poetry
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National Poetry Month Day 3: “Cousins” by Jonterri Gadson
Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April. Cousins On the rock slide behind Building 10, we crushed pebbles into powder, and plotted…
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National Poetry Month Day 2: “At the Book Shrink” by Brenda Shaughnessy
Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April. At the Book Shrink one learns to say “my body uses me as a grape…
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The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry
It is clear from Dove’s introduction to the anthology, and from her selections, that she just wanted an engaging, informative, high -quality collection. She succeeded.
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An Inverted World of Trees and Trembling Sky
At its best, After the Point of No Return gives us just what we hope to find: poems that wrestle with mortality, retrace the steps of a life, and take us past the limit of flesh into whatever comes next.
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Adrienne Rich, 1929 – 2012
Adrienne Rich, one of the preeminent poets of the 20th and early 21st centuries, has died at the age of 82, according to the LA Times. I don’t really have much to add–she was an amazing poet and powerful presence…
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Tell Me She Is Happy With Her Life
In this collection, Chaple successfully fuses the personal with the spatial. As a result, an awareness of the way poems, by airing out the rooms of stanzas, can provide at once solace and disarray comes into terrible focus.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat With D. A. Powell
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with D.A. Powell about his poetry collection Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys.
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“Winter Lottery,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Michael McGriff
Winter Lottery In the gray, frozen months, the pack rats moved into the garage and ruined everything.
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Drinking a Glass of Light
The emotional theme of the volume, the nostalgia and death that is announced in the book’s title and reaffirmed in almost every poem to some extent, is what I know I will carry with me for a long time.
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Wind and Rain Make No Difference
Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom could fit neatly into any number of contemporary-sounding categories: hybrid text, art book, lyric essay, etc. It is a book that relies on interdependence of image and text, of history and the present, of…
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What You Lost Is What Everyone Lost
Often, in contemporary literature, grief becomes clichéd; O’Rourke, however, avoids sappiness or melodrama. Instead, her poetry probes at the actualization of grief, revealing a startling emotional depth.
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“That Old Desire,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Meghan O’Rourke
That Old Desire Was a fire licking and hot, a red fur with blue trim, like an Elizabethan ruff, if a ruff could be made