Reviews
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Denying Epiphany
Otremba’s are poems of rigorous looking. In most, a speaker coolly observes a work of art, a person or animal, the poems’ tensions emerging in part from the speaker’s struggle for knowledge and connection.
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The Tao of Keith
A collection of wisdom, witticisms, hypothetical scenarios, and recipes (really!) lays out the principles of “Keithism”
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A Badass Biker Poet: Thom Gunn
Gunn’s work is imminently teachable in the form of Selected Poems, but it is derived from a world that now no longer exists: the Metaphysical poets drawn through the intermingling bodies of the Summer of Love: biker leather, drug haze,…
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90 Miles from Home
Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés’s stories about refugees from the Mariel Boatlift present the conflicts and loneliness of exile.
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Pauline Kael’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
The winner of the The Rumpus College Book Review Contest, a review of Pauline Kael’s seminal Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, by Matthew Weinstock.
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J.M.G Le Clezio’s The Book of the Flights
Second Place in the Rumpus College Book Review Contest Apparently it’s now possible, forty years after the first release of The Book of Flights, to see experimental fiction—like Marxism, feminism, political protests and disco—as a mildly embarrassing historical quirk.
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Measuring the Weight of Loss
A post-romantic poet not content to wax sentimental on idealized Nature, a la Mallarmé, Andrew Michael Roberts has staked his tent in her decimated domain.
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The New Valley by Josh Weil
Josh Weil’s keenly observed trio of novellas follows the lives of men left behind by time’s relentless progress.
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{sound of cicadas}
Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s memoir, A Drifting Life, chronicles the youth and career of a prominent graphic novelist.
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The Chronicles of Narcissists
Hal Niedzviecki explores the motives, technologies, and consequences of Peep Culture.