poetry
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I Live in a Hut by S. E. Smith
J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield famously said that the mark of a great author is whether, after reading their work, you want to call them up to talk, want to gab with them about nothing much and everything in between. You…
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Letters From Robots by Diana Salier
I am not impressed with writers who refuse to use punctuation or capitalization; that gimmick has been famously used already, so now it comes across as lazy and unoriginal. Also, I have no patience for unspecific second person singular or…
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Fragile Acts by Allan Peterson
The cover of Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts, in print and as eBook, is as visually compelling as the cover of Rebecca Lindenberg’s Love, An Index, the first poetry selection in McSweeney’s new series. The cloth binding of Fragile Acts is…
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Dispatch From the Future by Leigh Stein
I don’t think I ever laughed with a poem. Sometimes I chuckle at a clever turn of phrase, or at a shared sentiment, or a little idiosyncrasy that I thought all my own, and though I laughed at that dirty…
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Uselysses by Noel Black
Uselysses by Noel Black is a collection of five, distinct, short books of poetry. The first three books collect introspective and self-conscious poems common in contemporary poetry, distinguishing themselves with imaginative imagery and a unique sense of humor. The fourth…
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Sunday Rumpus Serialization: Three Poems
David Hernandez returns to The Sunday Rumpus with whimsically intense new poems and artwork, in this second of a two-part installment.
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Traveler by Devin Johnston
“One can no more locate the unconscious impulse to a poem among the synapses of the brain,” Devin Johnston writes in the preface to Precipitations, his study of the relationship between contemporary poetry and the occult, “than one could uncover…
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Engine Empire by Cathy Park Hong
There remain a few shops, labels, and presses in the United States that embody DIY artistic independence in the best way, combining the intensity and existential tenacity of hardcore punk with the zine culture’s relentless focus on aesthetics, history, honesty…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Under the Maud Moon” by Galway Kinnell
A round- cheeked girlchild comes awake in her crib. The green swaddlings tear open I first encountered the last poem I loved, Galway Kinnell’s “Under the Maud Moon,” eleven summers ago, after a short trip to a novel writing workshop…
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The Rumpus Interview with Cynthia Cruz
Her poems were spare, fierce, dark little packages that managed to feel both mystical—almost like fairytales—and contemporary with their references to drugs and Greyhound stations.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “The Bells” by Adam Zagajewski
My maternal grandparents emigrated from Poland in 1924 after experiencing the horrors of World War I. They arrived here with pockets full of hopes and dreams and little else. I never met them; they died before I was born. I…
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Ring of Bone: Collected Poems by Lew Welch
Lew Welch has been dead now for 40 years, just about as long as his total time on earth. He disappeared on May 23, 1971, walked out of poet and friend Gary Snyder’s house into the mountains of California, carrying…