Reviews Archives - The Rumpus

Sacred Mire and the Cutting Edge of Anti-: Tawahum Bige’s Cut to Fortress

Bige as an in-your-face activist-poet resists the colonizer through a poetry they themselves appropriate and transform mainly via language play and voice into an indigenous poetry of personal redemption.

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Little by Little: Naomi Cohn’s The Braille Encyclopedia

...disability will likely affect everyone in one way or another as they age—which is why regressive policies, revoked support, and limited accessibility are personal issues for us all.

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We Must All Transition: Paul B. Preciado’s Dysphoria Mundi

Here we see dysphoria’s root: not an internal mental imbalance but external injustice and material harm caused by systems of hierarchy and domination.

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Unfun: Mariah Stovall’s I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both

There’s a temptation to look for narrative redemption, a sense of completeness, some reassurance that the trouble was worthwhile, that all will be okay.

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The Wildness of Grief: Sarah Giragosian’s Mother Octopus

...mothering is entwined with dying throughout this wide-ranging volume, as birth and death are revealed as two sides of one leaf.

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LittlePuss Press Double Release: On Vivian Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event: An Essay & Anton Solomonik’s Realistic Fiction

If the LittlePuss books are advanced exercises in cognitive dissonance, Blaxell and Solomonik insist on returning to matters of the heart.

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Past is Prelude: Denne Michele Norris’s When The Harvest Comes

Norris’s ability to create interlocking portraits of flawed but somehow still lovable characters is one of her masterful offerings.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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