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…
Reviews
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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…
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…
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…
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…
Engine Empire by Cathy Park Hong
There remain a few shops, labels, and presses in the United States that embody DIY artistic independence in the best way, combining the intensity and existential tenacity of hardcore punk…
Ring of Bone: Collected Poems by Lew Welch
Lew Welch has been dead now for 40 years, just about as long as his total time on earth. He disappeared on May 23, 1971, walked out of poet and…
We’re Flying, by Peter Stamm
Most of the characters who populate the stories in We’re Flying were once happy. They were ordinary, but hopeful, representatives of Stamm’s native Switzerland: cheerful parents, loving spouses, young professionals.…
Either Way I’m Celebrating by Sommer Browning
Sommer Browning’s Either Way I’m Celebrating shows effervescence, delight in language, and whimsy, even as it hides more introspective and severe undertones. Taking elements of surrealism from the Ashbery branch…
Parsifal, by Jim Krusoe
Last year, Jim Krusoe completed his Resurrection Trilogy, a threesome of novels (Girl Factory, Erased, and Toward You) concerned with what he called “the spongy turf between life and death,”