poetry
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Glass Is Really a Liquid
The hard thing about these poems is that they make sense, fundamentally, but they’ve got a strange, skittering-away sense to them, a resistance to being pinned down.
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Your Frills Are Made of Bone
The Haunted House… tumbles through a teenage-girl world, giddy and feverish, at times drunk on foiled friendships and empty kisses, and at others sober with the knowledge that this tumultuous frolic is lamentably (thankfully?) temporary.
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The Foreign Skin of the Familiar
What’s most delightful is how Rader balances the heaviness of that observation against the lightness of the characters of Frog and Toad. Absurdity and lyricism, humor and serious contemplation, bump up against one another in pleasing ways.
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Dear Ruins of Our Future Selves
Wetzsteon’s formal style mixed with her populist vernacular is unmistakable and unforgettable.
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Two Books from Helen Vendler
Long time Rumpus Reviewer Barbara Berman examines the two latest offerings from critic Helen Vendler, one on Emily Dickinson and the other on the last books from five of the 20th century’s finest poetic voices.
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A Struggle at the Roots of the Mind
I don’t know if I’m the only youngish reader to have this chip on my shoulder, but I always sort of assume that poems by older people get mellower. Let me say it again: Rich’s lines are harrowing, are incensed…
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Let’s Float Free in the New Air
Such a surreal experience of the human body pervades See Me Improving. There is as much mystery in sneezing as there is in orgasm.
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Lounge Music
This is a book meant to bring poetry to the masses, in other words, and so [Editor A. J.] Rathbun has thrown in something for every taste, if only to ensure that every reader will find something to love.
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Shape of a Key, of a Dog, of a Letter
Cassian’s strongest poems–and there are many of them in Continuum–function in this way, where the initially familiar becomes a catalyst for something pleasurably disorienting as she subverts the expectations that she initially led us to have.
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Hammer Is the Prayer of the Poor and the Dying
For [Christian] Wiman, form is the fire his feet are held to. It’s the syntactic embers that burn, the linguistic flames that flare. At no point does Wiman let the reader forget he is reading poetry.
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Announcing the January Pick for The Rumpus Poetry Book Club
January’s pick for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club is A Beautiful Name for a Girl by Kirsten Kaschock. It’s from Ahsahta Press, and it’s Kaschock’s second collection of poems. For a sample of her work, follow me below the fold.
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From Exuberant Hanging Gardens
Leslie Williams is a fine poet, skillful and smart. She takes a range of topics I find by themselves repelling or uninteresting (suburban life, nature, flowers, gardening, Thomas Jefferson, the American South, etc.) and makes them compelling; she demands my…