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Rumpus Articles
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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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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…
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More Human: On Science Fairs, Artificial Intelligence, and Educational Experiments
My first-year composition students come to me much like that little dot in my sixth-grade science fair demonstration. They’ve spent years bumping around on a grid their teachers keep rearranging, and they’ve learned some things about how to navigate it.…
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Moving Past Shame into An Expanding: A Conversation with Belle Burden
“I was setting flame to not so much the particulars of life, but just the appearance of it and the rules that I was supposed to live by. Staying quiet about what happened to coming out of that lane to…
