poetry
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Eileen G’Sell
At best, life is hard. / At worst, life is easy. / I believe it is true. / I would like to believe / I believe it is true.
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Why I Chose Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s Interrupted Geographies for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
I still remember the time many (many) years ago, as an undergrad, when my professor dropped Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and Sir Walter Ralegh’s response on the class and launched into a discussion of the pastoral…
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Earnest, Funny, and Fun: Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities
What makes Chen’s poetry so exhilarating is that these poems always have a center of gravity—the self—that keeps the many subjects they explore in orbit.
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Poetry That Makes You Nearly Miss the Plane: The Complete Works of Pat Parker edited by Julie R. Enszer
In other words, sometimes we need to be jolted out of our predictable behaviors and routines. We need the kind of reading that scatters us, pulls and weaves our cerebral, emotional, and visceral chains.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #87: Kai Cheng Thom
Rarely is birth silent for anyone involved. Silence, instead, is a learned phenomena. Unlearning silence can become its own birth, as it seems in Kai Cheng Thom’s debut poetry collection a place called No Homeland, opening with, “diaspora babies, we…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 14): “Some Grass Along a Ditch Bank”
…being on the edge of the natural world is like being on the edge of time.
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An Ambitious Atlas of Fears: Catherine Pierce’s The Tornado Is the World
Pierce’s poems approach danger from surprising angles. Do you fear the tornado? Then come inside it and hear it speak.
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On Grief and Inheritance: A Conversation with Brionne Janae
The poet Brionne Janae discusses her debut poetry collection After Jubilee, intergenerational trauma, and writing her way into historical personae.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #85: Elizabeth Metzger
I have known the poet Elizabeth Metzger since kindergarten—and ever since I have known her, she has been a poet. When we played the The Game of Life, a board game, she wrote small lyrics about the futures we ended…


