Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Listening to Ghosts, Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and the Ethics of Remembering
Toni Morrison’s Beloved arrives at its reader with the economy of a hush and the force of a storm. It is an argument written in the grammar of ghosts: sentences that are at once precise and porous, voices braided together…
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The First Book: Mariah Rigg
“Rejection can sometimes open doors to new ways of telling stories, comparison will only stagnate your writing. It will turn you away from the work that you need to create, the work that is entirely yours, and have you trying…
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Walking as a Pastime: Jason Allen-Paisant’s “Thinking with Trees”
Despite his struggle to assert himself, to feel belongingness in his adopted home, the poet concludes the collection with defiance and hope. In “Fear of Men,” he questions whether he must imagine “the trees dark at night” or “silhouettes rising,…
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The First Book: Eliana Ramage
‘You will write other novels…’ I find it affirming because (1) it quiets the worry that the first book has to say or hold everything, which no book can or should, (2) the word write.”
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Autobiomythography or Attending to What Memoir Excises: A Conversation with Lana Lin
My artistic practice includes making films, writing, and visual art. It’s driven by the same kinds of concerns around race, identity, and self-expression—and what it means to speak or to say something. In an interview [about] Dorothy, a publishing project,…
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Three Poems
my pussy hurts. Like it’s been kicked. Cunt feels too tough. It’d never admit to feeling pain. Vagina’s imprecise
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In Praise of Difficulty & Reading Toni Morrison: A Conversation with Namwali Serpell
“She saw the readers as a chorus, like the chorus in a Greek play, where the audience is part of the ensemble. She gives the example of when you’re in an audience in a musical performance—you’re shouting, clapping, and stomping…
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The Inheritance of Grief and Work: Abbie Kiefer’s “Certain Shelter”
Shelter becomes manifest for the speaker through place, particularly in towns devastated by the loss of industry. Through the setting of small-town Maine, Kiefer examines the way life is transformed after the closing of a town mill, and even more…
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Three Poems
Crumbs — all that’s left of my coffee cake. Plates clatter as they’re loaded in the dishwasher. Ashtrays on the bar. When Hopper painted Nighthawks he didn’t intend to evoke loneliness —a waiter, two men in suits, a woman considering…
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Synanthropia
The mouse moves casually, irrationally, like it is curious. It does not see me yet. It is fat and grey like a mutt is grey. The scream is unlocked, some pre-language gesture at speech. I investigate its texture. Not guttural…
