Reviews
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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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FUBAR Nation
Chelsea Martin’s strange collection of miscellany evokes the loneliness of life lived through technology.
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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.
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The Myth of Mary and the Mother of God
We encounter images of the Virgin Mary constantly: in churches, tattoos, and local news stories reporting frequent visual manifestations of her iconic form.
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Wrack & Ruin
Don Lee returns to Rosarita Bay with a novel that features Brussels sprouts, kung fu divas, feuding brothers, and a complex look at ethnic identity.