Rumpus Reviews
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The 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.
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American Fractal
Timothy Green’s debut collection of poetry, American Fractal, picks up where scientific discourse leaves off.
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A 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…
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The 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.
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This 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.
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The 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.
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A 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.
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Disinclined 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.
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you 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…
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Bobcat 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…
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Water 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.
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Cradle 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.