Poetry
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Poetry That Makes You Nearly Miss the Plane: The Complete Works of Pat Parker edited by Julie R. Enszer
In other words, sometimes we need to be jolted out of our predictable behaviors and routines. We need the kind of reading that scatters us, pulls and weaves our cerebral, emotional, and visceral chains.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #87: Kai Cheng Thom
Rarely is birth silent for anyone involved. Silence, instead, is a learned phenomena. Unlearning silence can become its own birth, as it seems in Kai Cheng Thom’s debut poetry collection a place called No Homeland, opening with, “diaspora babies, we…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 14): “Some Grass Along a Ditch Bank”
…being on the edge of the natural world is like being on the edge of time.
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An Ambitious Atlas of Fears: Catherine Pierce’s The Tornado Is the World
Pierce’s poems approach danger from surprising angles. Do you fear the tornado? Then come inside it and hear it speak.
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On Grief and Inheritance: A Conversation with Brionne Janae
The poet Brionne Janae discusses her debut poetry collection After Jubilee, intergenerational trauma, and writing her way into historical personae.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #85: Elizabeth Metzger
I have known the poet Elizabeth Metzger since kindergarten—and ever since I have known her, she has been a poet. When we played the The Game of Life, a board game, she wrote small lyrics about the futures we ended…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 13): “Letter to Simic from Boulder”
“Wherever you are on earth, you are safe,” writes Richard Hugo. Really?
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #29: Poetry Is an Affliction
On Thursday night, May 25, an amazing event will take place outside a BART train station in the Mission District of San Francisco, as it has every Thursday night for the past fourteen years. If you were to pass by, you…
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A Very Great Scoundrel: The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volume III: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks
In hindsight, it’s sometimes difficult not to read more than a bit of sadomasochism into Hopkins’s inner passions and the ways in which he resisted them.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Chen Chen
Chen Chen discusses his new collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, playing the game white supremacy has set up, and if God is trying and failing to be a cool dad.
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All of the Facts and None of the Truth: Fox Frazier-Foley’s Like Ash in the Air after Something Has Burned
While these women are physically gone, they gain agency after their deaths through Frazier-Foley’s poems.
