Posts by author
Virginia Konchan
-
National Poetry Month Day 2: Virginia Konchan
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
-
I Was Not Born by Julia Cohen
Virginia Konchan reviews Julie Cohen’s I Was Not Born today in Rumpus Poetry.
-
A Neon Tryst by Lina Vitkauskas
Virginia Konchan reviews Lina Vitkauskas’s Neon Tryst today in Rumpus Poetry.
-
abu ghraib arias by Phil Metres
Virginia Konchan reviews Phil Metres’ abu ghraib arias today in Rumpus Poetry.
-
“Book of Dog” by Cleopatra Mathis
The domesticated dog, evolved 15,000 years ago from gray wolves, is not a reliquary of slavish dependence in Book of Dog, Cleopatra Mathis’ seventh collection, nor is it a token of the bourgeois middle-class’s presumed benignity. It is as necessary…
-
“The Children” by Paula Bohince
The plosive thrills and quietly mournful tenor of the finely-wrought poems Paula Bohince’s The Children (her second full-length collection) reward enormously upon first encounter, and only more so upon subsequent reads. This collection reminds the reader that lyric’s static and…
-
I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say by Anthony Madrid
If this collection didn’t have one again questioning the origin and provenance of poetry (other than the intellect or empirical self), the poems would be getting short shrift.
-
Madame X by Darcie Dennigan
Madame X pilots the idea that the line between reality and dream is not so much collapsible as it is meant to be collapsed.
-
The Grief Performance, by Emily Kendal Frey
Emily Kendal Frey’s compact, laconic poems from her first collection, The Grief Performance, outwit, outlast, and, eponymously, outperform not only death, but failure, ennui, and despair. How, you ask? For starters, the speaker of The Grief Performance treats poems as if they were contingent…
-
A Sunny Day is a Sufficient Cathedral
The book’s strongest moments are often its quietest, as when the complexity of the speaker’s engagement with himself and the world is repulsed or rerouted by automatic prompts and alienation.
-
Fingers Through Sweat-Curled Hair
Biddinger’s repeated returns to haptic perception as a legitimized approach to the divine, or a sense of peace or benediction, amounts to an aesthetic necessity, alongside the necessity of putting iconicity and holy writ in relationship with narrative, reality, and…
-
After the Umpteenth Bird
The speaker of The Trees Around navigates the empty spaces on the page with as much deftness and resilience as he does the empty spaces in our universe (perceptual and actual).