Books
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A Reluctant Chronicling: Natalie Shapero’s Hard Child
“I typically hate discussing the past,” the speaker admits in the title poem, “Hard Child,” then a few poems later, a little more defensively—“I swear to God I hardly think of the past.”
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Can We Even Trust Ourselves?: A Conversation with Jac Jemc
Jac Jemc discusses The Grip of It, revision, and returning to the theme of trustworthiness again and again.
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Both Beauty and Horror: Water & Salt by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Tuffaha harnesses the legerdemain of lyric to link love and grief, anger and hope.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #94: David Burr Gerrard
David Burr Gerrard’s new novel The Epiphany Machine is one of the more ambitious books you’ll read this year, centering on a device that can reveal the epiphany of your life by tattooing the words onto your arm. “ABANDONS WHAT…
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A Poethead’s Guide to the Galaxy: Talking with David Hernandez
David Hernandez discusses his most recent poetry collection, Dear, Sincerely, working across multiple genres, and why the act of making anything is a kind of optimism.
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Staying Syncretic: A Conversation with Kool A.D.
Kool A.D. discusses his debut novel, OK, the war on drugs, systemic destruction of left-leaning movements by the government, and the inability to escape American capitalism.
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Navigating Empathy: Camille T. Dungy’s Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History
Luckily for us, Dungy’s increase in empathy and experience coincides with her embrace of the braided essay: her thinking crashes people, places, and ideas against each other in unexpected and adventurous ways.
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There Is No Answer: Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles
As Sentilles makes clear, she is against the wars the United States is currently involved in, and war in general, but she’s critical of what that means.
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At the Intersection of Personal and Political: Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now edited by Amit Majmudar
American writers have a long, distinguished history of calling out injustice.
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Beauty Undercut by the Possibility of Terror: Afterland by Mai Der Vang
Precariousness is an essential condition of life for the people who populate Vang’s poems, especially the Hmong refugees on whom the poet’s eye most lovingly lingers.
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The Impossible Question: Vagrants & Accidentals by Kevin Craft
How are we to live when loss—personal, environmental, and political—is heaped upon loss?
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Earnest, Funny, and Fun: Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities
What makes Chen’s poetry so exhilarating is that these poems always have a center of gravity—the self—that keeps the many subjects they explore in orbit.