poetry
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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.
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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. Prose poems are strongside linebackers waiting to unleash a terrible…
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The Crash Scene of Species Extinction
Everything Roberson writes has an encyclopedic backscope, condensed into impeccable art.
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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 such a book.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Interviews Tracy K. Smith
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Tracy K. Smith about her collection Life on Mars/
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The Octopi and the Flaking Salt
The Grief Performance took me to the edge of an existential black hole, then threw me back on the concrete and said, “Bitch, please. This is theater.”