Cloistered
I can’t stop thinking about the nuns in Hollywood . . .
...more
A story is like a nomad: An Interview with Geetanjali Shree
We must return again and again to the whole issue of hegemony of the English language
...more
Language as Possibility: Renee Gladman’s Plans for Sentences
If 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 […]
...more
From the Archives: The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Bad Blood
To give blood in the United States today is like joining an elite, profoundly uncool, hyper-exclusive club.
...more
Learning from Grief: Claudia Putnam’s Double Negative
Among 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 […]
...more
When The Pipes Inspired the Poets: A conversation with the Boiler House Poets Collective
The 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.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Washed Clean
That’s when I noticed John the Baptist standing chest-high in the middle of the narrow, easy-moving river.
...more
Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Todd McKinney
Of course, it’d be wonderful to have / the Southern Hemisphere back.
...more
April Spotlight: Letters in the Mail
Our next Letter in the Mail comes from author Henriette Lazaridis, who writes to us about embracing slowness amidst hustle culture.
...more
Men Haunting Men: A conversation with Richard Mirabella
Maybe being haunted is just feeling something crooked nearby
...more
Insatiable Hunger: Wanting, edited by Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters
If I could not morph into a rescue dog doted on by childless lesbians, at least I could luxuriate in this anthology.
...more
From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: Even the Moon
When 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?
...more
Leave what you can, take the rest: An Interview with Idra Novey
Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.
...more
ENOUGH: Three Poems by Tenika Stallings
“On the Other Side of the Door,” “Left for Dead,” “The Double Cross”
...more
Migration and return: De’Shawn Charles Winslow on going back to West Mills
I 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
A Worn Violence: On Gabrielle Bates’ Judas Goat
[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.
...more
The Last Book I Loved: Took House
Wildness both compels and repels.
...more
The View from the Backstretch: Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch
Though 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.
...more
Rumpus Original Fiction: All This Will Be Underwater
I 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?
...more
Poets make the world huge: A conversation with Michael Wiegers of Copper Canyon
I 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
FUNNY WOMEN: Excerpts from George Eliot’s MiddleMuppet
“MEEEEEEEEEP!!!”
...more
Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by John A. Nieves
Balladeer 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 […]
...more
RUMPUS POETRY BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: WHY I WRITE LOVE POETRY IN A BURNING WORLD by Katie Farris
Our April 2023 Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection is Katie Farris’s Standing in the Forest of Being Alive
...more
The Freedom of Form & Re-Entering Myths: An interview with A.E. Stallings
Our 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.
...more
What to Read When Celebrating Black History
The Rumpus editors share a list of books to celebrate Black History Month
...more
Seas of Discourse: Zülfü Livaneli’s The Fisherman and His Son
people 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.
...more
Rumpus Original Fiction: The Litany of Invisible Things
The sound of love: you and him. Once upon a time.
...more
The page is the stage: An interview with Junious Ward
“If you’re gonna push form, you’ve got to really push it.”
...more
Voices on Addiction: The Churn
Nothing mattered but the churn.
...more
