The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
The first time I read Allison Benis White’s Small Porcelain Head, I was screening manuscripts for a book prize on my honeymoon. Admittedly, it’s an odd way to celebrate nuptials, but I thought I might read some of the manuscripts during afternoons on the beach.
...more
Used well, the collective perspective affords the poet a wider voice, a surer sense. The reader feels present in these moments of ruin, trusting even the more fantastical occurrences.After the Plantation Fire
We buried the bodies and danced—we had to.
Beneath the sagging porch, generators roared,
mosquitoes sated themselves on wild dogs, boats
approaching us from the river loaded with soldiers
Under Brimhall’s deft attention, the historical becomes personal, and the personal skirts the mythological.
In 2009, Traci Brimhall won the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award for her collection Rookery. Rumpus Contributor Evan J. Peterson interviewed Brimhall for this half of what we call a Rumpus Original Combo