I’m Cold, Please Touch Me: The Freezer Door by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Sycamore wrote this book long before pandemic time, and yet it couldn’t have arrived at a better moment.
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Posts Tagged: book review
Diversifying the YA Hero: Ed Lin’s David Tung Can’t Have a Girlfriend Until He Gets into an Ivy League College
But David eventually comes to realize that he, too, holds a certain level of privilege.
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The Light Endures: 13th Balloon by Mark Bibbins
Grief begs to be analogized, not to be tamed exactly, but somehow made approachable.
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A Myriad Reckoning: Seismic: Seattle, City of Literature
The collective reimagining in Seismic calls for literary revolution.
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A Literary Tasting Menu: My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee
Simply put, the novel’s heart is not political but sensual.
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A Poetics of Questions: The Bower by Connie Voisine
To learn is perhaps Voisine’s primary goal in writing the poems in The Bower.
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Asking the Right Questions: Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom
Transcendent Kingdom becomes an experiment in itself.
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Not Looking Away: The State She’s In by Lesley Wheeler
But look at this poet-speaker speaking the unspeakable!
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When Ideals Meet Reality: The Contradictions by Sophie Yanow
You want to live by your ideals, but it’s hard to make them align with reality.
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A Language for Extinction: Zaina Alsous’s A Theory of Birds
And if you ask of her to come to you, her answer is refusal.
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Haunted by Hoax: Paul Griner’s The Book of Otto and Liam
But Griner is too skilled a realist to allow The Book of Otto and Liam to become a simple revenge story.
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The Violent and the Sensual: original kink by Jubi Arriola-Headley
Violence can be turned around, turned into pleasure, or an act of freedom, or an act of defiance.
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The Inescapability of Motherhood: Makenna Goodman’s The Shame
When the novel begins, Alma is in the car, speeding away from her life.
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In and of the Wreck: Together in a Sudden Strangeness
In its imagery and mood, the collection feels distinctly April.
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Possibility Is Spellbinding: The Lightness by Emily Temple
In short, lightness is the capacity to leave without regret.
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A Year In Rumpus Book Reviews 2020
A look back at the books we reviewed in 2020!
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The Fluidity of Language and Identity: Melissa Faliveno’s Tomboyland
When was the first time you remember seeing yourself in a book you were reading?
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Reading the Landscape of the Past: Jessica J. Lee’s Two Trees Make a Forest
Learning to read a landscape can reveal a deep history.
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The Worlds We Inhabit: Home: New Arabic Poems
These writers expand the meaning of the word home by virtue of their lives and their writing.
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Pushing a Universe through a Keyhole: Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith
Still, Smith’s sadness does not serve to disintegrate her zeal for living.
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Interrogating Language: Carlos Andrés Gómez’s Fractures
Language enacts violence through manipulation.
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Barbara Berman’s 2020 Holiday Poetry Shout-Out
Barbara Berman reviews four books in her 2020 Holiday Poetry Shout-Out
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A Different Kind of Butterfly Effect: Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face
[Y]ou can’t grow up in a cultural milieu and be immune to what it loves.
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Playing at the Edges of Form: Alexandria Hall’s Field Music
The pages of Alexandria Hall’s debut collection, Field Music, are liquid.
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The Complex Disability Representation We Need: Rebekah Taussig’s Sitting Pretty
What Taussig does, then, is ground these ideas in reality through her own lived experiences.
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Spotlight: The Rumpus Review of John Stanley’s Little Lulu
For the longest time, John Stanley’s Little Lulu was one of the best kept secrets in comics.
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A Holiday in Hell: Lauren Tivey’s Moroccan Holiday
If you’re going to Hell, bring a good guide.
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Desire Makes Storytellers of Us All: Anthropica by David Hollander
What a fitting end to the postmodern literary experiment. Or are we just getting warmed up?
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Documenting Existence: Deed by Justin Wymer
Wymer is grappling with survival, with the cost of the duplicity of identity.
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What Society Allows Us to Be: Megha Majumdar’s A Burning
What does it mean to be free?
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