Why I Chose Justin Phillip Reed’s Indecency for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
Here’s what we’re reading in our Poetry Book Club next month!
...morePosts Tagged: Citizen
What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Black History
Rumpus editors share for their favorite writing that speaks to black history, past and present.
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What to Read When You Want Fire and Fury
Rumpus editors share a list of books by writers of color and women that bring fire, fury, and sometimes, both.
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A Deeply Human Act: Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
What is so extraordinary about this collection is its lyricism, its humanity, and its urgency.
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The Woman Behind the Curtain Pulling the Levers: Talking with Zinzi Clemmons
Zinzi Clemmons on What We Lose, representations of blackness, and life’s influences on writing.
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What to Read When It’s Time for Sports
Just a “heads up” (as they say in the sports world): this isn’t your average sports list.
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What to Read When You Want to Make America Great Again
Here is a list of books that help remind us what actually makes America great (hint: it’s not tax cuts).
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Amy Benson
Our American obsession with the personal and individual has made us the tremendous resource consumers we are in the world.
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A Recommended Reading List for Trump’s America
We asked nineteen authors what books they’d suggest as recommended reading in light of America’s new political reality.
...morePoem of the Day: “Sound & Fury” by Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine is an oracle. Her poetry is beautiful, interrogative, and inventive, as seen in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen (the American lyric we need for a path forward). Her consideration and public consciousness is nothing less than illuminating, and necessary in these dire times mercilessly lacking in empathy.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #63: Patrick Madden
Patrick Madden teaches writing at Brigham Young University and is the author of the essay collection Quotidiana. His essays frequently appear in literary magazines and have been featured in The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. He pays close attention to the details of the every day, infusing humor and self-deprecation, combining […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jericho Parms
What is lost still has substance, is malleable, can take on new impressions, and be molded again to our experience, often resulting in the most lasting force that determines how we see the world.
...moreIntervening in the Everyday
For BuzzFeed Reader, Tamerra Griffin speaks with Claudia Rankine—author of Citizen and recipient of one of this year’s MacArthur Genius fellowships—about police violence, forms of protest, and how she would have woven these topics into her acclaimed book had she been writing it this year: I would have added images around many of these protests that […]
...morePoetic Citizens
Over at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center blog, Suzi F. Garcia challenges the idea of poetry as a niche act of the elites by showing just how vital and contagious teaching a text like Citizen can be: Move poetry outside of its context. Find a way to protest. Bring it to students in classrooms, […]
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The Conversation: Jayson Smith and A. H. Jerriod Avant
My responsibility is to not be negligent and cause unnecessary harm. To a listener or reader. My allegiance is only to truth.
...moreThe Title Contains a Question
Blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with black people. The Guardian’s Kate Kellaway interviews Claudia Rankine on the writing of Citizen, some of her other work, and her thoughts on racism—and of course, Rankine, as always, is in top form.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Reginald Dwayne Betts
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Reginald Dwayne Betts about his new book Bastards of the Reagan Era.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Thorpe Moeckel
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Thorpe Moeckel about his new book Arcadia Road, the challenge of writing long poems, raising twins, and camo thongs.
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I’ll Fly Away: Notes on Economy Class Citizenship
I want to break from a continued and systematic white supremacy so pervasive it is entrenched in the vernacular I use to express myself.
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Claudia Reigns Queen
If you want to know what the effect that book has had on me, that’s the effect. I don’t care if you think I’m an angry black woman. I don’t care if you think I’m making you feel uncomfortable. I feel better. And that is important to me. Claudia Rankine met up with Bim Adewunmi […]
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Juliana Spahr
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Juliana Spahr about her new book That Winter the Wolf Came, the oil industry, and writing about “difficult” topics.
...moreClaudia Rankine Takes the Stage
My stage adaptation of Citizen is not a play. In addition to winning the National Book Critics Circle for poetry, Claudia Rankine’s modern genre-bending classic Citizen is now being adapted for the stage. Melville House has the whole story.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Anne Marie Macari
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Anne Marie Macari about her new book Red Deer, how to write simplicity with depth and mystery, and the sacred feminine.
...moreWhy We Need Claudia Rankine
There’s the persistent seduction of collective amnesia, our desperate wanting to embrace a mythology that we’ve evolved. We want to erase the nightmarish truth that at one time, we were the kind of people who would inflict unspeakable cruelties to another human being…Rankine’s Citizen demands that we not look away. For NPR, Syreeta McFadden writes […]
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Kathleen Ossip
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Kathleen Ossip about her new book, The Do Over, Catholic school, the afterlife, poem-like things, and how form sets sorely-needed limits.
...moreBlatant Hybrid
Over at The Believer, Ratik Asokan chats with Claudia Rankine about Citizen, art, and how we’re constantly updating our principles: We will always fail each other. That goes without saying. The question is, what happens next? If failing is then countered with the question, “What’s wrong with you?”, then that’s a problem. If you make […]
...moreOutrage Laced With Vulnerability
When the grand juries failed to indict Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo, they added to a lineage of injustices enacted against black people in America. Rumpus contributor Kaveh Akbar speaks to Claudia Rankine about her poetry collection Citizen, which explores the microaggressions supporting the system that let it happen: I didn’t have a directive in […]
...moreDuly Sympathetic
Over at BOMB, Claudia Rankine takes a look at the way we use our words: Tone is an everyday kind of maneuver. It disrupts and communicates aggression, disgust, dis- respect, and humor, among a myriad of possibilities, thereby allowing language to morph into a blanket or a gun. It helps me know how to read […]
...moreWeekend Roundup
First, feel for Steven Kraan’s Lonely Circle. Then, in the latest The Last Book I Loved, Chris Kubica shares his affection for Krabat, by the Czech writer Otfried Preußler. The story of an adventurous boy who discovers a mysterious, magical grain mill appealed deeply to the 9-year-old Kubica. Kubica’s relationship with his former 4th grade teacher enriches a heartwarming […]
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