Poetry
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Four Poems by Jon Jon Moore Palacios
Predators take pleasure in attack, but you take pleasure away / from the lacewings and the ladybugs, the wasps and the hoverfly larvae.
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Owning the Self: Yesenia Montilla’s Muse Found in a Colonized Body
I only care about revolution / & the ugly business of revenge.
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Dorothea Lasky
In the space of the garden / I ordered each mouthless opening / Until they formed into spirit mouths
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The World of Family and the Otherworldly: Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Dear Outsiders
Odd and evocative, Dear Outsiders does what literature does best—it takes the reader into a new world which changes them while it too changes.
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Carey Salerno
how exactly to ignite, to speak in sign, what the flashing draws down, damp, out, and what it / means to be a newborn body made of burnt-back embers, drifting over the sidewalk
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Artress Bethany White
Let’s just walk through the woods to see it / I whispered, in a flash forgetting the nature of guns
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Human and No Less Miraculous: The Craft of Explication in Eugenia Leigh’s Bianca
Within Bianca, the speaker must choose the life she has over and over again, as a way forward—not as a stoic rendition of the eternal return of the same, but as desire.
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Nonbinary Thinking: Stephanie Burt’s We Are Mermaids
We’re reminded that the first creatures that crawled out of the ocean were fish that evolved to walk on land. What are we if not constantly evolving?
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Reveling in the In-Between: J. Estanislao Lopez’s We Borrowed Gentleness
This humor, fresh in its irreverence, is welcome alongside other poems that read darker and more cynical as they grapple with survival and death.
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As with Vigor, As with Pain: A Review of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It
Egger’s sentences jump from one point to another, perhaps mirroring in her language how the speakers jump from one bed into another—the next temporary stop is wherever desire leads her to be.

