Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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“Full Throttle from the First Sentence:” A Conversation with Ivonne Lamazares
“Many of us go through similar experiences, where the foundations of our lives and family dynamics collapse. These situations force us to come face to face with the instability of self-narratives, family structures, and personal identities. I’m enormously curious about…
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Grief Makes Nothing Happen
We all recognize certain types of loss. If we’re fortunate, we take bereavement leave from our jobs, perform the pre-made grieving rituals. But we also know these aren’t the only losses, nor are they always the worst ones. Surely you…
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Clutching to Community Over Contemporary Culture
The ways in which the group will support one another …defines how friendship can stand in direct rebellion to societal status quo
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Four Poems
Once I read the best poem ever and dropped the book in the tub. Don’t say I’m not willing to risk it all for love. I pulled the book out sopping wet and read it anyway the pages translucent as…
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In the Land of Beauty and Illness: A Conversation with Eshani Surya
“One of the reasons that I’ve allowed my book to exist in so many genre containers is because I’ve often felt like my own life is simultaneously a coming-of-age story, along with a surreal fabulist story, along with a medical…
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Poems Are Really for People Who Don’t Read Them: on Patricia Smith’s “The Intentions of Thunder”
Ten chapters, if you will, demarcate a full life of writing, storytelling, and keeping history. Each section opens with a prelude—an interface with the interior of a poet reviewing the lens through which the work was made then and how…
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Garth Drunk
Because we had, during previous hang-outs in bars, gotten thoroughly obliterated drinking beer after beer, and because we had drunkenly parsed the emo-pop/punk divide and the boys had gotten into a good natured emo-pop/punk fight that soured, and because they’d…
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Two Poems
today, a man embarrassed himself: why don’t you write a poem about it? he said, voice interrupted by guffaws as i walked by, tired of being caught between humans, uninspired by a conversation about the fda and medical technology.
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Stick a Clock in Me I’m Pregnant
The subject of when to have kids haunted Matt and me for about one year. For me, it always came down to career success. I couldn’t imagine being happy as a mother without publishing at least one book. I’d resent…
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Harpooning the Self: “Moby-Dick,” Fatphobia, and the Monomaniacal Pursuit of Control
But in our culture, it must be subdued, extracted, and of course sold. Their podcast has saved me in numerous ways these past years. Each morning, driving to my job at a small high school in the deep South, I…
