poetry
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Dead Ahead
Doller’s facility with language, and his wheeling imagination, which pushes language into fresh directions, never ceases to delight the reader.
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Return Them to Their Sources Uninterpreted
Each conceit, each stanza, each line in Lovely, Raspberry sparkles with such wonderful ambiguity of thought that is, paradoxically, a type of clarity; through Belz’s absurdism, aspects of the human condition are illumined in unique, resonant fashion.
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As If the Stars Invented Dinner
So what are Mazer’s actual poems like? They are, in their way, haunted.
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A Gap in a Two-Way Mirror
As a chapbook, Narcissus Resists works. Across nineteen poems, a conceit such as this can get old, but Hittinger keeps his book compelling and engaging.
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Star-Smoked Skies
Kuipers is a “traditional poet” with respect to her unwavering focus on craft; the engine powering her verse is tight word choice that simultaneously conjures up tangible, living objects and powerful emotional resonance.
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Wait
Now in his seventh decade, C. K. Williams has published many books and won the big prizes, but the poems in Wait are fresh—he does not merely rely on old blueprints, but continues the struggles that have preoccupied him throughout…
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Why I Chose What I Chose, Ceiling of Sticks
Rumpus Poetry Book Club Advisory Board member Camille T. Dungy on why she chose Shane Book’s Ceiling of Sticks to be the group’s first selection. If anyone were to accuse contemporary American poetry of being insular, self-involved and provincial, these…
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The Rumpus Is a Place for Poets
Today we have an excellent Rumpus Original (Supersized) Combo, featuring an interview with Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize winner Neil de la Flor, a review of his collection Almost Dorothy, and a Rumpus original poem by de la Flor himself.…
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“Googlism for Steve,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Neil de la Flor
Googlism for Steve Steve is in my closet. Steve is non-industrious and totally asexual. Steve is still alive somewhere in the world.
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Joey was Dorothy, and I was Almost Dorothy
Page after page finds de la Flor purposefully mixing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry all together in long prosy lines that bend genre and gender, time and space.
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The Rumpus Original (Supersized) Combo with Neil de la Flor
How do you supersize a Rumpus Original Combo? That’s easy—just take a book review and an interview with the author, and add a Rumpus Original Poem to it!
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All the Whiskey in Heaven
In short, [Charles] Bernstein is taking apart the structures of conventional poetry, and more generally of the language we use every day – and which in turn uses us – in order to return us to a more basic relationship…