Rumpus Reviews
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A Vowel Away From Master
These poems often resist the reader in the same way his speaker resists his father, but the book’s exploration of such distance creates a closeness between the reader and the poems, and the speaker and his father, that’s almost too…
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A Squared-Off Landscape Representing the World
A Village Life is the work of a mature poet looking out at the world from a window, but now concerned with the larger cycles in which she participates, instead of the singular life in a petri dish.
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A New Cult of Domesticity
The speaker of The King doesn’t play into the randomly generated poems and discursive ironies of her generation; she lifts the curtain to the production, exposing the history of language’s (and romanticism’s) disintegration.
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The Organization of Pain and Joy
Tom Healy’s first collection of poems, What the Right Hand Knows, is fashioned entirely of artful silence and alluring reticence.
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Poems for the Gmail Generation
Brandon Scott Gorrell’s debut collection, During My Nervous Breakdown I Want to Have a Biographer Present is an anxious, ambivalent ode to Internet culture.
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A Vestige Stirred By Light
The Next Settlement has a rock-solid American quality that compares favorably to William Carlos Williams. Think Plymouth and ocean waves constantly changing, hypnotic in part because of the mysteries beneath.
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Take Dead Aim
Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize is ambitious and clever. By turns entertaining, fascinating, and charming, it is also monotonous with its adolescent charm and fluorescent insistence.
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“Trouble on the way, and great joy”
In a place where names are lost like household objects, and white noise supplants meaningful distinctions between voices and people, why the need for singularity (or personhood) at all?
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Fingers Through Holy Water
Gospel music, like its secular cousin the blues, never wallows in pity, but instead seeks to transcend pain and reach glory. Bashir’s book makes the same trip.
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Tissue of Flesh and Light
Marchant transforms potentially stale-sounding specifics into a breathing, universally grasped object as writer, reader and paradoxically, the “no longer beautiful mind” are in communion, even if the mind presented cannot comprehend the connection.
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Beautiful Horrible
“I like to see the most aggressive of [horror movies]—Dawn of the Dead, for instance—as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators