A Letter to Eric
What follows is a love letter to my twenty-six-year-old brother Eric, written shortly after he overdosed on heroin. He survived.
Rumpus Originals
9688 posts
The Girls Do Cute Things
Her parents, in the past, tried to surrender her to the state, asking the state to force her to go to school. They didn’t want to be held responsible for her any more. Now, it’s Maya who wants to live somewhere else.
PJ Harvey Tuesday #5: “This Mess We’re In”
Thom Yorke and PJ Harvey sit in New York and contemplate their doomed love and suffer, and it’s all terribly stylish and sexy. What really makes the song crackle, though, is the fact that neither one of them had sung this way about sex before—and haven’t really done so since.
The Rumpus Interview with Ellen Bryant Voigt
Poet Ellen Bryant Voigt speaks to the power of syntax, and her newest collection, Headwaters—"a monument to the conscious mind's compulsion to order and interpret a chaotic world."
Ted Wilson Reviews the World #209
A LAMBORGHINI ★★★★★ (5 out of 5) Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing a Lamborghini.
The Rumpus Review of The Counselor
Throughout the film’s first act, Scott and screenwriter Cormac McCarthy present a culture of testosterone, then spend later scenes toying with this impression...
Dispatch from the Carnival #2: The Snake Charmer
Sideshows themselves are a place where people come to see a public display of their private fears. Fear of deformity, of a disruption of the gender binary, of mutation, of disfigurement, of a crossover with the animal world, of being out of proportion.
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Ruptured
I think about that night a lot, how I knew the ambulance was coming for us. Call me Magic, if you want. I won’t object. Who doesn’t want to be called Magic? Was it magic or do we always know before we know?
Salt: A Triptych
Without salt, life has no savor, because without salt we are not human. It is the physical manifestation of the basic triad of our lives: love, work, and grief.
The Rumpus Interview with Owen King
We sit down with Rumpus contributor Owen King to talk about his latest book, Double Feature, paying homage to movies that are unintentionally funny, and only using research that gives a story meaning.
Fantasy Football for Poets, Week 12
I’m writing about three players who have all quit America’s most popular and visible sport mid-season. Their reasons for quitting are as different as their trajectories, but in each of them, there are shards of a much larger and tragic American story.