The Last Poem I Loved: “In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden” by Matthea Harvey
I read poetry for enjoyment now, to feel seen, and to see the world differently.
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Posts Tagged: Last Book I Loved
The Last Book I Loved: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick and the Shifting of Cultural Values
Whose stories deserve to be told? Who deserves to tell them? And how?
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The Last Book I Loved: Re-reading Dana Levin’s Banana Palace in 2019
In such a context, Dana Levin’s particular apocalypses deserve another look.
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The Last Book I Loved: Poeta en San Francisco by Barbara Jane Reyes
Through incisive and uncompromising verse, Reyes unearths the hypocrisy at work in exalted American democracy…
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The Last Book I Loved: So Long, See You Tomorrow
By drawing us into his childhood, Maxwell shows us how to revisit our own. We become the storytellers of our own lives.
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The Last Book I Loved: Abbott Awaits
Summer works like this. Every day small moments cycle like waves within tides, eroding our opportunities on a geological scale invisible from our point of immersion.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Loss of All Lost Things
I recognize something in the stories… It’s the culture of “I made it” versus the culture of staying behind, the culture of achievement versus the culture of guilt.
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The Last Book I Loved: Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living In New York
But when my loneliness feels as vast—and capable of drowning me—as the sea, this book about self-destruction comforts me more than any self-help.
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The Last Book I Loved: After Birth
I wanted what Ari wanted: affirmation that I could be a good mother while making mistakes and having ugly, difficult thoughts.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Way We Weren’t by Jill Talbot
None of us has telepathy, and even the most empathetic of us can’t really experience the world as another person experiences it. So we read essays and memoirs.
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The Last Book I Loved: Beautiful Ruins
I’d been treated for cancer, left my husband, patched things up, and just as life was veering back towards Normalville, it took a headlong swerve.
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The Last Book I Loved: Heather Has Two Mommies
“Did everyone but her have a daddy?” Why—at age three—would you weep for a parent you didn’t have and had never known? I didn’t buy it.
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The Last Book I Loved: Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Bernadette Fox is awesome, but she is also kind of losing it, and I get it.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Hours
Depression has a peculiar texture: sometimes, rather than sadness, it is an emotional flatline; the sneaking suspicion that you are play-acting.
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The Last Book I Loved: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets
15. Bluets becomes a space for desire (thwarted), for mystery, for obscurity and unattainability. To explore the space where these intersect in Nelson is the project of the book.
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The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Sleeping With the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen
No one writes poems like [Harryette] Mullen. And if Mullen’s poems teach us anything about the larger context of making poems, the lesson might be that no one should write poems like her.
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THE LAST BOOK I LOVED: The Last Good Kiss BY JAMES CRUMLEY
Doesn’t it always start with poetry? Or at least a poet. Or at least a writer.
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The Last Book of Poems I Loved: “Death Tractates” by Brenda Hillman
The poet does what poets do: reactivates words, makes odd associations, connects things that do not ordinarily belong together in order to create deeper meaning.
...moreThe Last Book of Poems I Loved: Memory by Laura Jensen
Laura Jensen’s Memory begins with the eponymous poem about a falconer, whose falcon flies after its prey and doesn’t return until evening, surprising its master when it lands in the window clutching its prize. The poem ends with a lovely figure that I extend to her poetry’s effect on me: Like memory, it returned when […]
...moreThe Last Book I Loved: My Struggle by Karl Ove Knaussgard
It was strange. Volume One of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume memoir/novel was, with one traumatic exception near the end, the story of a typical young man. He had a typical childhood broken up only by a typical divorce. He was a typical teenager; excesses of emotion, dreams of stardom, and experimentation with substances. Typically he […]
...moreThe Last Book of Poems I Loved: Blood Sugar by Nicole Blackman
It’s fitting that Nicole Blackman leads into the poems of Blood Sugar with a quote from the confessional poet W.D. Snodgrass: “I am going to show you something very ugly. One day it may save your life.” The chief construct of confessional poetry is the brutally honest autobiography of the poet and the act of […]
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THE LAST BOOK I LOVED: Eleanor & Park
I was born in 1986, the year that this story takes place, but like Eleanor I remember sitting on a boy’s carpet and feeling uncomfortable and excited and getting mixtapes and shaking for hours after kissing someone once.
...moreThe Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
Sara Habein on the last book of poems she loved, Richard Blanco’s Looking for the Gulf Motel.
...moreHave you always wanted to write for The Rumpus?
No? Why not? We’d like to know the last book you loved and why. Send us a writeup of the last book you truly loved — a little bit book review and a lot about why you loved it — along with a short bio. We’ll publish our favorites in The Rumpus blog. No length requirements, but please […]
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The Last Book I Loved: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t just a collection for hopeful writers or even for people who are young and unmoored. It’s for all people who have lost their sense of place
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The Last Book I Loved: History of the Peloponnesian War
This is not an easy book to love. As an object, it is one of those books all of an age: squat, with yellowing, pulpy pages, the kind whose corners you can’t turn down
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The Last Book I Loved: Cataclysm Baby
Cataclysm Baby, a short story collection by Matt Bell, explores fatherhood under the guise of a book of baby names. The innocent abecedary form belies the book’s dark contents.
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The Last Book I Loved: Brown Girl, Brownstones
My dreams, for so long unrestrained by land, air, or even death—and frequently including scenes of me tumbling through the air on glossy black feathered wings or jumping into an abyss with a smile on my face—now generally take place in a building with four walls and a roof.
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The Last Book I Loved: Dream Songs
My relationship with John Berryman’s Dream Songs, like the songs themselves, is murky, complicated, obscure in origin, and not easy to explain—not even to myself.
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The Last Book I Loved: Skagboys
Rents, Sick Boy, and sweet addled Spud are the same as ever—only here they are pre-skag and still naïve about a world that will leave them jaded and vicious in a few books’ time.
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