“Throw Something Down Hard Enough, You Discover Its Laws”
Maybe my faith that the profoundest feeling we’re offered by art that really hits us deep in is a setting free, a series of screens or horizons obliterated somehow lovingly.
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Posts by: Weston Cutter
The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka
Weston Cutter reviews Adrian Matejka’s The Big Smoke today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Easy Math by Lauren Shapiro
Weston Cutter reviews Lauren Shapiro’s Easy Math today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room by Betsy Wheeler
Betsy Wheeler’s Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room has sort of undone me for the month and a half I’ve spent with it, reading it or letting it hang over to the side and reverbrate while I try ways through other stuff. Part of this undoing and me giving the book this time has been […]
...moreWanting Light and Buying Hammers
Even the hardest books ultimately cohere, it’s just a matter of whether their internal logic will eventually open up and allow you entrance. Lily Brown’s Rust or Go Missing is such a book.
...moreRomanticism
The poems in April Bernard’s Romanticism feel more complete, somehow, for the fact that they each align their focus on objects which, on multiple readings, still seem to have no particular connection other than that they’re all from Bernard.
...moreGlass Is Really a Liquid
The hard thing about these poems is that they make sense, fundamentally, but they’ve got a strange, skittering-away sense to them, a resistance to being pinned down.
...moreA Struggle at the Roots of the Mind
I don’t know if I’m the only youngish reader to have this chip on my shoulder, but I always sort of assume that poems by older people get mellower. Let me say it again: Rich’s lines are harrowing, are incensed and knifing.
...moreThings That Work Are Muffled and Mute
Through rigorous consideration, with patient generosity, Valerio Magrelli’s poetry allows all his subjects—broken machines, utterances, each of us—to be our own streets, and in such a transfixing world, a circle closes around Kant: things can be both means to an end and ends in and of themselves.
...more10 Mississippi
This book is seductive because, page by page, poem by poem, 10 Mississippi is cyclic and aswirl, is… as flowing and eddying as the river of the title.
...moreAs If the Stars Invented Dinner
So what are Mazer’s actual poems like? They are, in their way, haunted.
...moreThe Indistinct Fuzz of a General Rain
World Enough is, despite the sometimes soft dulled-razor language, an incredibly smart, idea-driven book, and the in-charge idea and/or force seems to be America, viewed both from within the country and elsewhere.
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