Rumpus Reviews
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The Imprint of a Mind: Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra
This sparse book, “an essay on pregnancy and earthquakes,” deals with the author’s dueling fears of recent and future earthquakes and her impending childbirth.
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Glimpses of Peace Only in Dreams: Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees
There’s a war on, and Sergey Sergeyich is worried about his bees.
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A Collection of Hours: Look Here by Ana Kinsella
Reading about flânerie is a “useful” thing for me to do: useful for my career, for my scholarly ambitions. Actually partaking in flânerie is rarely useful in these ways
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An Open Letter in Lieu of a Review: on Still Life by Jay Hopler
. . . there’s some vital aspect to a person even the approach of oblivion can’t erase.
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Text Colliding with Text: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Much of the novel questions what constitutes a life: If it’s reduced or subverted or is itself a simulation, is it still worth living?
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Sketch Book Reviews: The Red Zone by Chloe Caldwell
An illustrated review of THE RED ZONE by Chloe Caldwell.
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Perfectly Made and Frighteningly Fragile: This Boy We Made by Taylor Harris
We must learn to see the divine even in our sorrow
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“Do You Hearest?”: A Review of Ova Completa by Susana Thénon, tr. Rebekah Smith
Where are you, Susana Thénon?—which I think might mean: How does Thénon achieve something more than evasion and isolation with all of this wandering around? Does she land somewhere?—“In a room where if I am I’m not or I am…
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On the Mystery of Eating Meat: Springer Mountain by Wyatt Williams
If you eat meat, then you are an animal who kills other animals. Humans are not alone in this, but more than all other creatures of the earth, we have gotten grotesquely good at it.
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Hammer Is the Prayer of the Poor and the Dying
For [Christian] Wiman, form is the fire his feet are held to. It’s the syntactic embers that burn, the linguistic flames that flare. At no point does Wiman let the reader forget he is reading poetry.
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From Exuberant Hanging Gardens
Leslie Williams is a fine poet, skillful and smart. She takes a range of topics I find by themselves repelling or uninteresting (suburban life, nature, flowers, gardening, Thomas Jefferson, the American South, etc.) and makes them compelling; she demands my…
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Monkey Bars
The result of Lippman’s perpetual contentiousness is a collection that is confrontational in the best sense of the word, interrogating the reader, himself, and America pretty much as a whole about child-rearing, over-medication, racism, consumerism and whatever else you’ve got.