A 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.
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Sean Singer
35 posts
Sean Singer’s first book Discography won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has also published two chapbooks, Passport and Keep Right On Playing Through the Mirror Over the Water, both with Beard of Bees Press and is the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
His work has recently appeared in Memorious, Pleiades, Souwester, Iowa Review, New England Review, and Salmagundi. He has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers-Newark. He lives in Harlem, New York City.
There 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,…
Wings 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…
Like 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.
Why 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…
Why 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.
No 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…
Mis-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…
From 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…
I 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.
What 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…
When 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…