National Poetry Month Day 13: Sy Hoahwah
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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Rumpus Original
Reading Achy Obejas’s BOOMERANG/BUMERÁN as Indelible and Recursive Testimony
A review of BOOMERANG/BUMERÁN, a bilingual poetry collection from Achy Obejas available now from Beacon Press.
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National Poetry Month Day 12: Mia Kang
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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A Breathtaking and Terrifying Expanse: Quan Barry’s When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East
“The distances are staggering. It could take you an hour to drive to a spot on the edge of the horizon, yet that spot feels like it’s just within reach,” Barry writes. “This is what it means to live on the steppe. There are no walls between you and nature. You are nature.”
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From the Archive: Why Writing Matters in the Age of Despair
No word is wasted. No story is told in vain.
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Running Straight Into the Devastation: Reyna Grande Goes to War
Reyna Grande is the author of several books, including the bestselling memoir, The Distance Between Us, (Atria, 2012) and the sequel, A Dream Called Home, released in 2018. Her latest novel, A Ballad of Love and Glory is a sweeping historical saga set in the1840s that follows Ximena, a Mexican army nurse and John Riley, an Irish-immigrant […]
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National Poetry Month Day 11: Natalie Shapero
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Nacho
The benign lipoma floated in a small jar that Abundio had set on his nightstand when he came back from the doctor’s office. At first, when Dr. Reyes had asked him if he would like to bring it home, Abundio had laughed in the belief that this was nothing more than obtuse doctor humor. But Dr. Reyes did not smile and waited for a response to her question. So, Abundio said: “Sure.”
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National Poetry Month Day 10: Brian Teare
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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National Poetry Month Day 9: Justice Ameer
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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What to Read When You Want to Bend Time
The works . . . interrogate time in text through myriad forms, playing with and revealing its machinations all through inventive means. Like the waves and fragments of memory, many of them swerve outside the lines of stiff categorization.
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Enough: My Claim
A Rumpus series of work by women, trans, and nonbinary writers that engages with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
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National Poetry Month Day 8: Arhm Choi Wild
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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National Poetry Month Day 7: Chaun Webster
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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National Poetry Month Day 6: Yanyi
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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Candy from Strangers: A Conversation with Jennifer Egan
We can try to perform our inner lives, but we can’t actually reveal them. We can create a simulacrum, which is so much of what I see on social media, and that simulacrum is entertainment. It’s exciting because we all love the whiff of authenticity, and the more mediated our culture feels, the more we crave it, but we can’t actually give it away. We cannot actually break through the barrier of our individual aloneness.
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National Poetry Month Day 5: Alan Pelaez Lopez
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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From the Archive: The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Butch and the Bathroom
Then there is the bathroom issue. My beloved is like me, like you, like anyone. Sometimes a person has to go.
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When To Believe an Unreliable Narrator: Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts
The aestheticization of violence in literature, like other representations, can be deceiving.
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National Poetry Month Day 4: Arianne True
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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The Subconscious Repository of Weird Things: A Conversation with Ananda Lima
Poetry allows me to say the thing without a million conjectures. It leaves a lot of space and allows words to resonate and connect without me having to take you there . . . because of the conventions of poetry, I can say things that are understood as a gate to the truth.
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National Poetry Month Day 3: Safia Jama
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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National Poetry Month Day 2: Megan Fernandes
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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National Poetry Month Day 1: Chen Chen
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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Funny Women: Who’s the Man in a Lesbian Relationship? A Guide for Curious Straight People
Present a copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Whoever puts it in their purse is the woman. Whoever pulls their own copy out of their pocket is Gertrude Stein.
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Looking for Trouble: A Conversation with Maud Newton
Are these stories true? Did my great grandfather really kill someone with a hay hook? Was my other great grandfather really a communist?
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The Scent of Man: Cameron MacKenzie’s River Weather
That I find these characters sympathetic, that I wish them whole while assuming they will never be: This is the beauty and frustration MacKenzie has so elegantly combined. It is easy to hate these men, but I have loved them.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Inheritance
When she was seven years old, Lottie killed her first rattlesnake. As long as she could remember, her grandfather had instilled in her that The Good Californian killed the rattlesnake, spared those behind him the danger of snakebite, the venom sapped from their future. She thought it was allegory until she came face-to-Western-face with a Mojave rattlesnake in the scrub out by the foothills.
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Doomscrolling in Novel Form: A Conversation with John Elizabeth Stintzi
You’ll really love this book if you have the opinion that reality is weird. And if you think, like me, that the fact that so many people believe that there’s even a steady thing that we could call reality is fucking insane. If that’s who you are, this book is definitely for you.
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Voices on Addiction: Nineteen
You’ll look back and you’ll think the scars seem almost invisible, like maybe they’ll be gone one day. But then you’ll realize you’re just looking at the smaller ones, and yes, the bigger one is still right there.
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