Reviews Archives - The Rumpus

“A black sheet between present and ancestors”: Kiran Bath’s Instructions for Banno

It is as if we are falling backward, towards the sky, towards the structural silencing of bannos, and Bath’s words wrap around us like curled balloon string and lead us back toward the ground.

Read

Read

Reviews

The Relentless Impressionism of Immigration: Shubha Sunder’s Optional Practical Training

Sunder’s impressionistic lens also reveals that, perhaps, only in stepping back from intense initiations into new spaces can we see them clearly.

Read

Read

Reviews

Shape Shifting: Nicole Graev Lipson’s Mothers and Other Fictional Characters

Lipson’s ability to do both with precision and compassion, often within the span of a single essay, will touch readers who are mothers, but also readers like me—and like all of us—who know what it is to have a mother.

Read

Read

We Can and Should Go Home Again: Raye Hendrix’s What Good is Heaven

These poems feel grainy with rich texture, like sinking your hands into the soil, the way it stays between your fingers all day if you don’t scrub your hands clean.

Read

Read

Reviews

Pawn or Perpetrator: Nussaibah Younis’s Fundamentally

Younis, given her expertise in Iraqi politics and international affairs, offers welcome insight into a realm that is often only shown in snippets on the news.

Read

Read

Reviews

“even as we all crowd the same body”: On Tetra Nova by Sophia Terazawa

To read Tetra Nova is to lean into nonlinear disorientation, flipping pages back and forth across time, scribbling in the margins of Vietnamese history.

Read

Read

Reviews

Meaning in the Mundane: A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful

Loss and loneliness might be ubiquitous, but Greene reminds us of their infinite manifestations, each with a specificity so intimate we feel it like a punch to the gut.

Read

Read

Reviews

Rich Kids Want to Die Too: Julia Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized

...[BERLIN ATOMIZED is] about the internal and external chaos of growing up during globalization in an exploding, rootless world—one in which young people can’t tell who they are.

Read

Read

Reviews

“stones will know”: On Trauma Plot: A Life by Jamie Hood

Hood wonders how to write rape and its aftermath when its very nature is fragmentation, a form that disqualifies it as a story.

Read

Read

A Poetics of Witness: Jeddie Sophronius’s Interrogation Records

Sophronius writes from an awareness of Chinese Indonesian marginality, yet the pulse of the collection’s counternarrative coheres around an Indonesian national identity.

Read