Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
-
Review: Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s “Boys Behind Glass”
This digressive style reminded me of a medievalist’s lecture I recently caught by accident—slipping into a nearly empty lecture hall, an unplanned digression of my own time. He was talking about the digressions in Beowulf, moments when the poem veers…
-
“At first, everything was just ugly and scary:” A Conversation with Amanda Quaid
That reminds me of my former student, the poet Max Ritvo, who had a great image about radiation being like a just-for-you soup can. He said the first time he heard the beam, he was like, “They made it just…
-
Who Deserves Your Compassion? A Conversation with Megha Majumdar
“Kolkata is one of the cities in the world which is most severely affected by climate change. It has grown hotter. It is predicted to endure more storms, and more severe storms. How does it feel to read that this…
-
Sunday Scaries: “The Lurking Kind”
“They were,” I said. “He was preparing them for when they grew up. He told them about this kind of monster that lurked in the shadows and was so dark that it couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. Its…
-
From “Crow’s Eye View”
Poem 1 13 children book it down the road.(a dead-end alley will do.) the 1st child says, scary.the 2nd child also says, scary.the 3rd child also says, scary.the 4th child also says, scary.the 5th child also says, scary.the 6th child…
-
National Poetry Month: Two Poems
Loyalty Oath Let evening winds carry a tsunami of scents to her sleep, and let him with a smile like a paperweight and a craggy face of bark find his way, let the back door of the flower truck passing…
-
Trauma, Healing, Radiant Transformation: A Conversation with Karen Malpede
“I wished to take readers with me where we are all afraid to go, into deep love, and into dying. I don’t offer solutions. This is not a “how-to” book for dealing with whatever. The experiences I write about have…
-
Constitutional Remedy
I won’t look right at him, but I will have noted that he’s wearing a sweater over another shirt, like always. That his hairline has receded even farther in the six or so years since I’ve seen him; the depth…
-
Books That Made Me Gay: “Spoiled Milk” by Avery Curran
The text opens with a charming dramatis personae introducing us to six living schoolgirls and one schoolgirl newly deceased. The dead girl is Violet Kirsch. On the night of her eighteenth birthday, Violet, this lithe and agile, dynamic girl, toppled…
-
National Poetry Month: From Of Pearl (a manuscript-in-progress)
Author’s Note: I am currently in the early stages of writing a book-length poem, Of Pearl. The book will take the form of several monologues, which intersect visually on the page and, at times, interact. One of the central voices…
-
On the Versatility, Physicality, and Morality of Verbs: A Conversation with Sarah L. Kaufman
“We can easily fall into more interiority—what a person’s thinking, how they’re feeling—but how revealing it can be to get them moving! Show us the character being a free spirit, or how they’re an introvert, how they’re observant, how they’re…
-
The Blood of My Women
Now that I am older, I realize how much shame has dictated my own life, from as far back as I can remember, permeating through every action I have taken or been encouraged to take, every memory that has persisted…