poetry
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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 to do with the possibility of failure and, in the…
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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 the scene as we remember change in our own lives…
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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 many years now. It’s sort of like my church, or…
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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 love for Rimbaud. Van Buskirk (Van, to his friends) published…
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“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 sublime, focusing on her two recent collections, Cœur de Lion…
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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…
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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 Future weeks ago. If, however, you are among the unfortunate…
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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…
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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.
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Leigh Stein at BOMBLOG
This week’s installment of BOMB’s “Word Choice” is four poems by Leigh Stein, whose new collection, Dispatch from the Future, launches July 19th at Melville House. The poems, like Stein’s debut novel, The Fallback Plan—a depiction of after-college limbo—strike a powerful balance…
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I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say by Anthony Madrid
If this collection didn’t have one again questioning the origin and provenance of poetry (other than the intellect or empirical self), the poems would be getting short shrift.
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Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle
Madness, Rack, and Honey is a gift from a rigorous intellect, unflinching critic, and a big old sloppy heart. Ruefle has created a work of poetry from the daunting task of writing about it.