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Rumpus Articles
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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
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National Poetry Month: “The Longshot”
The first woman ever made, walked into the hippodrome, counterclockwise, her jet arms paying homage to the great sunflower field of mothers she had left behind, scenic hips reminiscent of old bougainvillea
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Ecopoetry as a Method of Inquiry: A Conversation with MaKshya Tolbert
“Ecopoetry’s role keeps changing for me, is as much in flux as I am. I wonder if one role of ecopoetry can be to mark that flux, to find a language that honors the transience and ongoingness of the environment,…
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Exciting New Rumpus Initiatives
Debbie Millman and I are thrilled to share some exciting new initiatives we are launching with The Rumpus. Beginning on April 1, 2026, we are increasing our pay rates for work accepted on or after that date. (Sadly, we cannot…
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The One Who Pierces Snow
It was a game some of us played during recess, hidden behind a corner from the supervision of a teacher. We took turns. The person to depart would take in a deep breath and hold it, standing against a wall…
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Writing A Series of Trojan Horses into a Novel: An Interview with A. Natasha Joukovsky
“ I envisioned this novel as a series of Trojan Horses on the topic of identity: a feminine novel inside a masculine one, but then a human one inside that. I wanted the novel to work on all three levels:…
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Noticing is the Ultimate Act of Love: A Conversation with Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“Some might think poets go out “looking for metaphors,” like the world is a giant writer’s prop closet. I don’t start with metaphor. I start with observation, an image. I’m not asking, “wWhat does this bird stand for?” I’m asking,…
