Lou Reed, member of The Velvet Underground, wrote a poem, “O Delmore how I miss you,” to his college professor Delmore Schwartz in Poetry Magazine. “Reading Yeats and the bell…
The answer for me, in this case, is among a group of statues on the Drake University campus in Des Moines, IA. I’m reading from our June Poetry Book Club…
It’s 1990. I’ve shut the door to my bedroom, like any self-respecting teenage girl, to listen to my new CD—the one I ordered for a penny from one of those…
I’m fat. No matter where it stations itself then—against the sunset, unto the dawn, in the most awake and aware of lights at the gas station or drive-thru—my silhouette is…
Every once in a while, when I’m reading something, sorting through the words in a half-daze, my brain will just click. I’ll get it. I’ll take on an understanding of…
Love, An Index tells a beautiful and heartbreaking story, and at the heart of it is some of the most original and interesting poetry that I’ve come across in a…
Newly appointed Washington State Poet Laureate, Kathleen Flenniken, recently released a second book called Plume, part of the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series of University of Washington Press. I will admit,…
In Vanishing-Line, Jeffrey Yang writes, “But the birches of Yennecott/ recall his word-spirits.” Rather than using lines or stanzas as the basic unit of expression in this collection, Yang writes…
Our April poet, Carmen Giménez Smith, was featured on NPR’s NewsPoet series. (NewsPoet has featured Rumpus Poetry Book Club poet and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith as well.)…
Emily Kendal Frey’s compact, laconic poems from her first collection, The Grief Performance, outwit, outlast, and, eponymously, outperform not only death, but failure, ennui, and despair. How, you ask? For starters, the…
Many of the most interesting lyric books of the past few years have attempted a sort of reckoning between contemporary life and the reality of ceaseless war. Nick Flynn’s The…