The World of Family and the Otherworldly: Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Dear Outsiders
Odd and evocative, Dear Outsiders does what literature does best—it takes the reader into a new world which changes them while it too changes.
Poetry
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Carey Salerno
how exactly to ignite, to speak in sign, what the flashing draws down, damp, out, and what it / means to be a newborn body made of burnt-back embers, drifting over the sidewalk
Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Artress Bethany White
Let’s just walk through the woods to see it / I whispered, in a flash forgetting the nature of guns
Human and No Less Miraculous: The Craft of Explication in Eugenia Leigh’s Bianca
Within Bianca, the speaker must choose the life she has over and over again, as a way forward—not as a stoic rendition of the eternal return of the same, but as desire.
Nonbinary Thinking: Stephanie Burt’s We Are Mermaids
We’re reminded that the first creatures that crawled out of the ocean were fish that evolved to walk on land. What are we if not constantly evolving?
Reveling in the In-Between: J. Estanislao Lopez’s We Borrowed Gentleness
This humor, fresh in its irreverence, is welcome alongside other poems that read darker and more cynical as they grapple with survival and death.
As with Vigor, As with Pain: A Review of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It
Egger’s sentences jump from one point to another, perhaps mirroring in her language how the speakers jump from one bed into another—the next temporary stop is wherever desire leads her to be.
Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Fady Joudah
The bees would not miss us if the entire neighborhood went missing. / The reverse isn’t true. The mind goes to self // as the self comes to mind. / The mind tells the self, I made you, / and the self asks, who gave you that idea?
Twenty-five Years Unbound: Reading a Book of AIDS
The range of prepositions used here in writing about how to write AIDS is indicative of the range of questions encompassed by the book, the range of the “brutal presence” of the disease.
Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by J Brooke
I drew a house / I drew a house with a tire swing / I drew a house with a tire swing and deep green grass /
I drew a house with a tire swing and deep green grass and a little pond