Rumpus Reviews
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Stars 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…
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The 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.
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Assorted 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.
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My 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.
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The 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…
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The Ancient Book of Hip
The poems in The Ancient Book of Hip create a precise and evocative description of time and place; they celebrate that space, even as they have a witty undercurrent of critique.
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The Rising of the Ashes
What Jelloun proves throughout this book is that he has not let language(s) fail him or the people, places and historical moments he memorializes, making dates that are not headlines as important as front page news.
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The Plath Cabinet
Many of the strongest poems in this poetical homage politicize Sylvia [Plath], showing her to be less a victim than a citizen of her time, whom history can misrepresent but not silence.
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Crimson Colored Raunchiness and Terror
Taste of Cherry is a beautiful, carefully crafted, and sensual display of poetry; the verbal, pyrotechnical, unabashed bravery of the poems is their most significant quality.
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Usher
B. H. Fairchild fuses mundane with spiritual in resolute ways, as “in the silent prayer for the grace of rain abundant,” a glorious line that would have been less so if the words “rain” and “abundant” were switched
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“I tried to remember your scent as your own”
A collection like Ohio Violence is best consumed in small doses, so that its imaginative density, which is never ponderous, can be absorbed.
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Accomplices in Her Accomplishment
As much as Intruder makes us look at the difficult, the painful, the ugly, it also gives us a chance to watch the insides of a snow globe swirl, to enjoy beauty in all its victory, through images, rhythms and…