An INDIE x INDIE Poetry Book Club
Join The Rumpus‘s Poetry Book Club ($30/mo). NOTE: Our FINAL selection is our September 2024 pick Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen from Tin House. The sign deadline to receive this book has passed.
For over a decade, The Rumpus’ team has handpicked great new poetry titles to feature in our monthly Poetry Book Club. For our September 2023 through September 2024 selections, we focused on great new poetry collections and hear from the indie publishers behind the books.
Our Poetry Book Club conversations feature the Author + the Author’s Editor/Publisher + a Rumpus Editor offering insights into how the book came together, the writer’s inspirations and roadblocks, and a better understanding of how the collection connects with the Publisher’s list and mission.
The Rumpus supports risk-takers, and a lot of that work is led by indie (often nonprofit) publishers. We want to better highlight their contributions to the literary community.
Programs like our Poetry Book Club put you in conversation with the literary community and help keep The Rumpus running. However, the number of subscribers to this club has been low for several years. We are currently losing money running this program. After making a few pivots and added promotional efforts, the interest still remained low. Sadly, we need to end the program and focus our efforts elsewhere for the sake of sustainability.
However, we remain committed to championing emerging and established poets by publishing their poems in the magazine, providing poetry book review coverage, and running interviews with poets. The Poetry Book Club may return in another form in the future. In the meantime, we hope you’ll join us for our September selection.
Our Indie Press picks include:
FINAL SELECTION SEPTEMBER 2024 selection: SIGN UP deadline passed.
Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen. Subscribers will receive a copy of the book and an invite to join a conversation with author Kenzie Allen, a Rumpus editor, and a Tin House editor.
Intimate, dissecting, and liberating, Cloud Missives is a poetry collection of excavation and renewal. Like an anthropologist, Kenzie Allen reveals a life from what endures after tragedies and acts of survival. Across four sections, poems explore pop culture—the stereotypes in Peter Pan, Indiana Jones, and beyond—fairy tales, myths, protests, and forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.
Cloud Missives is an investigation, a manifestation, and a celebration: of the body, of what we make and remake, of the self, and of the heart. With care and deep attention, it asks what one can reimagine of Indigenous personhood in the wake of colonialism, what healing might look like when loving the world around you—and introduces readers to a profound new voice in poetry.
About the author:
Kenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Boston Review, Narrative, The Paris Review’s The Daily, Best New Poets, Poets.org, and other venues. Born in West Texas, she now shares time between Toronto, Ontario; Stavanger, Norway; and the Oneida reservation in Green Bay, Wisconsin
About the Press:
Tin House expands the boundaries of what great literature can do. Publisher of award-winning books of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; home to a renowned workshop and seminar series; and partner of a critically acclaimed podcast, Tin House champions writing that is artful, dynamic, and original. We are proud to publish and promote writers who speak to a wide range of experience, and lend context and nuance to their examination of our world.
AUGUST 2024 selection: Deadline passed
Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez. Subscribers will receive a copy of the book and an invite to join a conversation with author Nancy Miller Gomez, a Rumpus editor, and a YesYes Books editor.
Part cautionary tale, part love letter to the broken objects and people of this world, Inconsolable Objects is driven by the search for beauty in the forsaken. The poems are populated with sentient tornadoes, fetal mice floating in a snow globe, soldiers marching past a disembodied heart, and birds that have learned to imitate the sound of an AK47. In her spectacular debut, Gomez offers a call and response to all of us stumbling towards connection. These poems witness, interrogate, mourn, praise, and provide a hopeful glimpse into the mysteries of our shared experience.
JULY 2024 selection: SIGN UP DEADLINE PASSED
Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return by CAConrad. Subscribers received a copy of the book and an invite to join a conversation with author CAConrad, a Rumpus editor, and a Wave Books editor.
