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Rumpus Articles
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A Cacophony of Crowns: “cells, fully differentiated” by Kinsey Cantrell
Before venturing into Cantrell’s poetic narrative, the 9×7-inch poetic design of the collection presents symmetrical squared concrete poems encouraging disarray to the reading experience. Where one’s reading experience may take place traditionally across the page from left to right, the…
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The First Book: Sam Sussman
“It’s easy to think that when writing from life, the story is intuitive. That was not my experience. Life is not literature. I had to look carefully at what I had written and ask, “Am I writing this because it…
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What Resists the Burn Barrel: A Conversation with Mickie Kennedy
“Trust that the reader is intelligent enough to hop through time: moving back and forth between child and adult speakers. Freed of chronology, I immediately felt like “The Pact” would be a great opening for the book: intense, aggressive, grounding…
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Queer Joy, Intimacy, and Living in a Disabled Body: Rob Macaisa Colgate’s “Hardly Creatures”
I entered this book as one would enter an art gallery– clueless, curious, and slightly apprehensive. Very quickly though, the book held my hand and taught me how to read it. As in an art gallery, the book guides the…
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A Consideration of “Vanya”
Except that Andrew Scott plays all eight characters. A page in the playbill explains that the one-man-show idea occurred accidentally during readings of Stephens’ straight version. ‘It turns out when one person [does it], when there was one voice,’ Scott…
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Memoir to Novel, Sister Texts: A Conversation with T Kira Māhealani Madden
“I look at the paragraph as its own little work of music. I need to make sure the repetition, any sort of rhyme scheme, meter, consecution – everything needs to be clicking within the paragraph form. Sometimes that alters the…
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Satire as Anxiety Release and Reclaiming Narrative: A Conversation with Jordy Rosenberg
“Horror and satire are incredibly proximate genres. They both nourish the over-excitement of the reader—either through terror or laughter, or both—which I was hoping to do. Sometimes these are the only genres that are allowed to tell the truth about…
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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,…
