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.
-
Star-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.
-
Wait
Now in his seventh decade, C. K. Williams has published many books and won the big prizes, but the poems in Wait are fresh—he does not merely rely on old blueprints, but continues the struggles that have preoccupied him throughout…
-
Joey 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.
-
All 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…
-
The 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…
-
Time 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…
-
I 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.
-
How 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…
-
Simplify 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.
-
The Tense, Thrown Like a Switch
Farley’s poems live in the present, the past and the future simultaneously, fully conscious of their unrest.
-
A 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…