Wanted/Needed/Loved: Nathan Stocker’s Best Birthday Gift
A truly personal letter is really something different than a song. It’s intended only for the person it’s written to. A song is a way to share that emotional experience with others.
Blogs
5712 posts
Rumpus Original Fiction: The Pet Store
The boy is looking for something specific. I can tell. It shows on his face when he scans the shelves and doesn’t find it.
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Iris Dunkle
Iris Jamahl Dunkle on her new collection Interrupted Geographies, writing against the pastoral tradition, the power of persona poems, and the town of Pithole.
FUNNY WOMEN #155: Feminine and Masculine Words
A helpful trick can be to picture feminine words (pumpkin latte, duvet cover) as butterflies. Soft, delicate, hard to catch, and useless except near flowers. Masculine words are more like knives.
TORCH: An Alien, Ineligible for Participation
That a bumbling demagogue would be able to take this institutional racism and weaponize it is, then, not really a surprise. The seeds for this hate were planted a long time ago.
The Possible Absence of a Future: Talking with Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham discusses her latest collection, Fast, the terrifying destruction of our planet, a happy formal accident, and how to live in times of world crisis.
Fighting the Erasure of Poet Liu Xia
Liu Xia is a Chinese poet. Her husband, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Laureate and dissident, died recently in prison. Liu Xia, who has been under strict house arrest for ten…
A Reluctant Chronicling: Natalie Shapero’s Hard Child
“I typically hate discussing the past,” the speaker admits in the title poem, “Hard Child,” then a few poems later, a little more defensively—“I swear to God I hardly think of the past."
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #96: Donna Baier Stein
Colorado’s Baby Doe Tabor was a bad ass. Born in 1854, ‘Lizzie,’ as she was known, bucked social norms of her day. In an era when silver miners believed it…
Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Frank X Walker
But I am not trading in fear. / I am only afraid / that they have been in captivity / so long they won't recognize my scent.
What We’re Reading in September!
We are thrilled to share that our September Book Club selection is Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf Press, October 2017)! In this highly anticipated debut collection, Machado bends genre to shape…
Voices on Addiction: The Honeybee
She never stopped, a bee buzzing from flower to flower to flower, collecting all the sweetness she could.