bodies
-

Ambiguity as a Daily Experience: Talking with Jess Arndt
Jess Arndt discusses her debut story collection Large Animals, accepting love from other people, human bodies, and fear of the written word.
-

The Water Goddess
To exist solely now on land is to live always waiting to reenter the water—to feel soothed even by the sound of it falling. To live a life on land is to feel the loss of our former lives within…
-

Back to the Places I’ve Left
“No one knows how to handle it,” I tell her, but I can see she’s angry and I’m speaking into the wind.
-

The Rumpus Interview with Stacy Szymaszek
Poet Stacy Szymaszek discusses her most recent collection, Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals, the “notebook genre,” and claiming a city—ugly sites and all.
-

The Body and the Blood
The world around me looked suddenly sharper, more sinister, the female body where I lived appearing so much more penetrable, exposed, and impossible to hide.
-

A Letter to My Male Friends Who May Not Know That They Are Women
Dearest loves, As you are, I am stricken. I am devastated. I am unmade. We have all felt a terrible blow. And yet, of course, we all feel it differently, and have different understandings of what has befallen us, and…
-

Declared Fit
My affective response is not appropriate to the questionnaire. I drop tears on it. My face is hot and red above it. My body is full of the wrong kind of information. Not data. Not paper print out. The typed…
-

Spotlight: “Mouth” by Stacy Elaine Dacheux
“Mouth” explores the closeness of bodies—how we open up, connect, and fail to convey.
-

Salt
Now, nothing is ever quite salty enough for you. You have been caught shaking salt onto your bread at fancy restaurants, tonguing the rim of your margarita in order not to waste even a grain.
-

The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Idra Novey
Swati Khurana talks with novelist and translator Idra Novey about the challenges and joys of translation, the idiosyncrasies of language, the inextricable reception of women’s writing and women’s bodies, and much more.
-

The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Hot Thing
I wake in the dark in bed and there’s a furnace, a turncoat thermostat inside my body; there is no limit, there is no overdoodling, no crescendo. No hot enough, only hotter.
-

The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Ijeoma Oluo
Ijeoma Oluo discusses feminism, coloring, badass women, and being a troller of trolls.