As If the Stars Invented Dinner
So what are Mazer’s actual poems like? They are, in their way, haunted.
...morePosts Tagged: Rumpus Reviews
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.
...moreStar-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.
...moreJoey 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.
...moreAll 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 with language itself, and with the social relations which language encodes and enforces.
...moreThe Queen of Flash Fiction
In curt sentences detailing many unsettled lives, Kim Chinquee constructs a mosaic of despair in modern day America. Life is already hard, but attempts at intimacy (what many of the people in these pages seek) do not always further the characters’ life but leaves them confused and sorry—sometimes stoic.
...moreTime Loops, Child Molesters, and Sparkly Tube Tops
McGlynn’s book follows an almost fairy-tale-type logic – the unknowing past-self of the narrator plays the part of the last wife of Bluebeard, searching out the hidden rooms, with the watching future-self unable to keep her from finding the closet of severed women’s body parts.
...moreI Was the Jukebox
Sandra Beasley’s crisp images and multiplicities galore construct an enlivened world for her reader, bringing what Gregory Orr calls, “authority of imagination…” Each poem is an experiment that recreates from the codex of language a powerful brand of imagination.
...moreHow to Catch a Falling Knife
It is not easy to make interesting poems, yet How to Catch a Falling Knife is full of them. Part of the interest is apparent in the work the title performs: instead of shying from danger, these poems surprise by imagining their way fearlessly toward it.
...moreSimplify Me When I’m Dead
Keith Douglas has largely ceased to exist to most readers beyond those attracted to war as a subject. The reissue of Simplify Me When I’m Dead, containing forty-one poems, aims to correct that.
...moreThe Tense, Thrown Like a Switch
Farley’s poems live in the present, the past and the future simultaneously, fully conscious of their unrest.
...moreA Gloriously Difficult World
Foreign aspects sometimes have a familiar whiff, and not just to Simic fans who have seen proof of his admission that Serbian poetry has affected his own. They have a familiar whiff because a number of poets in this collection have translated Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Apollinnaire, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Cafavfy, among others.
...moreThe Indistinct Fuzz of a General Rain
World Enough is, despite the sometimes soft dulled-razor language, an incredibly smart, idea-driven book, and the in-charge idea and/or force seems to be America, viewed both from within the country and elsewhere.
...moreAmerican Fractal
Timothy Green’s debut collection of poetry, American Fractal, picks up where scientific discourse leaves off.
...moreA Life Spasming with Furious Longing
The Salt Ecstasies is really just a beautiful book of poetry, filled with blindingly fierce imagery and destructively skillful writing, but it’s most importantly an honest book, its poems written straight from White’s heart and from his gut, teaching the reader a whole lot about the experience of living in this world.
...moreThe Poetry of Polar Exploration
Elizabeth Bradfield’s passion for her subject and her acuity and great sensitivity to language make Approaching Ice a fine collection that will fit nicely on shelves of natural history books as well as those for poetry.
...moreThis is More than Poetry.
Grotesquery is the nature of the humor in The Black Automaton.… [Douglas] Kearney leads the reader through laughter at the unchangeable rottenness of life, rather than throwing a tearful pity party.
...moreThe Drunk Sonnets
Like most winning drunken acts, The Drunk Sonnets is comprised of extremes. I came away from each poem thinking it was either the best damn thing I’d read in years or that it fell completely flat.
...moreA Rich, Prickly Sense of Expansion
In A Meteorologist in the Promised Land, Becka Mara McKay reminds us that every language is a unique translation of a combination of desire and thought, both of which have complicated, individual histories.
...moreDisinclined to Mislead Anyone
Lantz forces us again and again to reexamine the way we see through such juxtaposition of facts as well as through the voices of characters who search for and experience improbable things.
...moreyou are a little bit happier than i am
Reading these poems makes me want to write and this is a book that I will probably come back to often when I feel stuck or uninspired. The poems in you are a little bit happier than i am feel genuinely exciting and I would rather read a book that is inspiring and exciting than […]
...moreBobcat Country
Page after page, Bobcat Country stirs both the counter-intuitively satisfying “Should I be reading this?” queasiness of the Confessional poetry of Berryman, Sexton, and Snodgrass, and the unsettlingly provocative “Is this really poetry?” queasiness of such Muumuu House-affiliated poets as Ellen Kennedy.
...moreWater the Moon
In the strongest poems in Water the Moon, the complex relationships between language and image underscore Sze-Lorrain’s themes of alienation and homelessness in a way that allows the reader to experience both.
...moreCradle Song
Cradle Song is more than poetry. Stacey Lynn Brown has written a cultural history of the south, of its tenuous and tendentious relationships, of the complicated and often disturbing power struggles between women and men, black and white.
...moreStars of the Night Commute
Stars of the Night Commute is a tremendous first book by a poet who has been publishing for some time now… One distinctive feature of Božičević’s work is that her poems work well together, that is, not only telling stories individually, but also in the form of several series.
...moreThe Intricated Soul
Sherod Santos’s poems demonstrate profound, unwavering discipline, a restless ear, and a commitment to witness. He is serious but never pompous, substantial without being ponderous.
...moreAssorted Poems
Susan Wheeler manages to navigate a wide terrain of both content and form while maintaining the interconnectedness of one of the less lame concept albums ever produced.
...moreMy New Job
If you’re a fan of experimentation, silliness, and fucking–and what reasonable human being isn’t?–you’ll find things to like about My New Job.
...moreThe Best of It
Kay Ryan has been compared to Emily Dickinson, and I like to imagine Dickinson and Marianne Moore reading her with sly commiseration. Unlike some poets with recognizable styles, Ryan does not write the same poem again and again, and her sharp eye is both benevolent and unflinching.
...more