What to Read When You Wish You Were Heading Back-to-School
The Rumpus editors put together a list of books for Virgo season
Features & Reviews
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“I Was Born to This Poetry”: The Book of Mirrors by Yun Wang
I hear the gossip of flowers / insatiable in their lust / Consider the cages that are our bodies
We Should Be Embarrassed by Most Things: An Interview with Leyna Krow
I think that is the dream—to have such a strong voice that people know your work as your work.
Under My Kilt
It’s heavier than I thought it would be, and stiffer. The cotton drill fabric has the feel of an army jacket. The snaps and clasps and buckles have a certain…
I Am No One’s Graveyard: An Interview With No‘u Revilla
Sometimes a poem is a rock, and sometimes rocks turn into flowers. And no matter how many poems I write about aloha and decolonial futures, they may still try to kill me
Sketch Book Reviews: Birds and Us by Tim Birkhead
THE BIRDS AND US, written by Tim Birkhead and released August 2022 from Princeton Review Press, is atheist perfect mix of history, narrative, and science with a dash of cool illustrations. Throughout the book, readers will learn about everything from bird cave paintings, to birdwatching, and everything in between.
You Don’t See the Whole Young Man until the Very End: An Interview with Douglas Stuart
The amount of pressure on young men still to get on with it and to bottle it up and to be strong and be certain is overwhelming. And it shows in the UK. The suicide rates for men are so high. It’s a mental health issue. We don’t allow men to express themselves or talk about their vulnerability, and we blame them for a lot; we get to that phrase “toxic masculinity” really quickly. I don’t believe masculinity is always toxic, I just think sometimes it’s very unhealthy and we need to examine it and open it up.
A Sultry Register: Nichole Perkins’s Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be
In early May I was scrolling through Twitter when I came across a post from author Nichole Perkins that piqued my interest. It was a sexy tweet—in a string of…
Feeling Comfortable Enough to Be Funny Is What Makes Me Want to Write Fiction: A Conversation with Megan Giddings
There was a long stretch where I tried actively not to make things I wrote funny because of a disastrous undergrad fiction workshop where I spent thirty minutes just listening to people complain that a story had jokes. And wouldn’t it have been so much better if the author had let us pay attention to the emotions? Lol.
Calibrations: On Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality
Throughout the collection New York City reflects a unique landscape of loss, a space as full of grief as it is of everyday life, scientific facts, memory, motherhood, healing, love, and hope.
A Hypnotic Transitory Beauty Quest: A Conversation with Jackson Bliss
While many Californians are obsessed with “living in the moment,” most Asian Americans I know live in a complex cultural space where “the moment” is the superstructure and history is the base.
The Young Girl Writes Back: Elif Batuman’s Either/Or
If she just wrote about her own life, perhaps she could produce something that rivals Portrait of a Lady. Yet none of the books she reads are actually written by women.