A Tour de Force of Grief: Sun & Urn by Christopher Salerno
The winner of the 2016 inaugural Georgia Poetry Prize, Sun & Urn is gloomy and luminous, nostalgic and hopeful, moribund yet brimming with life.
Poetry
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Four Poems by Elizabeth Schmuhl
I am the storm in my front porch and I am moving, / a threat to this home and everything in it.
Coursing Byways and Biographical Thoroughfares: Karin Roffman’s The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life
I’ve long found that when reading Ashbery’s poetry it’s easy to lose track of just who the poet is.
Radiant with Terror: Lowell and the Uncertain Country of Love
I found comfort in the way that Lowell’s poems frequently explore the landscape of mental illness and blur the lines between the self and the world.
Glimpsing the Colors of the World: Nancy Chen Long’s Light Into Bodies
As a white mother of biracial children myself, this book became for me an opportunity to glimpse, for a moment, the colors of the world, and of skin, as my children might.
Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Dean Rader
Let’s admit it: we have all been vacillating between hindrance and drawback, / but that doesn’t mean our languor is our own.
Entering an Open Doorway: Marjorie Agosín’s Las Islas Blancas / The White Islands
Agosín’s poems, though quiet and seemingly simple, linger with an interior elasticity that does not break.
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Iris Dunkle
Iris Jamahl Dunkle on her new collection Interrupted Geographies, writing against the pastoral tradition, the power of persona poems, and the town of Pithole.
The Possible Absence of a Future: Talking with Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham discusses her latest collection, Fast, the terrifying destruction of our planet, a happy formal accident, and how to live in times of world crisis.
Fighting the Erasure of Poet Liu Xia
Liu Xia is a Chinese poet. Her husband, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Laureate and dissident, died recently in prison. Liu Xia, who has been under strict house arrest for ten…
A Reluctant Chronicling: Natalie Shapero’s Hard Child
“I typically hate discussing the past,” the speaker admits in the title poem, “Hard Child,” then a few poems later, a little more defensively—“I swear to God I hardly think of the past."
Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Frank X Walker
But I am not trading in fear. / I am only afraid / that they have been in captivity / so long they won't recognize my scent.