Poetry
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Thunderbird by Dorothea Lasky
Thunderbird is one of the more traditional collections I’ve come across recently, both in tone and in form. Lasky doesn’t experiment heavily with form, preferring to stick to free verse occasionally broken into stanzas. Lasky lets her words do the…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Naming Names
Michael Lista nails it with his review of The Open Door: One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine, the anthology celebrating 100 years of Poetry, edited by Don Share and Chistian Wiman. University of Chicago hails the collection as a “new…
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Having Been an Accomplice by Laura Cronk
Cronk’s Having Been an Accomplice is layered in the “imagined” of the real world, no matter the continent.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Make John Koethe’s Day
Publisher’s Weekly gives the red star treatment to John Koethe’s ninth book of poems, ambiguously titled ROTC Kills. PW’s reviewer says Koethe is “an amiable hybrid of late Wallace Stevens, late John Ashbery, and William Bronk.” It’s a sweet comparison…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Roaring Editors
The Academy of American Poets is featuring Terese Svoboda’s generous tribute to a relatively unknown 1920’s proletariat poet, Lola Ridge. Svoboda isn’t just knocked out by Ridge. She compares her in a single breath to H. D., Emily Dickinson, and…
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The Branches, The Axe, The Missing by Charlotte Pence
Charlotte Pence, author of Weaves a Clear Night has created in The Branches, the Axe, the Missing a work of significant mythic force that explores intimate circumstances of a woman fraught with sorrow borne out of problematic relationships with an…
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The Daily Beast Loves The Rumpus Book Club
And we love you back. While I’m at it, a little update news. Our current book is Kathleen Alcott’s The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets—Bookslut covered it here and said “It’s never simple, but if complicated is what produces a novel…
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I Live in a Hut by S. E. Smith
J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield famously said that the mark of a great author is whether, after reading their work, you want to call them up to talk, want to gab with them about nothing much and everything in between. You…
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Letters From Robots by Diana Salier
I am not impressed with writers who refuse to use punctuation or capitalization; that gimmick has been famously used already, so now it comes across as lazy and unoriginal. Also, I have no patience for unspecific second person singular or…
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Fragile Acts by Allan Peterson
The cover of Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts, in print and as eBook, is as visually compelling as the cover of Rebecca Lindenberg’s Love, An Index, the first poetry selection in McSweeney’s new series. The cloth binding of Fragile Acts is…
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Uselysses by Noel Black
Uselysses by Noel Black is a collection of five, distinct, short books of poetry. The first three books collect introspective and self-conscious poems common in contemporary poetry, distinguishing themselves with imaginative imagery and a unique sense of humor. The fourth…
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A Rumpus Book Club Update
Rumpus Book Club members this month have been devouring Emma Straub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, and we’ll be chatting with Straub about her book this Wednesday night. Poetry Book Club members have been all over Mary Jo Bang’s new…