Columns
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What They Don’t Teach You About Collapse
The particular form of governance being implemented in Gaza has a shape to it. It’s recognizable if you know what to look for. It’s the same shape that appeared in other places, at other times: the architecture of separation, the…
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Review: “Love is a Dangerous Word,” by Essex Hemphill
Essex Hemphill’s treasured and defiant legacy as both an activist and poet, is elevated by editors Robert F. Reid-Pharr and John Keene, with Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2025). Hemphill’s genius is integral to a multi-voiced…
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“A Story of Collisions” & Poetry of Excess: A Conversation with Diamond Forde
“ I wanted poetry to do the impossible, to bridge the gap that death creates. But the more time I spent with her stories, the more time I had to acknowledge all of the ways poetry creates survival, too. I…
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Like Camels Raging
The job had a heroic narrative appeal. I could already hear myself sighing to my mother on the phone: the mouths I’d fed, backs I’d scrubbed. She’d ask what would happen if I caught it – if my lungs burst…
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Katie Berta
I don’t mind imprecision anymore and even seek it. How else are you supposed to convince your students you love each and every one of them, instead of loving just a few and only liking the rest very very much?
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Staying in the Light or Crossing the Threshold into Darkness: A Conversation with Melissa Faliveno
“I just wanted to write about these fun, spooky stories, and the way that stories become a part of a place, of the bearers and receivers of those stories, how their telling is a cycle and an inheritance. I also…
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Brandon Kilbourne’s “Natural History” is a Meticulously Crafted Diorama
Natural History opens with a section called “The Curious Institution”, in conversation with the centuries-old euphemism for slavery, “the peculiar institution”. This sets the stage for the rest of the text, which never lets the marvelous curiosity of the natural…
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Stories that Reveal Something True: A Conversation with Corey Rosen
“Stories make information stick. They give our experiences shape, emotion, and meaning. That’s why I wanted this book to be practical, so anyone can take the tools of storytelling and use them in real life, at work, in school, and…
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Jordan Hamel
The number one cause of memory loss is memory. Gave up lying to anyone who isn’t me. The secret is ignoring the camera & staring at your mirrored self, so everything
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Turmeric, Nine Ways
The first stomachaches grip me tightest at night. I watch the sliver under my bedroom door, waiting for Amma’s feet, for her hand on the ache. When I hear a sound that could be the snap of a suitcase or…
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“Adolescence as Hallucination” and Eschewing Autofiction: A Conversation with Chris Kraus
“I’ve never seen my novels as being about me. Catt is my avatar but I’m writing about the things, people, themes, and histories that are close and important to me, the things I know most intimately. I really can’t write…
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To the Letter: A Conversation with Virgina Evans
“ I wanted the story to be a tight ball of yarn even though there were a million strands. It had to be tight to keep a reader’s interest, so there was an element of looping back almost like a…