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.
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Posts by: Virginia Konchan
I Was Not Born by Julia Cohen
Virginia Konchan reviews Julie Cohen’s I Was Not Born today in Rumpus Poetry.
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A Neon Tryst by Lina Vitkauskas
Virginia Konchan reviews Lina Vitkauskas’s Neon Tryst today in Rumpus Poetry.
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abu ghraib arias by Phil Metres
Virginia Konchan reviews Phil Metres’ abu ghraib arias today in Rumpus Poetry.
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“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 to world ecology as the mice, ants, and moths that populate the collection, and possessed […]
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“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 sequential structures in fact require the reader to re-read, if she wishes becomes more deeply […]
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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.
...moreMadame 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.
...moreThe 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 to experience (perhaps, because they are). Poem 11 from “Meditation on a Meditation of Frost”: […]
...moreA 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.
...moreFingers 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 the arbitrary nature of violence, accident, and error.
...moreAfter 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).
...moreIt Ninja-Stars Me
The voice that animates The French Exit is smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn’t so much distort as endless “reveal,” like the panopticon eye of a camera.
...moreThe Range of Your Amazing Nothing
Lina ramona Vitkauskas asks, and her collection stands as an intrepid answer, the question as to why haute couture, avant-garde and post avant-garde cinema, Derrida, and marine life should be at odds, offering her reader startling juxtapositions vis a vis an unmistakable voice that sounds out as often as it retracts in the act of […]
...moreAmerican Fractal
Timothy Green’s debut collection of poetry, American Fractal, picks up where scientific discourse leaves off.
...moreKing of a Hundred Horsemen
As with much French poetry, the idée fixe of King of a Hundred Horsemen concerns the problematics of desire, and several of the passages are so euphonic in the original that quoting from the translation may lessen the overall effect for a potential reader.
...moreThe Plath Cabinet
Many of the strongest poems in this poetical homage politicize Sylvia [Plath], showing her to be less a victim than a citizen of her time, whom history can misrepresent but not silence.
...moreA New Cult of Domesticity
The speaker of The King doesn’t play into the randomly generated poems and discursive ironies of her generation; she lifts the curtain to the production, exposing the history of language’s (and romanticism’s) disintegration.
...moreThe Rumpus Original (Supersized) Combo with Rebecca Wolff
How do you supersize a Rumpus Original Combo? That’s easy—just take a book review and an interview with the author, and add a Rumpus Original Poem to it!
...more“Trouble on the way, and great joy”
In a place where names are lost like household objects, and white noise supplants meaningful distinctions between voices and people, why the need for singularity (or personhood) at all?
...moreMeasuring the Weight of Loss
A post-romantic poet not content to wax sentimental on idealized Nature, a la Mallarmé, Andrew Michael Roberts has staked his tent in her decimated domain.
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