From the Archive: Unbound
It’s always been ground glass, scraping against my insides. I imagine a light held to the place where I open would illuminate a mess of torn flesh, throbbing red-wet.
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Posts Tagged: Pain
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Nefertiti Asanti
“…each month I embrace a kind of death within my womb that offers me a life I can live with.”
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Tracing the Wolf
To brand myself with something I feared and sought to subdue seemed like a reclamation.
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The Space Between Vertebrae
My hands grow cold and rigid. In those blue-tinged palms, I can see my future.
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Affliction: On Finding Relief in Pain
Hurting heightened everything, both within and without it.
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Revisiting and Reinventing the Body: A Conversation with Destiny O. Birdsong
Destiny O. Birdsong discusses her debut poetry collection, NEGOTIATIONS.
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This Huge, Colossal Joy: A Conversation with Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison
Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison discuss their work.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #209: Lisa Olstein
“I don’t think I know how to write if I’m not guided by sound—that’s when it feels like I’m flailing or straining.”
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They Smile When They Chew
There is at least one monster on every team.
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Voices on Addiction: A Conversation with Emily Arnason Casey
Emily Arnason Casey discusses her debut essay collection, MADE HOLY.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Trisha Low
Trisha Low discusses her new book-length essay, SOCIALIST REALISM.
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This Future Is Here: Talking with Tom McAllister
Tom McAllister discusses his new novel, How to Be Safe, workshops, Twitter, dystopia, and narrative voice.
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Translating the Untranslatable: A Conversation with Andrea J. Buchanan
Andrea J. Buchanan discuss The Beginning of Everything and processing trauma through narrative.
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What Did You Expect, Though?
The immune system, meant to protect a body from foreign invaders, works too assiduously, sees danger where there is none, turns on itself. Such conditions lend themselves to metaphor.
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Magical Systems and Fusion Reactors: Rivers Solomon Discusses An Unkindness of Ghosts
Rivers Solomon discusses her debut novel, the importance of writing the body into a story, and more.
...more#SuicideGirls: Why I Teach Sylvia Plath
But let’s not forget: feminism is, at least in part, about choice, and portions of life are play, not politics. Play and relationships and creativity and whatever we want.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Diggins
I was told that I was “a good digger” if I was behaving as a young child, working hard, and not talking back. Like nursery rhymes, the rhythm of racism cannot be forgotten.
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Multitudes: (Re) Writing Mother
I like to listen to my mother’s voice; the sounds she makes in an English-Korean mashup; we are each the other’s dictionary.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, the art and literature magazine Paper Darts has a short story about the expectations and invasions of walking through the world in a female body. Not the obvious, more aggressive ones, the catcalling or man-spreading; instead, “Personal Space” by Susan Fedynak details the subtler, quieter transgressions, some perpetuated by other women, some perpetuated […]
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #16: The Game Is On
Today is the day that Pr*sident Trump shut down the American borders to refugees, green card holders, and non-citizens with paid for and improved visas—if they were from certain “Muslim majority” countries… It is also the day his administration made it clear that, going forward, “Christian” refugees would be given priority over all other refugees—and […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay discusses her new collection, Difficult Women, the problem with whiteness as the default and the need for diverse representation, and life as a workaholic.
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My Voice for Their Drugs
Anxiety disorients me from inside. My heart moves so erratically I’m afraid it will give out, my breath so staggered I have to remind myself to take in air.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Such a Thing
The future perfect tense indicates an action that is certain to occur. But when the future is not perfect or certain, the conditional “would” is more appropriate.
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Voices on Addiction: 365 Days without You
The men in my family don’t live long, you foretold. Damn you. Drunks and rock stars don’t grow up.
...moreSong of the Day: “Hurt”
“I hurt myself today,” Johnny Cash sings in one of the last recordings he made, his poignant cover of the Nine Inch Nails song, “Hurt.” The song couldn’t be more appropriate now, during this week of confusion and heartache and regret. Cash chose to release it towards the end of his life, perhaps as a kind […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Anuk Arudpragasam
Anuk Arudpragasm discusses his debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage, the bombing of civilians during the war in Sri Lanka, documenting war crimes, and powerful Tamil women.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Surprising the Psychic
Coming up Swords, a Nine: nightmares and anguish; the Ten: rock bottom; and Death: with her audible reminder the card was in “the place you are now.”
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Pain Scale Treaties
Perched on the shoulders of generational trauma sit these two theses: suffering begets cruelty begets suffering begets cruelty, and pain is empathy’s catalyst.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Infarct, I Did
This essay is not about love. Love doesn’t enter into it. We are talking mechanics. Four chambers, ventricles and atria. The mammalian heart, and thus, the bat heart, and thus, the human heart.
...moreDe La Soul and Snoop Dogg
As part of the lead-up to De La Soul’s next album And The Anonymous Nobody, the group has released a new single featuring Snoop Dogg. The album is set to come out via a crowdfunded, independent release on August 26th and is available for pre-order on iTunes. Listen to the single “Pain” after the jump.
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