Posts Tagged: Rumpus Reviews
From Exuberant Hanging Gardens
Leslie Williams is a fine poet, skillful and smart. She takes a range of topics I find by themselves repelling or uninteresting (suburban life, nature, flowers, gardening, Thomas Jefferson, the American South, etc.) and makes them compelling; she demands my attention because she is such an attentive writer.
...moreMonkey Bars
The result of Lippman’s perpetual contentiousness is a collection that is confrontational in the best sense of the word, interrogating the reader, himself, and America pretty much as a whole about child-rearing, over-medication, racism, consumerism and whatever else you’ve got.
...moreI Know My Brother In the Mirror
Michael Klein’s then, we were still living is a thoughtful, emotional book that treats death in a fresh, even endearing way.
...moreThings That Work Are Muffled and Mute
Through rigorous consideration, with patient generosity, Valerio Magrelli’s poetry allows all his subjects—broken machines, utterances, each of us—to be our own streets, and in such a transfixing world, a circle closes around Kant: things can be both means to an end and ends in and of themselves.
...moreSoften the Razor’s Edge, the Reign of Terror
Many poems, and many more lines, couplets and quatrains in Opal Sunset are superb, making their lesser companions wan imitations of what Clive James can really do when his interior editor and his varied gifts unite.
...more10 Mississippi
This book is seductive because, page by page, poem by poem, 10 Mississippi is cyclic and aswirl, is… as flowing and eddying as the river of the title.
...moreA Dialogue at the Core of Her Being
In No Surrender, Ai successfully blends personal autobiographical poems with her trademark dramatic monologues, making for a truly original text—a kind of personified hybridity—that is both haunting and humorous
...morePastries, Cowboy Music / That Kind of Shit
Reading, and re-reading these poems, you’ll find lines which are so outrageous, hilarious, and true that they get lodged in your head, like songs; and, you’ll find yourself quoting the poems to others, because they seem so apt in their ungainliness.
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What We Hack Up We Can Choke Down
It is Zweig’s essential Vermont-y-ness that makes her indispensable. The charm and beauty of those green mountains and isolation and mud seasons of that terrain is applied thickly in these poems.
...moreWhere I Live
Maxine Kumin’s poems about the specifics of life on the farm with family, and relationships to fish, fowl, horse and vegetable matter, not to mention lovely liquids and unappealing solids, are consistently satisfying and sometimes deliciously entertaining.
...moreHolding Company
In Holding Company, his third collection of poems, Major Jackson achieves the difficult feat of writing a book that feels simultaneously both intensely personal and yet also archetypally American.
...moreWhen I Go Outdoors, Light Splits
The poems in This Noisy Egg are always engaging and hold the reader’s attention, but they do not feel un-tethered or dangerous. Reading them, I had the sensation that there was little room for what Stanley Kunitz called “wilderness,” the part of the poem that appears to write itself, unhinged from the fantasies and illusions of the Writer.
...moreBody Odor Can Be a Room
In individual poems, small series of interconnected poems, and in the book as object, Mairéad Byrne has made in The Best Of (What’s Left Of) Heaven a map that covers every kind of topographical feature.
...moreWho’s There
In Knock Knock, Hartley has accomplished a humor hat-trick, netting jokes a) in poetry, b) while evoking multiple cultures and c) in multiple languages. Hartley’s comedy is in the absurdity of the details, whether sensory or linguistic.
...moreTwo Threads
Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems is best appreciated not for its message or its drama, but for its expert way at guiding a reader through the writer’s lively imagination.
...moreIt Begins to Look Like Courtesy
Carl Phillips is a masterful maker of sweet visual dances that are never cloying.
...moreWe Rise In the Bulbs of Night
Organized into five “acts,” Slaves to Do These Things is, ostensibly, theatrical in terms of its development—though the dramatic action isn’t always quite clear. That’s alright. Mystery plays are rare at present.
...moreTinkering With the Closed Box
It Ninja-Stars Me
The voice that animates The French Exit is smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn’t so much distort as endless “reveal,” like the panopticon eye of a camera.
...moreBetween Good and Bad, Right and Wrong
James Longenbach’s fourth book of poems, The Iron Key, feels like it has itself arrived from a different era. It oozes nostalgia for the many charms of Venice, the complexities of Greek myths, and the ethereal pleasures of opera and poetry that is, paradoxically, both old-fashioned and refreshing.
...moreThe Range of Your Amazing Nothing
Lina ramona Vitkauskas asks, and her collection stands as an intrepid answer, the question as to why haute couture, avant-garde and post avant-garde cinema, Derrida, and marine life should be at odds, offering her reader startling juxtapositions vis a vis an unmistakable voice that sounds out as often as it retracts in the act of listening.
...moreMortal Geography
Alexandra Teague’s charted worlds range from the exotic to the quotidian, from Tikal to a San Francisco classroom.
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