Following their book AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (winner of the PEN and the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry), CAConrad’s Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return shifts its attention from the previous book’s focus on communing with animals who are extinct toward communicating and caring for animals still living among us. Recalling the historical and symbolic significance of the boomerang as an instrument of return, these poems emerged from a (soma)tic poetry ritual in which the author wrote with animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, resulting in sculptural poems that are uninhibited and mysterious as they emerge organically from the bottom of each page. Guided by the urge “to/desire/the world/as it is/not as/it was,” CAConrad writes from an ecopoetics that is generous and galvanizing, reminding us of how our present attentions collectively shape a future humanity.
JUNE 2024 selection: SIGN UP DEADLINE PASSED
Girl Work by Zefyr Lisowski. Subscribers will receive and invite to join the conversation with the author, a Rumpus editor, and a Noemi Press editor.
Girl Work, a book-length meditation on sexual violence and feminized labor, centers hybrid-form and prose poems exploring haunting, labor, sexual trauma, and the assertion of a gender- nonconforming self in our current political moment. Written in injunctions to the self, to past assailants, and to friends, Girl Work, challenges canonical representations of pain as punitive, redemptive, or separable from the environmental conditions it springs from. Throughout Girl Work, a self is restored from the detritus of memory—flashes of sexual violence, pop cultural touchstones like the movie The Ring, the music of Ke$ha, the sudden death of a father, the paintings of Henry Darger, and more. Winner of the 2022 Book Award from Noemi Press.
MAY 2024 selection: SIGN UP DEADLINE PASSED
Death Styles by Joyelle McSweeney. Subscribers will receive and invite to join the conversation with the author, Nightboat Books editor and co-founder, Kazim Ali, and a Rumpus Editor.
In this follow-up to her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney proposes a link between style and survival, even in the gravest of circumstances. Setting herself the task of writing a poem a day and accepting a single icon as her starting point, however unlikely—River Phoenix, Mary Magdalene, a backyard skunk—McSweeney follows each inspiration to the point of exhaustion and makes it through each difficult day. In frank, mesmeric lyrics, Death Styles navigates the opposing forces of survival and grief, finding a way to press against death’s interface, to step the wrong way out of the grave.
April 2024 selection: SIGN UP DEADLINE PASSED
Blue on a Blue Palette by Lynne Thompson. Subscribers will receive and invite to join the conversation with the author and a BOA Editions editor.
Lynne Thompson’s Blue on a Blue Palette reflects on the condition of women—their joys despite their histories, and their insistence on survival as issues of race, culture, pandemic, and climate threaten their livelihoods. The documentation of these personal odysseys—which vary stylistically from abecedarians to free verse to centos—replicate the many ways women travel through the stages of their lives, all negotiated on a palette encompassing various shades of blue. These poems demand your attention, your voice: “Say history. Claim. Say wild.”
March 2024 selection: SIGN UP DEADLINE PASSED
Hatch by Jenny Irish Subscribers will receive and invite to join the conversation with the author and a Curbstone Books editor.
The prose poems in Jenny Irish’s newest collection, Hatch, trace the consciousness of an artificial womb that must confront the role she has played in the continuation of the dying of the human species. This apocalyptic vision engages with the most pressing concerns of this contemporary sociopolitical moment: reproductive rights, climate crises, and mass extinction; gender and racial bias in healthcare and technology; disinformation, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience; and the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence. More intimately, Hatch considers questions about how motherhood and its cultural expectations shape female identity. Working with avant strategies, Irish crafts a speculative feminist narrative, excavating and reexamining the aspects of the American experience that should have served as a call to action but have not. Part elegy and part prophecy, Hatch warns of a possible future while speaking to the present moment.
February 2024: SIGN UP DEADLINE PASSED
Paper Banners by Jane Miller. Subscribers will receive and invite to join the conversation with the author and a Copper Canyon Press editor.
