Blogs
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Notturno by Gabriele D’Annunzio
Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote Notturno on strips of paper big enough for just one line a piece, while his eyes were bandaged into near blindness, as he convalesced for over two months from an eye injury. As Virginia Jewiss writes in…
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Butch Geography by Stacey Waite
Of all the stunning epigraphs Stacey Waite includes in Butch Geography—insights from William Carlos Williams and Judith Butler and Virginia Woolf—the most memorable and significant to me is the Japanese proverb which marks the second of the book’s four sections:…
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Nick Cave Monday #21: “Nature Boy”
We’re stuck in a world where bad shit happens all the time. Nick Cave, our Nature Boy, watches the news with his dad and sees “ordinary slaughter” and “routine atrocity.” Dad tells Nature Boy not to look away, be strong…
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Lit-Link Line-up
Jennifer Egan says that Goon Squad could have been better and talks about the danger of applause, in an excerpt from Why We Write, and anthology featuring some of the most acclaimed writers of our time, including Rumpus regular Rick…
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Links I Like
I’ve been thinking about joy, I’ve been thinking about pain. It’s true that I’ve been thinking about joy for some time. Six years to be exact. The year of my nervous breakdown, I read Bettina Aptheker’s Intimate Politics which led…
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Notable Los Angeles 2/2-2/8
Saturday 2/2: The Rattling Wall is on a book tour and makes another stop. Benj Hewitt, Rhoda Huffey, Mandy Kahn, Amelia Morris, and Rachel Reynolds read and sign books. There will be drinks! Free. 7 p.m. at Skylight Books. Rumpus…
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Murder Ballad by Jane Springer
Because a book of poetry can do anything, I am going to propose that Jane Springer’s Murder Ballad open a hole in the Mississippi River. An impossible hole. Because the poems are going to vacate and fill in the space…
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Orphan Hours by Stanley Plumly
Like a blue jay, thrush, or white-chested robin, darting in last light into leaves, twigs, or sky – after the rain, say, but before evening falls, when dark follows a darkening, Stanley Plumly’s Orphan Hours shows us moments rife with…
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The Last Book I Loved: I Love Dick
[I]f ever there was a book that should be judged by its cover, it’s this one.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: “Daddy, what did YOU do in the great ‘Poetry Is Dead’ war?”
Read poetry, what else? That’s the greatest military maneuver in the ‘Poetry Is Dead’ war, isn’t it? It’s where the odds are longest, the risk greatest, kind of like Lee at Chancellorsville. It’s where you can ward off the absurdities,…
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Dialogos: Paired Poems in Translation by George Kalogeris
I Scene: The hilltop retreat of the ascetic Skepticus, high above the City. Small, uneven open space amid rocks, center. A rocky path leads upstage left, and, eventually, down the hill. Entrance to a small cave downstage center right. Enter…
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The Last Poems I Loved: The Angel Island Poems
Like Alcatraz, Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay is often shrouded in fog. From 1910 to 1940, the island housed the immigration station and detention center for the West Coast.