TORCH: My American Playground
I left the car by the roadside and ran up the slope, in tears now, reaching the picnic tables and swings and, as bright and vivid as in my dreams, my purple-shaped climbing frame, exactly as I remembered it.
Posts by tag
new england
26 posts
Repel the Wind
Why would I ask for my sanity from the Devil as I sleep walk, only to give it up again to the Holy Spirit?
Corinne Lee and Finding an Antidote to America’s Toxicity
Poet Corinne Lee on writing her epic book-length poem Plenty and finding new ways to live in a rapidly changing world.
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Instructions for Replicating a Bad Summer
Compare yourself to a raw wound. Explain that everyone else is one too, whether they know it or not.
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Tess Taylor
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Tess Taylor about her new collection Work & Days, manual labor, and the lyric possibilities in small fields.
The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Barber
Poet Jennifer Barber discusses loss, identity, historical trauma, and her newest collection, Works on Paper.
The Rumpus Review of The Witch
The most interesting part of The Witch is that the family is so convinced of humanity’s fallen, sinful nature that it never occurs to them to even look for an aggressor from without.
The Rumpus Interview with Kate Bolick
Kate Bolick talks about her new book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, writing and the nuclear family, and whether women are finally people yet.
Armored in Cars and Driving Unseen
America is a beautiful country and it was beautiful before we got here. I’m not sure yet if we, the ancestral echo of colonizers, are a beautiful people. I often have doubts.
Cheaters: A Life in Eyewear
When I was nine I faked a vision test to get a pair of pale pink cat eyed beauties. Because I wanted them.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Out on the Coast
When he was five, six, seven, and eight, Max spent most of the summer thinking about the whale, sitting in his room with the shades drawn remembering the first visit and looking forward to the second, just before the new school year.
Songs of Our Lives: Look Blue Go Purple’s “Circumspect Penelope”
Distance always seduced me—distance from whatever was most familiar, especially myself—but the difficulties in achieving such remove vexed me.