Rumpus Original
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Sunday Essay: You Or Someone Like You
Let me start off by saying I love getting to teach writing. It’s the only job I have ever had that I didn’t despise—every other job has been some boss or company taking my time in trade for something as…
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The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry
It is clear from Dove’s introduction to the anthology, and from her selections, that she just wanted an engaging, informative, high -quality collection. She succeeded.
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The Rumpus Interview with Geoffrey O’Connor
When you are on the cusp of hating a song, you simply decide to commit to what you have and celebrate. It’s like marriage really.
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An Inverted World of Trees and Trembling Sky
At its best, After the Point of No Return gives us just what we hope to find: poems that wrestle with mortality, retrace the steps of a life, and take us past the limit of flesh into whatever comes next.
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Politics in the Exam Room
In the fall of 2008 I was chatting with a woman I know about the upcoming presidential election. She was in her 60s, single, a funky dresser, world traveler, and amateur artist—what my mom would have called a “free-spirited Auntie…
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The Dreams of a Shrinking Nation
I’ve been thinking a lot about the decline of the Japanese birth rate lately. It’s a peculiar obsession, admittedly, but one that should worry Japan lovers everywhere. And while it wasn’t on my mind as I hurried up Wilshire Boulevard…
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What We Become
Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories illustrates the haphazard, psychological violence of a century of ideology, disruption, and the search for the meaning of personal freedom.
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Fictional Pointillism
Tupelo Hassman’s debut Girlchild is an emotionally rich and complex picture of a smart girl brutalized and circumscribed by circumstances.
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The Rumpus Interview with Craig Taylor
I’ve often thought writing takes equal parts alienation and ego, one to see things and the other to think your vision warrants recording. But, after reading Craig Taylor’s Londoners, I think it’s just alienation. He writes utterly without ego and…
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You’re Looking At Me Like I Live Here And I Don’t: Making a Film in an Alzheimer’s Unit
In the fall of 2008, I wrote a screenplay I intended to film entirely in an Alzheimer’s Unit. After many weeks of rehearsals, I arrived at a troubling realization: I was not just making a challenging film—I was making the…
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“How clearly you can see some nights,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Katie Chaple
How clearly you can see some nights So many stars like salt crystals scattered on a tablecloth, the seeming blankness of space,
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Tell Me She Is Happy With Her Life
In this collection, Chaple successfully fuses the personal with the spatial. As a result, an awareness of the way poems, by airing out the rooms of stanzas, can provide at once solace and disarray comes into terrible focus.