Survival and Hope: Akwaeke Emezi’s You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
You Made A Fool organically makes the argument that friendships can be just as important and fulfilling as romantic relationships.
Features & Reviews
9290 posts
Nothing and Everything: An Interview with Dr. Jenny Heijun Wills on the Fragmentation of Adoption
Family relies on the antics of nationalism: who belongs, who doesn’t, to whom are we loyal, to whom are we not . . . I suppose “family” is another F-word that can be something that brings pleasure, or that might be deployed as a weapon if in the mouth of the wrong person.
Stories help us be able to be brave: Adoption and Belonging with Mariama J. Lockington
It is okay to feel more than one thing.
History Is Fluid: R.F. Kuang’s Babel
In Babel, language is a resource stolen from the mouths of native speakers.
The Rumpus Talks with Michael Pedersen About the Beauty of Male Friendship
An acclaimed Scottish writer and performer, Michael Pedersen is the author of two poetry collections, Play with Me and Oyster, and most recently a memoir titled Boy Friends, which celebrates…
Tasting Our Own Wildness: Talking with Talia Lakshmi Kolluri
. . . perhaps humanity is not the pinnacle of what a living thing can be . . .
Ross Gay Waters the Seed of Joy: A Rumpus Interview
Rightness and goodness and fixedness is not the objective. The objective is to just be curious and wonder about the thing . . .
Sketch Book Reviews: A Line in the World by Dorthe Nors
While this book is about a tiny part of the world, it's universal in its particularity—a must-read for anyone who loves lyric essays.
Scaling The National through Poetics: A dialogue between Rodrigo Toscano and Paisley Rekdal
Transient feelings about feelings of deliverance from (I’d say, national) anxiety. People are micro-dosing on sentimental poetry.
Daydreams of Blackness: Some of Them Will Carry Me by Giada Scodellaro
Scodellaro’s characters have autonomy, know their comforts and desires, and find space and safety in the corners of forgotten places. They grieve on countertops, chewing ice and waiting for the return of a lover who has left for another.
Far from Usual and Better for It: The Layered Poetics of Allison Blevins’s Slowly/Suddenly
Slowly/Suddenly is presented as a diptych in the Table of Contents, perhaps mirroring Blevins’s commitments to other forms of art, but her poems’ progression from Part I to Part II is not a linear narrative, not a Before & After.