Blogs
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National Poetry Month Day 15: “Alternate Ending: My Grandmother As Gretel” by Kate Schmitt
Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April. Alternate Ending: My Grandmother As Gretel “Hansel and Gretel is the saddest story; it’s the…
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Lit-Link Round-up
My six-year-old son is obsessed with the Titanic. I thought he was just quirky, but the New Yorker posits this as an archetype of human obsession. I interview Charles Blackstone, Managing Editor of Bookslut and one of the nicest guys…
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A National Poetry Month Special: “Bones” by Melissa Broder, Illustrated by Paul Tunis
When Paul Tunis emailed me and asked if I’d be interested in looking at a comic he’d drawn in collaboration with the poet Melissa Broder, my answer was an unequivocal yes.
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I Have a Jaw That Seeks Chunks
In Melissa Broder’s second collection, Meat Heart, there is a burgeoning tension between the spiritual life of the imagination and its blood and guts container—the forehead, the hips, the heart—that is both dire and light. At the core of these…
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National Poetry Month Day 14: “between the wolf and the dog” by Davis McCombs
Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April. between the wolf and the dog a freight train splits the difference between dark and…
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The Body Place Is a Thinking Place
From these two new books, the reader can gather that it isn’t just the day that is strong and can withstand change, but the same words can be applied to the speakers of these poems and to Myles herself.
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The Last Book I Loved: Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
Based on the true story of an English midland town in the year 1666 that quarantined itself to sweat out the bubonic plague, Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague reminds me of the private school campus…
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National Poetry Month Day 13: “15 Minutes” by Eileen Myles
Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April. 15 minutes the beaming sun sun out there
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What We Hunger For
I am always interested in the representations of strength in women, where that strength comes from, how it is called upon when it is needed most, and what it costs for a woman to be strong.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Last American Man
It’s easy to write off one author based on a best-seller. Call it jealousy, call it high-end literary disdain, call it whatever you want, but it’s easy to give in to the impulse to distrust something once it’s become popular.…
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National Poetry Month Day 12: “Semi-Aubade” by Elisa Gabbert
Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April. Semi-Aubade When I wake in the morning, my mind is black.
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Envy Never Sleeps
As if to heed Hecate’s rebuke, to show the dire glory of her art, Szporluk’s poems speak with a voice unhinged by an unyielding despair. Teeming with submerged violence and opaque anger, they swirl, futile, in the face of our…