poetry
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“My Poets” by Maureen McLane
Maureen McLane has published two daring, original collections of poetry, and a book called Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry, from Cambridge University Press. Balladeering, with sometimes sluggish, academic prose, is worth effort for anyone wishing greater…
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Barbara Berman’s Holiday Shopping Guide
Barbara Berman is a long time Rumpus reviewer. Here she offers her recommendations for books to give during this holiday season and beyond. Years ago I decided to do as much holiday shopping as possible at independent book stores and…
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Sleep Song, The Poetic Epilogue to War, Cancelled
Sleep Song, the third installment of Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd’s poetic performances that showcase stories about soldiers of color in wars, had its Harlem Stage show cancelled because its Iraqi performers were denied visas. At Colorlines, Seth Freed Wessler…
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“The Lamp With Wings” by M. A. Vizsolyi
Love puts a lot of pressure on people to do things with each other. There are a lot of conditions to saying “I love you.” You have to act love out in the world, and it’s a big world, especially…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Bruce Lee’s Advice to Poets
Who isn’t a devotee of advice from writers about writing? One of my favorite books in this guilty-pleasure genre to come out lately is Dennis O’Driscoll’s collection of witticisms and one-liners, Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry.…
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“Book of Dog” by Cleopatra Mathis
The domesticated dog, evolved 15,000 years ago from gray wolves, is not a reliquary of slavish dependence in Book of Dog, Cleopatra Mathis’ seventh collection, nor is it a token of the bourgeois middle-class’s presumed benignity. It is as necessary…
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“Melancholia (An Essay)” by Kristina Marie Darling
Kristina Marie Darling’s wonderful new book of poems, Melancholia (An Essay)—her fourth—is more than a collection of abandoned footnotes and glossaries (poetic constructs she has been mastering since Night Songs), it is a history composed entirely of an ex-lover’s curios—a…
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Getting to Know Thurston Moore, Poet
“It was Moore’s, and Moore’s alone, unique dichotomy of rock star demagogue and unbridled fan of poetry that made his class worth the audit. Scansion, simile, synecdoche―such elements of praxis are lost on Thurston Moore, as they would any experimental…
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“I Growed No Potatoes To Write About, Sir”: a Rumpus Original Poem by Erin Belieu
I Growed No Potatoes To Write About, Sir nor bogs, nor fathers, nor special water that was my place alone to make me hard and wise— I did not sow nor bury, nor even try to fudge my nothings in…
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“Baltics” by Tomas Tranströmer
Tomas Tranströmer’s Baltics, a long poem, first appeared in 1974, but this time around Samuel Charters has added a new afterword to his original translation, and his wife Ann Charters has included photographs from 1973 of Tranströmer and his wife at…
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The Last Book I Loved: “Please” by Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown’s Please explores the way love and violence coexist with each other and how the two sometimes intertwine. The collection of poems is categorized by four sections: “Repeat,” “Pause,” “Power,” and finally, “Stop”; the first three sections address self-identification…
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“The Apothecary’s Heir” by Julianne Buchsbaum
A winning selection in the 2011 National Poetry Series, Julianne Buchsbaum’s The Apothecary’s Heir interrogates the wildness of nature, the decadence of urban sprawl, and the necessity of myth and history in our daily lives. While her third collection maintains…