After the Umpteenth Bird
The speaker of The Trees Around navigates the empty spaces on the page with as much deftness and resilience as he does the empty spaces in our universe (perceptual and…
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poetry
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The Rumpus Interview with Shira Dentz
Shira Dentz is the author of black seeds on a white dish, nominated for the PEN/Osterweil Award 2011, a chapbook titled Leaf Weather, and door of thin skins, forthcoming from…
Instead of Words…Blew Cinders
Page by page, and bit by bit, the story of these poems becomes part of a warm current of emotion in a greater ocean of loss.
Accidental Political Poets
Poetry is the literary art form that can most readily adapt the grammatically-fraught, political commentaries of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, apparently. Michael Solomon compiled and edited a bunch of…
Set the Dumpster On Fire
What Gottlieb reveals to us in this collection, is that the key to survival is the same animal desire that served as our undoing in the first place, but the…
The Last Poem I Loved: “Sparrow” by Melissa Kwasny
I’ll be honest: I’m not usually much of a fan of prose poems. I like lineation, form, structure. Give me meter, syllabics, some rules to cling to—if I want a…
The Last Poem I Loved: “When he left, how many birds did he leave?” by Jessica Young
I love a poem which opens by grounding me in a particular context, or way of thinking, or regard of the narrative voice, but then uproots me tornado-style and flings…
Your Emptiness Has an Aqueduct In It
The Last Usable Hour might be one of our truest examples of serial poetry. Each of the book’s four sequences, and each of the poems that comprise them, stand as…
His Nose Still Mine
The reflective and observant nature of the speaker creates a sense of subtle wisdom that clips [Shane] McCrae’s signature, disruptive syntax.
The Last Poem I Loved: “The Terrible Angel” by Russell Edson
I love prose poems. Prose poems sacrifice the agility of line breaks for the raw power of the sentence. Poems with line breaks are undersized receivers who run intricate routes.…
The Crash Scene of Species Extinction
Everything Roberson writes has an encyclopedic backscope, condensed into impeccable art.
Wanting Light and Buying Hammers
Even the hardest books ultimately cohere, it’s just a matter of whether their internal logic will eventually open up and allow you entrance. Lily Brown’s Rust or Go Missing is…