November 2012
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“Book of Dog” by Cleopatra Mathis
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…
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“Melancholia (An Essay)” by Kristina Marie Darling
Kristina Marie Darling’s wonderful new book of poems, Melancholia (An Essay)—her fourth—is more than a collection of abandoned footnotes and glossaries (poetic constructs she has been mastering since Night Songs), it is a history composed entirely of an ex-lover’s curios—a…
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The New Sincerity
In a New York Times op-ed that’s been making its way around the internet, Christy Wampole asserts that irony is the ethos of our age. At The Atlantic, Jonathan D. Fitzgerald argues that she has it backwards. “All across the pop…
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Mary Todd Lincoln: The Controversial First Lady
Mary Todd Lincoln was no Jackie Kennedy. Although Mary Lincoln is often portrayed as being consumed by aristocratic airs, she hardly fit in with the upper-class. She spent hefty sums of money on custom tailored dresses to “look the part;”…
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The Rumpus Interview with Dr. Matthew McKay
Matthew McKay, writer and the co-founder of New Harbinger Publications, explores his transition from nonfiction to fiction writing, and looks closely at dissociative identity disorder and what it means to love someone with this and other mental illnesses.
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Glad We Got That One Sorted Out
Is humankind basically good or basically evil? Or does it vary too widely from person to person to generalize across the whole species? Well, some scientists took a look, and it turns out we’re good. So we can all stop…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver
After I finished reading “Wild Geese,” all I could think of was: So what! So what that I am an undocumented person living in hiding, so what that I was turned into a “criminal” when I was a child, so…
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Happy Baby Roundup
The Happy Baby Kickstarter campaign has 21 days to reach the $85,000 funding goal. You can make a donation here. ‘Like’ Happy Baby on Facebook! Stephen Elliott talks with a Happy Baby Kickstarter backer, Stacey Lewis of the legendary City Lights bookstore. You know we…
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The Rumpus Review of El Médico: The Cubatón Story
To be a doctor in Cuba is to live inside the swirl of history and politics that whooshes around the small Communist island at all times.
