poetry
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Poetry Book Club News
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.) Check it out. And if you’d like to become a…
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The Grief Performance, by Emily Kendal Frey
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 speaker of The Grief Performance treats poems as if they were contingent…
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Inmost, by Jessica Fisher
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 Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, Fanny Howe’s Come…
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Michael Robbins Interview
Vol. 1 Brooklyn converses with Michael Robbins about his recently released poetry collection, Alien vs. Predator. Other topics of discussion include his hatred of Mississippi, Dadaism, suberversion in music, Occupy, and the police. “The stuff that interests me is dangerous,…
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Coming to That by Dorothea Tanning
Dorothea Tanning’s Coming to That is a book full of imagination, creativity, and intellect.
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Between the Crackups, by Rebecca Lehmann
Rebecca Lehmann’s collection, Between the Crackups, is a glittering, furious book. Many of its poems inhabit a childhood world full of violence and anger. Others showcase adult voices that range in tone; they are frustrated, sorrowful, sometimes funny, sometimes contemplative.…
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Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans
Visiting the Taos Pueblo (“an ancient community continuously inhabited for 100 years”) on San Geronimo Day, I was frightened by the Sacred Clowns (Koshares). The list of rules for visitors explained that these fit young men roving about in traditional…
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National Poetry Month Day 38: “A Room in Cleopatra’s Palace” by Mary Jo Bang
This brings us to the end of our National Poetry Month project, one poem short of a sestina’s worth. We close out this year with a poem by Mary Jo Bang, whose forthcoming translation of Dante’s Inferno will be our…
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This Is Ridiculous
Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog, reports that poet Joshua Clover and 11 students at UC Davis are potentially facing a $1 million fine and up to 11 years each in prison. Their crime? Peaceful protest. A petition is circulating which…
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National Poetry Month Day 37: “Two Lyrics from ‘Rondo’” by Janet Holmes
Well I got to keep it going keep it going full steam. Two Lyrics from “Rondo” The boys pawing the ground are horses. They will drag you between them. Come, give them your arms!
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National Poetry Month Day 36: “The Lover’s Field Guide to Lesser Coinage” by Sandra Beasley
Was National Poetry Month over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no! The Lover’s Field Guide to Lesser Coinage There are eight stycas in a penny, two pennies in a farthing, three farthings in a nearthing, and eight nearthings…