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Rumpus Articles
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The First Book: Janan Alexandra
“There wasn’t a single defining moment when the idea for the book was conceived. I think of it more like clay: shaping and reshaping, or waves washing up on shore, bringing little bits of detritus and glass and seashell to…
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National Poetry Month: Two Poems
Tightened, cut repetitions, activated passive voice, considered where we might be locked in the wheel Put some things down there
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Born on a Dying Planet
The glittering sphere lives in the top drawer of Lela’s dresser. Sometimes she takes the ball and rolls it between her palms, and when she does her parents’ voices float forth. She rations these messages carefully, knowing there will never…
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On Sacrifice, Siblings, and Familial Scripts: A Conversation with Jane Park
“When I first wrote this, it was very stream-of-consciousness. My story had no plot. It was just dysfunctional people. There were also many multi-year stalls where I stopped working on it, but each time I returned, I could read it…
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National Poetry Month: Two Poems
TVs, SCANNERs, as advertised in the window, & another said SHOES: SOLES & REPAIRS & another said Passport photos & DrEAM REPAIR & another said MisC. so when it was my turn
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National Poetry Month: “Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma”
A body can waste away quietly, carrying an enemy in its blood. It doesn’t want to fight; it wants to toil skin-deep in the blood.
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The First Book: Leigh Lucas
“This isn’t advice but it’s helpful. I’d heard from so many poets I admire that it was hard, sometimes really hard, to get their first collection published. Some poets I know even published their second books before their first books…
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Hell Is the Absence of God’s Love
We watch the neighbors and the high schoolers as we sip cold gin at the window. There’s the widow from the other side of the loop who chuckles while she takes an old Playgirl calendar and a paperback of Vixens…
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A Poetics of Water: Maya Salameh’s “Mermaid Theory”
It is this “shock,” this consistent disintegration, and the techniques necessary to stall it, that Maya Salameh so tenderly and precisely metabolizes on the page. Water is our earliest teacher, and Salameh shapes language like it. Salameh’s lyric feels familiar:…
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National Poetry Month: “SUPER BOWL LX: BENITO”
Meaning the Boricua, not the brutish brain that argued Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State; meaning the man of the island outside US borders but not outside US possession, the descendant of sugarcane and…
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In “The Undead,” a filmmaker gets caught in the Kremlin’s dark games
Russia is a country full of criminals, yes—but also home to creative spirits who are drawn to the stage, page, or canvas to tell a story
