A Table That Goes On For Miles by Stefania Heim
Sean Singer reviews Stefanie Heim’s A Table That Goes On For Miles today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Posts by: Sean Singer
Poetry of Witness The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 by Carolyn Forche and Duncan Wu
Sean Singer reviews Poetry of Witness The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 by Carolyn Forche and Duncan Wu today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Bend To It by Kevin Simmonds
Sean Singer reviews Kevin Simmonds’s Bend To It today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Patter by Douglas Kearney
Sean Singer reviews Douglas Kearney’s Patter today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Darktown Follies by Amaud Jamaul Johnson
Sean Singer reviews Amaud Jamaul Johnson’s Darktown Follies today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Autogeography by Reginald Harris
Sean Singer reviews Reginald Harris’s Autogeography today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Recalculating by Charles Bernstein
Sean Singer reviews Charles Bernstein’s Recalculating today in Rumpus Poetry.
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We Come Elemental by Tamiko Beyer
Sean Singer reviews Tamiko Beyer’s We Come Elemental today in Rumpus Poetry.
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The Cineaste by A. Van Jordan
Sean Singer reviews A. Van Jordan’s The Cineaste today in Rumpus Poetry.
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My Scarlet Ways by Tanya Larkin
In age of poetry saturated with the irony and airy nonsense of the last phalanx of the grandchildren of the New York School, it is wonderfully refreshing to read Tanya Larkin’s poems in My Scarlet Ways. She uses a refreshing synthesis of lyric and narrative poetic modes in an expressive and intellectually rigorous way.
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Either Way I’m Celebrating by Sommer Browning
Sommer Browning’s Either Way I’m Celebrating shows effervescence, delight in language, and whimsy, even as it hides more introspective and severe undertones. Taking elements of surrealism from the Ashbery branch of American poetry, Browning also shows elements of Dobby Gibson and Juliana Spahr, though as her own inimitable recipe.
...moreA Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
I found this text to be profound, relentless, frustrating, inspiring, demanding, silly, pompous, elastic, and mind-expanding. That is what poetry is for, and this is for poetry.
...moreThere Are More Knowzits Than Ever
Coleman’s work is functional and communal; she wields the oral tradition in a way that reflects her poetry ancestry—the blues queen, Koko Taylor, for example, or the fringe Beat genius, Bob Kaufman—but she also shows planed, hewn lines of intellectual poem-making.
...moreWings Wands Stars Tulle
These poems have all the instinct and fangs of a canine, and the plush, electric fur of a wolf: the intensity and sheer quality of workmanship in the poems is impressive.
...moreLike Algae on the Surface of Grace
There is a feeling of complicity in his [Dlugos’s] best poems in that he makes the reader love the burnished, tumultuous late nights and affection for those around him.
...moreWhy I Chose Lea Graham’s Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
Rumpus Poetry Book Club board member Sean Singer on why he chose Lea Graham’s Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You as the July selection for the club.
...moreWhy I Chose Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
Tracy Smith’s Life on Mars is a strong, surprising, and often beautiful book. Its themes include family births and deaths, outer space as a metaphor for inner space, and broader political questions regarding violence and power.
...moreNo Trace of Origin, No Thorn
The poems in Copperhead use the deeply wrought questions with which it is concerned to wisely come up with a sort of memoir, which is attaching deeply felt memories with deeply felt language, thus making it literature.
...moreMis-Writing Race Is a Failure of the Imagination
In February at the AWP Conference in Washington D.C., Claudia Rankine gave a talk about Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change.” Afterward, she posted a call for responses to the conversation that started at AWP, and today she posted those responses here. Included among them is a piece by Rumpus reviewer and Poetry Book Club Board […]
...moreFrom Exuberant Hanging Gardens
Leslie Williams is a fine poet, skillful and smart. She takes a range of topics I find by themselves repelling or uninteresting (suburban life, nature, flowers, gardening, Thomas Jefferson, the American South, etc.) and makes them compelling; she demands my attention because she is such an attentive writer.
...moreI Know My Brother In the Mirror
Michael Klein’s then, we were still living is a thoughtful, emotional book that treats death in a fresh, even endearing way.
...moreWhat We Hack Up We Can Choke Down
It is Zweig’s essential Vermont-y-ness that makes her indispensable. The charm and beauty of those green mountains and isolation and mud seasons of that terrain is applied thickly in these poems.
...moreWhen I Go Outdoors, Light Splits
The poems in This Noisy Egg are always engaging and hold the reader’s attention, but they do not feel un-tethered or dangerous. Reading them, I had the sensation that there was little room for what Stanley Kunitz called “wilderness,” the part of the poem that appears to write itself, unhinged from the fantasies and illusions […]
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Dead Ahead
Doller’s facility with language, and his wheeling imagination, which pushes language into fresh directions, never ceases to delight the reader.
...moreBetter She Had Slapped Me
Tongue contains none of the typical tricks, irony, or obsessive self-absorption of many recent books. Each poem is self-contained, yet are all of a piece.
...moreThe Ancient Book of Hip
The poems in The Ancient Book of Hip create a precise and evocative description of time and place; they celebrate that space, even as they have a witty undercurrent of critique.
...moreCrimson Colored Raunchiness and Terror
Taste of Cherry is a beautiful, carefully crafted, and sensual display of poetry; the verbal, pyrotechnical, unabashed bravery of the poems is their most significant quality.
...moreTake Dead Aim
Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize is ambitious and clever. By turns entertaining, fascinating, and charming, it is also monotonous with its adolescent charm and fluorescent insistence.
...moreA Badass Biker Poet: Thom Gunn
Gunn’s work is imminently teachable in the form of Selected Poems, but it is derived from a world that now no longer exists: the Metaphysical poets drawn through the intermingling bodies of the Summer of Love: biker leather, drug haze, and the destructive tragedy of death sought without irony or deconstruction.
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