Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Picking Up Bones
“During all the years I’d lived in Las Vegas as a child, I’d felt like an animal trying to escape the harsh environs. In addition to the physical harshness, the desert represented, for me, the city’s cultural barrenness, the lack…
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Poems by Shira Erlichman
First Week in Her Bed 1The miracle was that no one was home. I could let the sounds out. The sounds entered through her neck & came out of my mouth. My thighs adagioed. I went 2everywhere she took me. The silence…
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On “Poppy State”: Myriam Gurba, Bruja of the Conquest
In her new memoir-in-essays, Gurba also reveals herself to be a verbal sorceress. While her previous collections traffic in rage and biting humor, Poppy State, though colored by both, expands into the more healing, elemental territory of native California plants.…
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Mississippi Dog
The dog appears again the next day, under clouds. This time when I notice her she is already sitting out there in the field, facing the broad side of E Wing that must appear to her like one long, stretched…
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How an Earthquake Put Me on a Boat
Today is the day I am supposed to be cured. “Three months,” the fifth doctor I met says. “You will be fine in three months; it just takes longer for some people.” I cling to that number, an arbitrary timeframe…
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The End is the Place We Begin: A Conversation with Marissa Davis
I remember, too, reading some time ago someone describe Black Americans as being part of a post-apocalyptic culture. We’ve survived the worst: the belly of the slave ship; the tortures wrought upon generation after generation of our ancestors for centuries.…
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After Jimmy’s Heart: Nicolas Boggs’ “Baldwin: A Love Story”
Boggs implicitly asks: is Jimmy still lovable within the fullness of his humanity?
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The Spurious Glamor of Certain Voids
Don’t we all love looking, Diane Seuss wondered, at dead things?
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JOYRIDE: A Conversation with Susan Orlean
Taking stock of her own life, she writes about what hurt, what thrilled, and what shaped her. The result is a rare behind-the-curtain view of the golden age of journalism, interwoven with glimpses of Orlean’s childhood, her evolution as a…
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Joining the World: A Conversation with Patricia Lockwood
“A lot of pandemic novels were about a place where everyone could get away from it and not directly have to deal. I totally understand that, but as a person who was writing about it from the very beginning, probably…
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Irregular Heart
When she was pregnant with me, my mother said she could see her future like a train, coming to run her down.
