The Rumpus Poetry Book Club is finishing up this month’s book, Reginald Dwayne Betts’s incredible Bastards of the Reagan Era, and getting ready for our online chat with the author (my favorite part of the Rumpus Book Club experience), but I thought it would be nice to showcase what’s coming up in the next few months.
In November, we’ll be reading Shane McCrae’s new book, The Animal Too Big to Kill, out from Persea Books. Publishers Weekly says of this book “With his unmistakable cadences, he probes insistently yet big-heartedly into some paradoxes of belief and righteousness, confronting God from the quagmire of his upbringing: half-Black and raised by White supremacists.”
In December, we’ll be reading Philip B Williams’s Thief in the Interior, from Alice James Books, about which Adrian Matejka writes “Need is everywhere—in the unforgiving images, in lines so delicate they seem to break apart in the hands, and in the reader who will enter these poems and never want to leave.”
And in January, we’re reading Camille Rankine’s Incorrect Merciful Impulses, an incredible debut book from Copper Canyon Press. The press materials describe this book like this: “Rankine’s short, lyric poems are sharp, agonized, and exquisite, exploring themes of doubt and identity. The collection’s sense of continuity and coherence comes through recurring poem types, including ‘still lifes,’ ‘instructions,’ and ‘symptoms.'”
You can join by the month here or get a little break on the price and join for a year here. Treat yourself!
