Rumpus Articles - The Rumpus

Mystic-heretic-philosopher-poet Alina Ștefănescu’s newest collection of poetry, My Heresies (Sarabande 2025) is a radiant skirmish of families and selfhood, countries and allegiances, rules and refusals, and the force with which…

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Essays

Orientation

At the time, though, I couldn’t make much sense of anything. So I accepted everything with the detached nonchalance of a guy who has no idea what’s going on.

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A Donne for Our Times: on Deed by torrin a. greathouse

Worlds cannot be built from scratch, though, and many of greathouse’s poems find building blocks in existing works. These uses go beyond mere reference and reveal new resonances in even the most familiar sources

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What to Read When You Want to Destabilize the Binaries Between Good and Bad

Among the 14 “Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture” as outlined by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, are “Either/or Thinking,” “Fear of Open Conflict,” “Belief in One Right Way,” and “Perfectionism.”…

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The First Book

The First Book: Daniel Tam-Claiborne

I began writing Transplants in earnest in 2019 during the last semester of my MFA program. I had the truly great fortune of working with Lauren Groff who, when given the option between helping me touch up my existing short stories for my graduate thesis or advising me on a new project nearly entirely from scratch, wisely nudged me toward the latter.

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Fiction

Rumpus Original Fiction: The Red Zone

That night, when I confessed to never having used a tampon before, not having a mom around to explain it, Cami locked us both into a bathroom stall and showed me how.

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A Space of Her Own

Marcia LeBeau’s debut collection, A Curious Hunger, is a powerful testament to the unabashed wholeness of womanhood—and an assertion that our culture, where power skews cis male, needs to make…

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Essays

On Exteriority: David Szalay’s “Flesh”

After a few more one-liners, it becomes clear István is living in pandemic-era England (he vapes now, etc.) and trying to log on to a Zoom meeting with his therapist

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Poetry

Rumpus Original Poetry: Megan Pinto

The Doe Because of the rain, the meadowis empty. How quickly the trainvanishes this view. I press my ear to blank paper, hopingto hear you, waiting for a break in…

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Interviews

Divorcing Dad Rock from Gender and Genre: An Interview with Niko Stratis

I've developed my own framework for what I want dad rock to be. To me, it is a genre that is about people. I'm trying to approach it with very loose terms to not give away all my secrets, but a genre where the person who is making the music is not telling you what to do but is imparting some knowledge they have learned based on mistakes that they themselves have made

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What to Read When

What to Read When Your Ex Takes the Dog

Books helped me claw myself from bedrot. I dove into the page, and now have ten stories to thank for resurrecting me from my despondency. For helping me to feel again.

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Essays

Finding Baldwin

The books are on the floor, side by side. I begin to pick them up one by one. Lying beneath two old books is this one. The author’s name screams in white on a red strip at the top of the front cover.

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