poetry
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“Call the Clock,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Nicole Walker
Call the Clock I was a little envious. I’d only ever had one and he— cat o’ hearts—he had nine. He traded them in every time they got broken.
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When I Go Outdoors, Light Splits
The poems in This Noisy Egg are always engaging and hold the reader’s attention, but they do not feel un-tethered or dangerous. Reading them, I had the sensation that there was little room for what Stanley Kunitz called “wilderness,” the…
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Body Odor Can Be a Room
In individual poems, small series of interconnected poems, and in the book as object, Mairéad Byrne has made in The Best Of (What’s Left Of) Heaven a map that covers every kind of topographical feature.
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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
I think we’re just a couple of days away from announcing our next two books for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. The logistics for this thing are a bear sometimes, but it’s worth the effort, and we’re very excited about…
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Who’s There
In Knock Knock, Hartley has accomplished a humor hat-trick, netting jokes a) in poetry, b) while evoking multiple cultures and c) in multiple languages. Hartley’s comedy is in the absurdity of the details, whether sensory or linguistic.
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Two Threads
Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems is best appreciated not for its message or its drama, but for its expert way at guiding a reader through the writer’s lively imagination.
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Jazzy Danziger: The Last Poem I Loved, “Epithalament” by Brenda Shaughnessy
Contrary to popular belief, language is not flat, passionless, clichéd and dying, and if you disagree, it’s imperative that you read Brenda Shaughnessy’s poem “Epithalament” as soon as possible. Language must be “weirded” if it’s going to make the ordinary…
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It Begins to Look Like Courtesy
Carl Phillips is a masterful maker of sweet visual dances that are never cloying.
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David Peak: The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved, Horror Vacui
This is the one I return to, sometimes several times a year. The term “Horror Vacui” has two definitions, both of which serve as a useful framework while skirting the abyss hinted at throughout Heise’s alternately gloomy and beautiful poems.
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Tinkering With the Closed Box
Cyborgia is wildly imaginative and the poems don’t take themselves too seriously. Even when these women are being constructed or destroyed, the book isn’t particularly angry or even political. It instead feels rather gleeful.
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The Ultimate in Recycling
It’s just a coincidence that I’ll be teaching the Wendell Berry poem “Enriching the Earth” tomorrow, a poem which ends with the lines “And so what was heaviest / and most mute is at last raised up into song,” but…
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It Ninja-Stars Me
The voice that animates The French Exit is smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn’t so much distort…