Cloistered
I can’t stop thinking about the nuns in Hollywood . . .
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...moreWe must return again and again to the whole issue of hegemony of the English language
...moreIf you look at any scripted sentence, especially written in cursive, without any concern for reading or meaning, what do you see? Something like looping lines scrawled on the page, strange glyphs making little drawings and patterns. There is a kind of open mindedness involved in this activity, a willingness to try to see what […]
...moreTo give blood in the United States today is like joining an elite, profoundly uncool, hyper-exclusive club.
...moreAmong the meanings of Claudia Putnam’s cryptic title is a mathematical one, based on the lower left quadrant of graphs; it is a meaning that she chooses, explicates, and explores from many angles. But negative infinity is much harder to get your mind around than the grammatical concept of the double negative, so a reader […]
...moreThe Boiler House held a magic, as it turned out, for all of us, with its sound installation clanging and pinging in the background, sun slanting through the pipes, pigeon feathers drifting, an occasional passerby pausing to listen.
...moreThat’s when I noticed John the Baptist standing chest-high in the middle of the narrow, easy-moving river.
...moreOf course, it’d be wonderful to have / the Southern Hemisphere back.
...moreOur next Letter in the Mail comes from author Henriette Lazaridis, who writes to us about embracing slowness amidst hustle culture.
...moreMaybe being haunted is just feeling something crooked nearby
...moreIf I could not morph into a rescue dog doted on by childless lesbians, at least I could luxuriate in this anthology.
...moreWhen you finished, several minutes passed before we spoke. You dipped a finger in a pool of candle wax. How could I know this was the only real secret you’d ever kept?
...moreEvery day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.
...more“On the Other Side of the Door,” “Left for Dead,” “The Double Cross”
...moreI was able to visualize my hometown so much more keenly, having not lived there in fifteen years. I believe it allowed me to write about the place with a little bit more compassion than if I had tried to write these books living there.
...more[T]here is a speaker who will simply persevere, who will, like “the heart trying to leave the chest,” keep going, and by keeping going, will tend always, though it’s sometimes hard, toward human connection. Toward love.
...moreWildness both compels and repels.
...moreThough this account is full of wounds, losses, and hardships, the Sonia who emerges herein speaks of them with the kind of sinewy, bracing directness you would expect of a complete stranger sitting across from you at the bar.
...moreI typed, Are you aging? Are you tired and worn? Do you spend all your time fretting about the fine lines on your face and how they foretell the slow and steady march toward death or, worse, that moment when the world will turn its eyes from your old & unbeautiful face?
...moreI don’t believe we come to nor travel through poetry alone . . . Rather than “social” I would instead encourage the word “communal”; the former sounds a little more performative and exclusive to my ear than does the latter, which sounds more like an invitation.
...more“MEEEEEEEEEP!!!”
...moreBalladeer Quatrains This slant-ass love song is for six storeys of cement and light and how it held every portable us blanket-swaddled against scattering. This is for the width of its spaces, slope of its ramps, the promise of a place to just stop for a while in a world full of […]
...moreOur April 2023 Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection is Katie Farris’s Standing in the Forest of Being Alive
...moreOur lives may seem to be lived on the small scale of the everyday but, because we are mortal, because ultimately everything is at stake, also play out against something universal and important.
...moreThe Rumpus editors share a list of books to celebrate Black History Month
...morepeople do not fight their battles in isolation between mountains of seawater or in a vacuum of hypermasculine idealism; they suffer together and sometimes apart with a thin connective tissue strung between them.
...moreThe sound of love: you and him. Once upon a time.
...more“If you’re gonna push form, you’ve got to really push it.”
...moreNothing mattered but the churn.
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