Blogs
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Advice for Lovers by Julian Talamantez Brolaski
“A rose is arrows is eros,” as one poem has it, and who is to argue? Love and lyricism are all the better for their queerness. Brolaski, with a powerfully trans poetic, instructs us on just this fact, cloying power…
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SELF-MADE MAN #13: Queerly Beloved
I see sixteen-year-olds now, with their subway chatter and baby fat, and try to imagine the ways they are saving each other’s lives.
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Happy Release Day!
If you’re a member of the Rumpus Poetry Book Club (and if you aren’t, here you go), then you should have received your copy of Leigh Stein’s Dispatch From the Future weeks ago. If, however, you are among the unfortunate…
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Where I’m Reading
Editor’s Note: Back in June, I made a video for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. I read a poem from our June selection, Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts among the people in a statue on the campus of Drake University. Mary…
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Lit-Link Round-up
The inimitably incisive Steve Almond rips Romney’s “truth problem” a new one. And here, the freaky Almond interviews the freakier Jennifer Spiegel, author of The Freak Chronicles, on The Nervous Breakdown. Speaking of which: Are you a Mary Gaitskill freak…
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Black Square by Tadeusz Dąbrowski
To say the least, the speaker in the collection works hard to figure himself out in relation to philosophical, religious, and spiritual matters, and while some American readers may find such a project quaint, naïve, or retro, it holds power…
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Paradise, Indiana by Bruce Snider
It’s gratifying that Bruce Snider dwells in the past without so much as a hint of nostalgia, that he offers up both the beauty and devastation of small-town Indiana.
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Announcing Letters for Kids!
This Just In: Announcing Letters For Kids! Letters For Kids is just like Letters In The Mail, except intended for subscribers six and older. We’re helping people appreciate the post office at a younger age. You’ll get two letters a month…
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Lit-Link Round-up
Is it ever the season for galleys. Five in particular, in ARC right now, that are either slaying me or, I hope, soon to slay me . . . The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison (Algonquin). I’ve been…
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I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say by Anthony Madrid
If this collection didn’t have one again questioning the origin and provenance of poetry (other than the intellect or empirical self), the poems would be getting short shrift.
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Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle
Madness, Rack, and Honey is a gift from a rigorous intellect, unflinching critic, and a big old sloppy heart. Ruefle has created a work of poetry from the daunting task of writing about it.
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Michael Jauchen: The Last Book I Loved, Miss Lonelyhearts
I read a lot in the bathtub. This isn’t because I’m particularly drawn to cleanliness, but because I’m drawn to the readerly space that a hot tub of water can create. The stillness of a full bathtub—that sporadic spigot drip,…