The Last Poem I Loved: “The Bells” by Adam Zagajewski
My maternal grandparents emigrated from Poland in 1924 after experiencing the horrors of World War I. They arrived here with pockets full of hopes and dreams and little else. I…
Blogs
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Ring of Bone: Collected Poems by Lew Welch
Lew Welch has been dead now for 40 years, just about as long as his total time on earth. He disappeared on May 23, 1971, walked out of poet and…
Arguing Against Perennial Busyness
A mistake is being made by our society, according to Ed Smith at the New Statesman, that those in the workforce are expected to be constantly busy. Workers spend a majority…
Alex Gallo-Brown: The Last Book I Loved, Magic Hours
Magic Hours, Tom Bissell’s recent collection of non-fiction, surveys his magazine writing over the last decade or so. It is a genre, he informs us in the Author’s Note, he…
Melding Web Content and Advertising
Choire Sicha writes about the visual evolution of the internet over at The Awl. Sicha discusses the fact that advertisements are being woven into the content of websites, such as promoted…
Either Way I’m Celebrating by Sommer Browning
Sommer Browning’s Either Way I’m Celebrating shows effervescence, delight in language, and whimsy, even as it hides more introspective and severe undertones. Taking elements of surrealism from the Ashbery branch…
Dogs of Brooklyn by Susie DeFord
When poets decide to collect what they consider to be some of their best work into a manuscript, there are seemingly thousands of choices to make. Should all the poems…
An Elegy for Oxford American
There has been a shakeup recently at literary magazine The Oxford American. Editor and founder Marc Smirnoff and managing editor Carol Ann Fitzgerald were fired on July 15. They have since compiled…
Troy, Unincorporated by Francesca Abbate
The good news about Troy, Unincorporated by Francesca Abbate, is that though it is a re-imagination of Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” from his Canterbury Tales, you don’t have to have…
Swinging Modern Sounds #37: The Age of Fine Arrangements
Cuddle Magic, in my opinion, is the band most likely to succeed, these days, if by succeed you mean getting a leg up, surpassing the modest touring-all-the-time-not-making-very-much-money-hustling-constantly model of the…
Lit-Link Round-up
I don’t do Tumblr. In fact, I’m having acute paranoia that maybe I’ve just spelled or capitalized something wrong IN “Tumblr,” here in the public forum of The Rumpus. But…
We Are Many. We Are Everywhere.
A great deal of the conversation about publishing and diversity is grounded in the idea that there simply aren’t many writers of color.