Poetry
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Sunday Rumpus Serialization: Three Poems
David Hernandez returns to The Sunday Rumpus with whimsically intense new poems and artwork, in this second of a two-part installment.
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Traveler by Devin Johnston
“One can no more locate the unconscious impulse to a poem among the synapses of the brain,” Devin Johnston writes in the preface to Precipitations, his study of the relationship between contemporary poetry and the occult, “than one could uncover…
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Engine Empire by Cathy Park Hong
There remain a few shops, labels, and presses in the United States that embody DIY artistic independence in the best way, combining the intensity and existential tenacity of hardcore punk with the zine culture’s relentless focus on aesthetics, history, honesty…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Under the Maud Moon” by Galway Kinnell
A round- cheeked girlchild comes awake in her crib. The green swaddlings tear open I first encountered the last poem I loved, Galway Kinnell’s “Under the Maud Moon,” eleven summers ago, after a short trip to a novel writing workshop…
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The Rumpus Interview with Cynthia Cruz
Her poems were spare, fierce, dark little packages that managed to feel both mystical—almost like fairytales—and contemporary with their references to drugs and Greyhound stations.
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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 never met them; they died before I was born. I…
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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 friend Gary Snyder’s house into the mountains of California, carrying…
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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 of American poetry, Browning also shows elements of Dobby Gibson…
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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 be similar in style? What about subject? Should the order…
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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 been an English major or a Chaucer lover to appreciate…
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Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen
Take the omniscience and time-weary voice of myths, add in the best parts of fables, namely the anthropomorphic language and the supernatural weirdness, ground it in some extremely compelling poetry, and you’re still nowhere near what’s happening in this book.
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Partyknife by Dan Magers
When James Wright said, “I have wasted my life,” Dan Magers must haven taken it to heart.