poetry
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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.”
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When the Stonecutter’s Work is Done
Be warned: Char demands much from his reader. His poetry seems to exist in a limbo, where emotion and intellect meet with startling results. His labyrinthine vision leads the reader into a universe where everything seems transformed.
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My Stupid Dollar, My Beautiful Soul
When reading Space, in Chains, I would command my sister, my mother, my friends: “listen to this poem.” I recited Kasischke’s poetry out loud at the dinner table; I scanned her words as subways hurtled beneath boroughs; I listened to…
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The Speed of Belief
We don’t always run a separate review of our Poetry Book Club selection, but you’re in luck here. Taylor Hagood takes us through Tracy K. Smith’s latest, Life on Mars.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “To My Twenties” by Kenneth Koch
“Only this do you know for sure: time is an ellipsis until it is not.”
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The Hokum of Her Clothes
[O]ne of Laux’s strengths is her willingness to break through those poetic walls so many of us construct. She seems to want no distance between herself and her reader.
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The Patron Saint of Bad Marriages and Atomic Bombs in Peace Time
Reese’s poems…often bless the patience and attention of the reader by not demanding it.
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Romanticism
The poems in April Bernard’s Romanticism feel more complete, somehow, for the fact that they each align their focus on objects which, on multiple readings, still seem to have no particular connection other than that they’re all from Bernard.
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My America Isn’t On a Staid Map
Rane Arroyo’s character shines through in the amazing White as Silver collection, and will be clarified continuously as his vast trove of unpublished work begins to come to light.
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The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved: Rose
Inside a used bookstore at a grotesquely outsized strip mall in Fremont, California, I first pulled Li-Young Lee’s 1986 chapbook Rose from the shelf, a volume so thin the spine hardly held a label. Rose was pushed all the way…