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Rumpus Articles
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A Geometry of Silence
“Sometimes I think the house should be the one to speak. Let the drywall testify to how long we went without touching. Let the baseboards admit how often I cleaned, hoping order would quiet the ache. Let the doorjamb where…
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The Cost of Ambition in Allie Tagle-Dokus’s “Lucky Girl”
But while the focus of the plot revolves around childhood fame, its core deals with what ambition can cost an artist
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“This Is Not a Drill”: Maggie Nelson’s New Book, “The Slicks”
…Her sensitivity to complicated dialogues about Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath is well considered
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The Pink Wooly Mammoth in the Corner: A Conversation with Rachel Eliza Griffiths
“Once I had a draft, I could step back and some of what I do love in the writing process—revision and craft, and rewriting, rewriting, rewriting—could come and help me. Writing this book felt like using guerrilla tactics to get…
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The Two-Sentence Outline that Defines the Form: An Interview with George Saunders
“Usually, I try to make things as brief as I can (my model is one of those wind-up toys and I wind it up and drop it on the floor and it races right under the couch. The end). But…
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Aldrin Badiola
in the bathroom with eight fingers. Another shirtless man, this time in tight pants, asks if you want a piercing.
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“Tonic Immobility” and Freezing as Survival Response: A Conversation with Jen Percy
“I think that people are actually really good at telling their stories when they’re given the power to tell it from their perspective without forcing them into a box. I wanted to create an open space. It led down some…
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Bird Shoots Buck
As roommates, our cycles of sleep/wake/work were staggered, dictated by our graduate classes, or, during the summer, our crummy temp jobs. Chores lived on a whiteboard and were completed asynchronously. We figured the kid was, at a baseline, another responsibility…
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Power, Land, and Crossing Classes: A Conversation with Daniyal Mueenuddin
“When you’re writing fiction, you hide your rhythms and rhymes–but for poets, those temporal structures and sonic patterns are overt and central to what they’re trying to do. I spent many years tinkering with those structures, messing around like some…
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What They Don’t Teach You About Collapse
The particular form of governance being implemented in Gaza has a shape to it. It’s recognizable if you know what to look for. It’s the same shape that appeared in other places, at other times: the architecture of separation, the…
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Review: “Love is a Dangerous Word,” by Essex Hemphill
Essex Hemphill’s treasured and defiant legacy as both an activist and poet, is elevated by editors Robert F. Reid-Pharr and John Keene, with Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2025). Hemphill’s genius is integral to a multi-voiced…
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“A Story of Collisions” & Poetry of Excess: A Conversation with Diamond Forde
“ I wanted poetry to do the impossible, to bridge the gap that death creates. But the more time I spent with her stories, the more time I had to acknowledge all of the ways poetry creates survival, too. I…