Poetry
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Modotti” by Adrienne Rich
I didn’t have time to be devastated on the day Adrienne Rich died, but I still couldn’t keep back the tears. Like so many others, Rich was The One to me, America’s greatest living everything I ever wanted to be:…
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National Poetry Month Day 2: “At the Book Shrink” by Brenda Shaughnessy
Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April. At the Book Shrink one learns to say “my body uses me as a grape…
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National Poetry Month at The Rumpus
This is the fourth time we at The Rumpus have celebrated National Poetry Month by running a new, original poem by a different poet every day of April (and sometimes a little beyond). You’ll be able to keep up with…
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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.