Sean Singer
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Either Way I’m Celebrating by Sommer Browning
Sommer Browning’s Either Way I’m Celebrating shows effervescence, delight in language, and whimsy, even as it hides more introspective and severe undertones. Taking elements of surrealism from the Ashbery branch of American poetry, Browning also shows elements of Dobby Gibson…
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A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
I found this text to be profound, relentless, frustrating, inspiring, demanding, silly, pompous, elastic, and mind-expanding. That is what poetry is for, and this is for poetry.
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There Are More Knowzits Than Ever
Coleman’s work is functional and communal; she wields the oral tradition in a way that reflects her poetry ancestry—the blues queen, Koko Taylor, for example, or the fringe Beat genius, Bob Kaufman—but she also shows planed, hewn lines of intellectual…
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Wings Wands Stars Tulle
These poems have all the instinct and fangs of a canine, and the plush, electric fur of a wolf: the intensity and sheer quality of workmanship in the poems is impressive.
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Like Algae on the Surface of Grace
There is a feeling of complicity in his [Dlugos’s] best poems in that he makes the reader love the burnished, tumultuous late nights and affection for those around him.
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Why I Chose Lea Graham’s Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
Rumpus Poetry Book Club board member Sean Singer on why he chose Lea Graham’s Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You as the July selection for the club.
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Why I Chose Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
Tracy Smith’s LIFE ON MARS is a strong, surprising, and often beautiful book.
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No Trace of Origin, No Thorn
The poems in Copperhead use the deeply wrought questions with which it is concerned to wisely come up with a sort of memoir, which is attaching deeply felt memories with deeply felt language, thus making it literature.
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Mis-Writing Race Is a Failure of the Imagination
In February at the AWP Conference in Washington D.C., Claudia Rankine gave a talk about Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change.” Afterward, she posted a call for responses to the conversation that started at AWP, and today she posted those responses…
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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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I Know My Brother In the Mirror
Michael Klein’s then, we were still living is a thoughtful, emotional book that treats death in a fresh, even endearing way.
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What We Hack Up We Can Choke Down
It is Zweig’s essential Vermont-y-ness that makes her indispensable. The charm and beauty of those green mountains and isolation and mud seasons of that terrain is applied thickly in these poems.