A Year in Rumpus Book Reviews
A look back at the books we’ve reviewed in 2019!
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Posts Tagged: mourning
Remembering as Deconstruction: Eduardo Halfon’s Mourning
To scrutinize the past, one must approach the walls between then and now.
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How to Name Dead Babies
Let’s not pretend first means there’s a good place to start.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Tsitsi Dangarembga
Tsitsi Dangarembga discusses her new novel, THIS MOURNABLE BODY.
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How I Learned to Hope Again
And in order to hope, I have to once more believe—in the midst of unrelenting dark—that light exists even if I cannot see it.
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The Ritual
It’s not easy being the mother of a dead child. In fact, it may be the hardest kind of mothering there is.
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The Depths We Don’t Have Words For: Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s Echolocation
[R]eading these poems feels like looking down into deep water, being able to see only so far and no farther.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Day of the Dead
Octavio is tired, tired of trying to separate what he remembers so vividly from the memories he can barely make out in the fog.
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Elegy with Records on the Doorstep
The old music still filled pits in him like sawdust and wood glue do a nail hole. The songs didn’t say anything new over the years, but they provided home when he missed it.
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
First, shaky cultural bridges are strengthened through mourning in Lito Velázquez’s Saturday Essay, “A Taste of Something, Slowly Over Time.” Then, Brandon Hicks offers an illustrated early Valentine’s Day treat: true love and eternal happiness is churned out in the automated romantic experience of a lifetime. Finally, in the Sunday Essay, Beth Roddy recalls the rite of passages offered in […]
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R.I.P.: Inauguration Day
Instead of mourning in solitude, let us sob together. Let us soak communally in our fear. Let us hyperventilate, our breasts heaving in unison.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Red Whole
I’ve become an abridged version of myself—made half-done and meager. Made hungry for answers.
...morePoem of the Day: “I’ll Be Here” by Robert Creeley
I’ll Be Here There is a lake of clear water. There are forms of things despite us. Pope said, “A little learning,” and, and, and, and—the same. Why don’t you go home and sleep and come back and talk some more. —Robert Creeley (via The Poetry Foundation)
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The Life Jacket
How later you learned grief and love are partners too. How love held you through grief’s fire.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Through the Vitrine
It has been fifteen years, but I can still remember every moment of that year. It is cased in a vitrine, and the things I see through the wavy plexiglass are indistinct and as odd as that car going the wrong way on the parking garage ramp.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
The grief story: it’s sympathetic, moving, and even cathartic when done well. It’s also a trap for clichés, overwrought metaphors, sticky sentimentality, and hyperbole. Add that to the ubiquity of the grief story, and you get a subject that can be damn tricky to write well. Some writers may spend hours coming up with new […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: On Theft
Maybe this is what compelled Stella to plunder goods without paying. Her mother had been taken, her heart song snatched away. The stealing became her mourning.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Widow
If he had died in the Civil War, the extent of my mourning would have been a scandal. He was not my husband, my fiancé, my father, or my brother.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: I wanted to be sure to reach you
I have no answers, but I can feel my feet.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: An Ocean of Hatted Absurdity
I wonder if in absence I will now come to conflate him with the character I’ve drawn. Or with the character I’m drawing now.
...moreWho Do You Cry For?
Who do we remember and why do we mourn? Teju Cole writes about unmournable bodies for the New Yorker.
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The Pot Thrower: Notes on the Death of a Brother
If Charlie had finally lost his focus after all these years, well, no wonder. I’d have lost it after about fifteen minutes wrestling with CF. We had to help him find his resolve again and get back his health, not stand there crying.
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