A herald of desire, suffering, mortality, and the mission of poetry itself, Jane Miller’s Paper Banners “say[s] the cosmos / isn’t hostile. / Yet strangles a dove / with one hand.” Against this angst, Miller steps outside of history to contemplate voices of love, aging, and artmaking. Many poems are addressed to family members, friends, and young poets, or pay homage to familiar figures taken by time or tragedy, including Virginia Woolf, Osip Mandelstam, and the Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao. In clear, short lines, these poems harken to ancient banderoles, or pennants, which announced rallying cries on the lances of knights and mottoes on the flags of ships. Here, Miller’s Paper Banners is made of images of the American Southwest and scrutinizes its political and physical landscape. Like skywriting streamed in white smoke, this collection bears its message on the wind, its words addressed to anyone. As Miller catalogues the intimate experiences that make up a life—friendships, loves, dreams, our human connection to the environment—Paper Banners becomes a hope that “what will survive of us is love.”
JANUARY 2024: SIGN UP DEADLINE PASSED
How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems by Mikeas Sánchez and translated by Wendy Call and Shook. Subscribers will receive and invite to join the conversation with the author and their translators.
How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems examines the intersection of Zoque struggles against colonialism and empire, and those of North African immigrants and refugees. Sánchez encountered the latter in Barcelona as a revelation, “spreading their white blankets on the ground / as if they’ll soon return to sea / flying the sail of the promised land / the land that became a mirage.” Other works bring us just as close to similarly imperiled relatives, ancestors, gods, and archetypal Zoque men and women that Sánchez addresses with both deeply prophetic and childlike love.
Coming from the only woman to ever publish a book of poetry in Zoque and Spanish, this timely, powerful collection pairs the bilingual originals with an English translation for the first time. This book is for anyone interested in poetry as knowledge, proclaimed with both feet squarely set on ancient ground.
Additional indie publishers and books to be announced!
FAQs:
Q: Can I participate in your Poetry Book Club if I live outside the US?
A: Unfortunately, we are unable to offer international book club subscriptions at this time.
Q: What’s the cut-off date to receive the upcoming month’s book and to participate in the discussion?
A: Please subscribe by midnight on the 15th of the month to receive the next month’s book and join in the conversation with its author and a Rumpus editor on our subscriber-only Crowdcast channel. Please note as soon as you sign up for a subscription, you’ll begin receiving author conversation invites. That means, you may receive an invite to join a conversation in the month before your 1st book. Feel free to attend if you wish!
Q: How do I receive and invite to the Book Club conversations with authors?
A: We will email you event links and pass codes at least a few weeks before every event and a reminder the week of. Conversations will take place on The Rumpus‘ Crowdcast channel. If you joined a book club but didn’t get an invitation, please send an email to [email protected]. Usually, new books are mailed the 1st week of the month and these exclusive author discussions take place the last week of every month.
Q: What if I can’t attend the Author-Editor conversation live?
A: You’re subscriber passcode will continue to work for 30 days after the event, so you’re welcome to catch the conversation later on or re-watch it again.
Q: I’m already a subscriber, how to I update my address, payment, or other information so my subscription isn’t interrupted?
A: You can create or log into your existing account on the Rumpus Store page and update as needed. If you’re address changed and you’re worried a recent book won’t arrive to your new place, please contact our Store Manager, Eric at [email protected].
Q: Are there refunds?
A: No. But you can cancel a monthly subscription at any time by creating or logging into your existing account on the Rumpus Store.
Q: What if my question wasn’t answered here or I’m a book publicist or publisher who would like to submit a book for consideration?
A: Please contact [email protected] with any additional questions about our book clubs. Note we’re generally deciding on upcoming Book Club picks at least 4 months in advance.
Previous 2023 selections included:
Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates, Promises of Gold by José Olivarez, Synthetic Jungle by Michael Chang, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris, West by Paisley Rekdal, I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes, Diaspora Sonnets by Oliver de la Paz, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times by Taylor Byas
NOTE: Due to consistently low participation numbers relative to the high cost and time to run, the prose Book Club ended in the summer of 2023. All prose and Combo Book Club subscribers were informed via email and will not be charged after May 15, 2023. Our Poetry Book Club has always been more popular and we hope to keep it going for as long as possible! Please join if you’d like to see it continue.