poetry
-

You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake by Anna Moschovakis
Because approaching a lake is a strange thing, especially in the opening pages. Small detours abound.
-

David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: If You Ain’t Got Your Poetics, Man, You’re Sunk
I’m glad to see Joshua Weiner wrestle so diligently and forthrightly with Charles Bernstein’s Attack of the Difficult Poems over on The Los Angeles Review. His review deserves attention, and I hope it sparks discussion. The trolling below his review…
-

“In Time’s Rift” by Ernst Meister
In Heidegger’s essay ‘The Nature of Language’ he poses the question “When does language speak itself as language?” He answers: “Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages…
-

Thunderbird by Dorothea Lasky
Thunderbird is one of the more traditional collections I’ve come across recently, both in tone and in form. Lasky doesn’t experiment heavily with form, preferring to stick to free verse occasionally broken into stanzas. Lasky lets her words do the…
-

David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Naming Names
Michael Lista nails it with his review of The Open Door: One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine, the anthology celebrating 100 years of Poetry, edited by Don Share and Chistian Wiman. University of Chicago hails the collection as a “new…
-

Having Been an Accomplice by Laura Cronk
Cronk’s Having Been an Accomplice is layered in the “imagined” of the real world, no matter the continent.
-

The Rumpus Interview with Lauren Berry
Lauren Berry, author of The Lifting Dress, discusses her experiences as a high school teacher, in an effort to continue a needed conversation about careers for graduates of Creative Writing MFA programs.
-

David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Roaring Editors
The Academy of American Poets is featuring Terese Svoboda’s generous tribute to a relatively unknown 1920’s proletariat poet, Lola Ridge. Svoboda isn’t just knocked out by Ridge. She compares her in a single breath to H. D., Emily Dickinson, and…
-

The Branches, The Axe, The Missing by Charlotte Pence
Charlotte Pence, author of Weaves a Clear Night has created in The Branches, the Axe, the Missing a work of significant mythic force that explores intimate circumstances of a woman fraught with sorrow borne out of problematic relationships with an…
-

The Daily Beast Loves The Rumpus Book Club
And we love you back. While I’m at it, a little update news. Our current book is Kathleen Alcott’s The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets—Bookslut covered it here and said “It’s never simple, but if complicated is what produces a novel…
-

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…
-

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…