenth of December and Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair, but there’s some great stuff on the horizon.
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These poems are not traps, but safe spaces with doors inside them.
...moreLet’s say that some months we wind up with an extra copy or two of our Book Club or Poetry Book Club selections. And let’s also say that, after a while, those extra copies start to take up a little space.
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The domesticated dog, evolved 15,000 years ago from gray wolves, is not a reliquary of slavish dependence in Book of Dog, Cleopatra Mathis’ seventh collection, nor is it a token of the bourgeois middle-class’s presumed benignity. It is as necessary to world ecology as the mice, ants, and moths that populate the collection, and possessed of a “plain language” that challenges not only the echo chamber of rhetoric, but the very conceit (the restaging of the spatio-temporal order) of the lyric poem.
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Camille T. Dungy on why she selected Book of Dog by Cleopatra Mathis for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club in November.
...moreBack in July of 2010, The Rumpus started a poetry version of its book club. Board member Camille Dungy selected Shane Book’s Ceiling of Sticks to start us off and we’ve never looked back. Here’s a rundown of the book club for potential members–what you’ll get and what you would have gotten if you’d been with us from the beginning.
...moreAnd we love you back.
While I’m at it, a little update news. Our current book is Kathleen Alcott’s The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets–Bookslut covered it here and said “It’s never simple, but if complicated is what produces a novel like this one, we should be grateful for the messy, the broken, and the quiet graces they birth, the camaraderie that can find us in even the most isolating of nightmares.”
We’re very excited to announce that our October book is Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins.
...moreRumpus Book Club members this month have been devouring Emma Straub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, and we’ll be chatting with Straub about her book this Wednesday night. Poetry Book Club members have been all over Mary Jo Bang’s new translation of Dante’s Inferno, and we’ll be chatting with her on Thursday.
...moreIf you’re a member of the Rumpus Poetry Book Club (and if you aren’t, here you go), then you should have received your copy of Leigh Stein’s Dispatch From the Future weeks ago. If, however, you are among the unfortunate people who had to actually wait for the book’s official release, then today is your day.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Rowan Ricardo Phillips about his poetry collection The Ground.
...moreThere is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
...moreCobalt Issue #4: Summer 2012 features an interview with our own Brian Spears.
Topics of conversation include his debut collection, A Witness in Exile, shifting roles in the writing world, The Rumpus Poetry Book Club, and poetry’s place in education.
“I don’t really care if someone makes a judgment about my life choices.
...moreThe Rumpus Book Club has been having a great time with this month’s selection, Elizabeth Crane’s We Only Know So Much, and the Poetry Book Club has been taking Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts with them everywhere. But we’re nearly halfway through the month.
...moreThe answer for me, in this case, is among a group of statues on the Drake University campus in Des Moines, IA. I’m reading from our June Poetry Book Club selection, Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts. I’ve posted video of this act in our new Facebook group for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Carmen Giménez Smith about her poetry collection Goodbye, Flicker.
...moreThere is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
...moreOur 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.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Linda Hogan about her poetry collection Indios.
That’s one hell of a birthday present, there. A Pulitzer Prize!
We’d like to point out that The Rumpus Poetry Book Club had an idea of just how awesome this book was even before it officially came out. Not that we’re bragging or anything.
...moreThere is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with D.A. Powell about his poetry collection Useless Landscape, or A Guide For Boys.
Rumpus Poetry Book Club Board Member Camille Dungy on why she chose Linda Hogan’s Indios as March’s selection.
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Aase Berg and translator Johannes Göransson about the poetry collection Transfer Fat. We are also joined this month by Garth Graeper of Ugly Duckling Presse, who published Transfer Fat.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
...moreA lot, really. First of all, we’re about to chat with Aase Berg and Johannes Gorannson about Berg’s book Transfer Fat It’s the first time we’ve done a translation, and we’re very excited to be able to talk with both the poet and the translator.
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