Poetry
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An Inverted World of Trees and Trembling Sky
At its best, After the Point of No Return gives us just what we hope to find: poems that wrestle with mortality, retrace the steps of a life, and take us past the limit of flesh into whatever comes next.
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Adrienne Rich, 1929 – 2012
Adrienne Rich, one of the preeminent poets of the 20th and early 21st centuries, has died at the age of 82, according to the LA Times. I don’t really have much to add–she was an amazing poet and powerful presence…
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“How clearly you can see some nights,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Katie Chaple
How clearly you can see some nights So many stars like salt crystals scattered on a tablecloth, the seeming blankness of space,
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Tell Me She Is Happy With Her Life
In this collection, Chaple successfully fuses the personal with the spatial. As a result, an awareness of the way poems, by airing out the rooms of stanzas, can provide at once solace and disarray comes into terrible focus.
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Elegy and Affirmation
McSweeney’s interviews Rebecca Lindenberg about her first book Love, an Index, making poetry out of Facebook statuses, “maximalism,” and more. “I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you ‘have something to say.’ I think, actually,…
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat With D. A. Powell
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with D.A. Powell about his poetry collection Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys.
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“Winter Lottery,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Michael McGriff
Winter Lottery In the gray, frozen months, the pack rats moved into the garage and ruined everything.
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Drinking a Glass of Light
The emotional theme of the volume, the nostalgia and death that is announced in the book’s title and reaffirmed in almost every poem to some extent, is what I know I will carry with me for a long time.
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Wind and Rain Make No Difference
Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom could fit neatly into any number of contemporary-sounding categories: hybrid text, art book, lyric essay, etc. It is a book that relies on interdependence of image and text, of history and the present, of…
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A Square Grows Gloomy
Especially for a reader coming to Trakl for the first time, Firmage’s accessible introduction and organization of the poems provide an excellent overview of Trakl’s development as a poet and the range of work he produced.
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What You Lost Is What Everyone Lost
Often, in contemporary literature, grief becomes clichéd; O’Rourke, however, avoids sappiness or melodrama. Instead, her poetry probes at the actualization of grief, revealing a startling emotional depth.
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“That Old Desire,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Meghan O’Rourke
That Old Desire Was a fire licking and hot, a red fur with blue trim, like an Elizabethan ruff, if a ruff could be made