RUMPUS POETRY BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: UPWARD MOBILITY by José Olivarez
An excerpt from The Rumpus Poetry Book Club's February selection, PROMISES OF GOLD by José Olivarez
Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
The Most-Read Essays of 2022
Essays are all about reflection, and we thought we’d kick off 2023 with a look at the most-read pieces of last year. It can sometimes feel like hours (years) of…
What Is a Person?: Lydia Conklin’s Rainbow Rainbow
Safety requires setting up clear boundaries, but a restricted life is lonely and isolating and often impossible to bear.
From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Three Flash Fictions by Niyah Morris
The lasso was a gaping mouth that opened wide enough, we hoped, to swallow the cloud.
Pinning myself like a butterfly onto the page: A Conversation with Kimberly Nguyen
I imagined myself as a lone satellite floating in outer space trying to reach earth.
Voices on Addiction: There is No Escape
. . .this house is not the right place for children either and yet, here you are day after day.
The Sense of Words: Reverse Engineer by Kate Colby
. . . language is duplicitous. To be broken is perhaps to be part of a process (or a metaphor for life), where to bend (and survive) also leads to being broken. In this context, the word “broken” in “Reverse Engineer” might well point to a hard-won success.
Telling our necessary truths: A Conversation with Janet Rodriguez
Only after this memoir was I able to see the Kafka truth: We are telling our necessary truths. We are the necessary heroes of our own narratives. Somewhere inside all of it, there is a collective truth, one we can safely tell.
From the Archive: The Saturday Rumpus Essay: DNA
Of course, maybe dividing the world into two kinds of people is just another way of making sure there is a crack in everything. When can you smooth out this fault line?
The Story and the Truth: Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation
. . . a scathing, satirical campus novel about academia, orientalism, the Western commodification of Asian cultures, and the lengths to which institutions will go to protect their reputations and their darlings.
From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: No Good
The sounds that she would expect here are entirely absent. There are no cries, no weeping. Just soothing, muffled tones.