Reviews
-
Between Heaven and Here, by Susan Straight
Susan Straight has remarkable range as a writer. Her voice can be elegant in the rhythms and vocabulary of her narrative, yet also blunt and raw in dialogue. In her latest novel, Between Heaven and Here, the third of a…
-
Letters From Robots by Diana Salier
I am not impressed with writers who refuse to use punctuation or capitalization; that gimmick has been famously used already, so now it comes across as lazy and unoriginal. Also, I have no patience for unspecific second person singular or…
-
Tall, Slim & Erect, by Alex Forman
Three quarters of the way through Alex Forman’s multimedia paean to presidential minutiae, Tall, Slim & Erect: Portraits of the Presidents, you hit this candid entry from Harry Truman’s 1947 diary: This great white jail is a hell of a…
-
Fragile Acts by Allan Peterson
The cover of Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts, in print and as eBook, is as visually compelling as the cover of Rebecca Lindenberg’s Love, An Index, the first poetry selection in McSweeney’s new series. The cloth binding of Fragile Acts is…
-
Four New Messages, by Joshua Cohen
It’s hard to write well about the Internet. This is partly, as many have noted, because life on a screen is already mediated, so to write about these corners of twenty-first-century existence is to attempt, in some ways, a representation…
-
David S. Atkinson: A Rumpus Book Club Member Reviews We Only Know So Much
Elizabeth Crane’s We Only Know So Much focuses on the lives of a bunch of messed up people. Really messed up people, in fact. Okay, there’s a great deal more than that…but it’s a good spot to begin.
-
Dispatch From the Future by Leigh Stein
I don’t think I ever laughed with a poem. Sometimes I chuckle at a clever turn of phrase, or at a shared sentiment, or a little idiosyncrasy that I thought all my own, and though I laughed at that dirty…
-
Uselysses by Noel Black
Uselysses by Noel Black is a collection of five, distinct, short books of poetry. The first three books collect introspective and self-conscious poems common in contemporary poetry, distinguishing themselves with imaginative imagery and a unique sense of humor. The fourth…
-
Battleborn, by Claire Vaye Watkins
A Nevada native myself, I’ve walked through the same ghost towns as Watkins, driven the same barren stretches of asphalt.
-
If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter
If only we could all go back to that time before all beginning.
-
Traveler by Devin Johnston
“One can no more locate the unconscious impulse to a poem among the synapses of the brain,” Devin Johnston writes in the preface to Precipitations, his study of the relationship between contemporary poetry and the occult, “than one could uncover…
-
The Event of Literature, by Terry Eagleton
Though prolific, the writer, cultural critic, religious apologist, and British literary theorist Terry Eagleton fights for relevance with each subsequent book. Most of us, if we know his name at all, either recognize him from the somewhat recent spat between…