Posts by author
Jesse Nathan
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Across the Harbor, Silver-Paced… and Soon Defaced?
Decades ago, Hart Crane wrote “To Brooklyn Bridge,” his most famous poem. “And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced / As though the sun took step of thee, yet left / Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,– / Implicitly thy…
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Show Your Work!
Matthew Zapruder proposes we meet the current explosion of variety coursing through contemporary poetry head-on with a new kind of criticism. Zapruder wants critics to talk a little less about what the poem said and a little more about how…
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Bravery, Panties, and Devil’s Tower: The Rumpus Interview with Laurel Nakadate
Laurel Nakadate is a photographer and filmmaker from New York City.
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Be Knocked Flat
Poetry readings are notorious for putting audiences to sleep. Which is why Poems Out Loud‘s devotion to the notion of experiencing poetry read aloud—and read well—is so thrilling. The site was inspired by Robert Pinksy’s just-published book Essential Pleasures: A…
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Best American Nonrequired Blog
The Best American Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers, is compiled by a team of high school students who spend the year reading everything they can get their hands on. The students debate the merits of the year’s crop of…
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A Jittery Spoonful of Surrealism
Monkeybicycle.net is the punchy literary magazine edited by Steven Seighman and Eric Spitznagel. The mag publishes writers like Tao Lin and Ryan Boudinot, and the piece on the site’s main page, “Wish” by Mike Valente, is representative of Monkeybicycle’s aesthetic.…
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Jesse Nathan: The Last Book I Loved
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic was the last book I love love loved. It’s explosive, a text that’s sinewy and daring. It tears open the marks left on the narrator during the wars in the former…
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Beautiful Booze Hags
In a flash that’s maybe as much prose poem as it is non-fiction (does it matter?), John Griswold injects us into a scene at the end of a man’s life. Three waitresses at the restaurant where the man ate every…
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How Not to Lie
Alexei Tsvetkov calls Prague “a place where you wait for something to happen.” It’s from there he wrote this dispatch on the occasion of his recent (somewhat permanent) departure. It’s a meandering, dreamy piece drifting between nostalgia and a hard-nosed…
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Words Before the Doors Close
For a certain segment of the American Mennonite population, a segment whose ancestors passed through and lived in Germany, the language of the old country was low German. Low German’s Jewish counterpart is Yiddish–and it even sometimes sounds like it.…
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“Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a crowd of Carhartt flannels.”
Jeff Parker‘s narrator watches from a dryer as the woman he’s laid claim to slinks off (and into bed) with a stout beef named Brick. The narrator confronts his rival, who lies naked with the fine-bodied Patsy, by punching him…