Reading Whitman While White
It is only by holding Whitman accountable for all of his language that we can also love other parts of his language and poetics.
...more
Posts Tagged: Reviews
Sketch Book Reviews: Bourdain by Laurie Woolever
An illustrated review of Laurie Woolever’s new book, BOURDAIN.
...more
The Revolutions of a Sonnet: frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss
The richly historied form of the sonnet is a powerhouse for holding the past.
...more
The Worlds We Inhabit: Home: New Arabic Poems
These writers expand the meaning of the word home by virtue of their lives and their writing.
...more
Barbara Berman’s 2020 Holiday Poetry Shout-Out
Barbara Berman reviews four books in her 2020 Holiday Poetry Shout-Out
...more
Rumpus Poetry Reviews, Reimagined
Meet our new poetry reviews editors!
...more
What We Need: Juan Felipe Herrera, Maw Shein Win, and John Freeman
Barbara Berman reviews Every Day We Get More Illegal, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, and The Park.
...more
Any Moment Is a Door: Nadia Colburn’s The High Shelf
Again, the red door stands open, allowing the world to enter.
...more
The Joy of Play: Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces (10th Anniversary Ed.) by David Biespiel
Biespiel offers a number of best practices—not just for writing poems, but for living a creative life.
...more
Intimate and Vast: Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
This is stunning work—painful, embodied, and glorious.
...more
A Window with Reality Through It: Everything Here by Billie Swift
Swift’s shuffled lines create haunting, breathtaking possibilities.
...more
Courageous Music: Jane Mead’s To the Wren: Collected & New Poems
Her poems make felt observations sing, no matter the subject.
...more
Angry Reminders: Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50
Human beings like to make myths out of things we don’t understand.
...more
Transcending Metaphor: Jenifer Sang Eun Park’s Autobiography of Horse
To call [AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HORSE] unique is an understatement.
...more
A Fierce Compassion: Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism
WOMEN OF RESISTANCE recognizes this reality with fierce compassion, and a lot of really fine poetry.
...more
Making Absence Present: Save the Bathwater by Marina Carreira
Saudade is often translated as longing, and as with most translations, what gets left out matters.
...more
A Kind of Balm: Angel Bones by Ilyse Kusnetz
Except she isn’t windless and neither are we, thanks to her.
...more
Holding On: Ridiculous Light by Valencia Robin
The poems of Ridiculous Light are wary of hope yet keep thrumming toward it.
...more
Show without Telling: Stay by Tanya Olson
[I]f you want maximum pleasure from this collection, then, you will want to listen closely.
...more
Mindful Witnesses: Three Books from New Directions
Barbara Berman reviews work by Dunya Mikhail, Thomas Merton, and Robert Lax.
...more
A Cleansing Tornado: Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff by Sara Borjas
Undergirding all the truth about pain is the triumph that comes from having a heart like a window and a mouth like a cliff.
...more
A Gentle Reckoning: Blas Falconer’s Forgive the Body This Failure
If there is distance in this collection, it originates with our own discomfort with its subject matter.
...more
A Hard-Won Love: NOS by Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman
The child is born of them, yet is other to them; they work on behalf, and yet despite, and also against her.
...more
A Live Ember: Stephanie Strickland’s How the Universe Is Made
Over time, Strickland’s lines themselves grow wild, less uniform in their patterns of indentation. Like root structures deep in the ground, they branch in many directions.
...more
Painful Celebrations: Five Books for National Poetry Month
Every act of reading is inseparable from what the reader has encountered before.
...more
Eliminated to Illuminated: Tarfia Faizullah’s Registers of Illuminated Villages
Faizullah drills language for meaning.
...more
Rooted to the Earth: The Carrying by Ada Limón
Limón’s ability to express her speaker’s connection to the earth, her desire to bring forth life in all its forms, is breathtaking.
...more
War Games: Kill Class by Nomi Stone
What happens when we play along with something not real—does it become real?
...more
Melodic, Honorable Engagement: Ryan Vine, T. R. Hummer, and Norman Finkelstein
Reading Vine, Hummer, and Finkelstein, in an era in which people often feel almost flattened, we rise.
...more
Peripheral Terror: Total Recall by Samantha Giles
There is horror in how a memory can be altered or rendered “false” by exterior forces.
...more