poetry
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The Rumpus Interview with Josh Fernandez
I remember reading a journal, thinking, “If I read the word ‘tendril’ one more time, I’m going to jump out of this window.” Luckily, I was outside.
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Would You Do That Again?
In short, the book offers the expert work of an expert: it is as if Bly is writing messages against the sky using not a plane but his own flawless wings and capacious vivid breath.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Bolt from the Blue” by Gregory Orr
After taking a certain number of poetry classes, one may end up with a giant box of photocopied poems. If one is a packrat (and I am), these poems are impossible to discard. Sometimes I cut them up for collages,…
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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 actual).
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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 CavanKerry Press. Stacy Kidd conducted the following extensive interview via…
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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.
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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 Sarah Palin-isms in I Hope Like Heck: The Selected Poems…
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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 degree to which we succeed in that survival will depend…
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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 poem that looks like a chunky little square of prose,…
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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 me through the air to where nothing resembling a soft…
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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 individual pieces and as chapters in a developing narrative.
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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.