We Can Be Heroes
“Poems are made of words that live in bodies — bodies shaped by line breaks, and fixed forever in space, on the page. Picture a gymnast in relation to the…
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poetry
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Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen
Take the omniscience and time-weary voice of myths, add in the best parts of fables, namely the anthropomorphic language and the supernatural weirdness, ground it in some extremely compelling poetry, and you’re still nowhere near what’s happening in this book.
Partyknife by Dan Magers
When James Wright said, “I have wasted my life,” Dan Magers must haven taken it to heart.
Olympic Poetics
“It’s easy to say poets are attracted to sport for reasons that have something to do with form. I’m sure that’s true, but I also think that it has something…
Scared Text by Eric Baus
A metamorphosis occurs among the prose poems of Eric Baus’ collection, Scared Text, winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry. We are the audience, the spectators, but also part of…
Where I’m Reading: Milk Bar
It’s Saturday morning, and so I’m sitting in a coffee shop which is in relative close proximity to my apartment. I’ve been going to coffee shops on Saturday mornings for…
Alden Van Buskirk
At The Poetry Foundation, Garrett Caples writes a moving essay on the life of Alden Van Buskirk, a Vermont born, Dartmouth-St. Louis-Mexico-Oakland raised poet with connections to the Beats and a…
“Not since Sylvia Plath…
…has a poet indulged an orgy of self-speculation of these proportions.” At The Boston Review, B.K. Fischer takes a close look at Rumpus contributor Ariana Reines’ poetry of the erotic…
Advice for Lovers by Julian Talamantez Brolaski
“A rose is arrows is eros,” as one poem has it, and who is to argue? Love and lyricism are all the better for their queerness. Brolaski, with a powerfully trans poetic, instructs us on just this fact, cloying power dynamics, pulling hair, and refusing any of the quaint old boundaries.
Happy Release Day!
If you’re a member of the Rumpus Poetry Book Club (and if you aren’t, here you go), then you should have received your copy of Leigh Stein’s Dispatch From the…
Black Square by Tadeusz Dąbrowski
To say the least, the speaker in the collection works hard to figure himself out in relation to philosophical, religious, and spiritual matters, and while some American readers may find such a project quaint, naïve, or retro, it holds power because the speaker, no matter his tone or particular mood, remains piercingly perceptive and unabashedly honest.
Paradise, Indiana by Bruce Snider
It’s gratifying that Bruce Snider dwells in the past without so much as a hint of nostalgia, that he offers up both the beauty and devastation of small-town Indiana.