Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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The One Who Loved Is Not the One Who Betrayed: On “Severance,” Identity, and the Shifting Selves of Love
You remember your younger self’s devotion the way you remember a book you once loved: vivid, moving, but no longer yours.
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Critical Analysis
We’ve become vegan since moving to Oregon this fall for jobs as adjunct writing instructors, Norma from Chicago, where she’d had to flee “her Virgo stalker,” and me from New York. We’d both dropped out of PhD programs and received…
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On Poetry, Passing, and Trans Politics: A Conversation with J Brooke
“Do you know the Walt Whitman poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer?” Whitman is hearing this scientist spewing out all the facts and the figures and formulas. He gets all agitated, so he goes outside and looks up at…
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Making Revolution Beautiful: A Conversation with Sophie Lewis
“Without wanting to make things too neat, I think there is a continuity between projects insofar as maybe one could postulate the love letter is part negation of what kills us.”
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What Is Freedom: Imani Perry
Freedom is as freedom does.It was not in 1776, when Benjamin Franklin still bought, sold and owned peopleAnd Madison, and Jefferson and Washington too-And somebody whose name I don’t know in MarylandOwned my mother mother mother mother mother Esther.I come…
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50 of the Best Book Covers of the Year (So Far)
Book covers undeniably serve a marketing function. They are a way of drawing potential readers in and, hopefully, conveying valuable information about the book.
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Two Poems
Notes Toward the Great Floridian Novel I Ruth dusted the taxidermy alligatorwhere it stood menacing the front windowof her mother’s tourist trap shop in Alachua.Behind the gator hung Hawaiian shirts,other gators’ claws made into backscratchers,and American flag glass breakersin the…
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Born to Run: The American Road Trip Myth & Lauren Groff’s “The Wind”
There is a sinister breeze blowing throughout the story, like the big bad wolf that is always stalking the piggies and the sheep. It’s often lingering right outside the gates or behind the wall, sometimes breaking through, breaking ribs, bruising…
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Maintaining the Energy for Activism When You’re Struggling to Pay Rent: A Conversation with Jules Wernersbach
“So you’ve got this rat-a-tat-tat of things to do riding the wave of your own internal nonsense. That’s the natural tension of being a human being at work. My challenge as a writer is to make space for both in…
