We’re excited to announce August’s selections for the Rumpus Book Club and Poetry Book Club!
In the Book Club, we’ll be reading Michael Helm’s After James, a novel “in three parts, each gesturing toward a type of genre fiction: the gothic horror, the detective novel, and the apocalyptic. Science and art become characters, and secrets form, hidden in the codes of genetic sequences, poems, and the patterns of political violence. Part to part, elements repeat otherworldly weather, disturbing artwork, buried corpses and amid these echoes, a larger mystery arises, one that joins artifice to nature, and fiction to reality, delivering us into the troubling wonder of the present world.”
In the Poetry Book Club, we’ll be reading Monica Youn’s Blackacre. Brenda Shaughnessy says these are “poems so sharp and fine they cut deep past the body or the self or the mind—they’re needles of rain carving out a canyon. Death is as close as birth, and as far. Youn dazzles with her enigmatic loopholes—the taut noose, the elusive umbilicus, the Möbius qualities of longing and lack and love—which shadow or shape who we are, and what can be called ours.”
You can join the book clubs here and still receive this month’s books, as well as take part in the exclusive chats with the authors at the end of the month.
