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weekend rumpus roundup

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    In the Saturday Essay, Devin O’Neill considers the dual nature of the male feminist, looking back not-so-fondly on the desire to “lash out” against an unforgiving world during high school and junior high. O’Neill used “nerd” and “goth” identities to…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    First, say hello to our new Saturday media editor, Arielle Bernstein! Then, in “All The World’s A Stage,” Grant Snider neatly illustrates our inner performer. Poet Kent Shaw marvels at the “glandular muscularity” of water as a theme in Harmony…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    Kristina Marie Darling’s poetry collection, Fortress, is “image-rich” and wonderfully allusive. The setting is the famously decadent palace of Versailles. Like the film Marie Antoinette, “Darling’s book is simultaneously excess and desolation,” writes Sandra Marchetti. White spaces are used strategically…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    In the Saturday Interview, May Cobb talks with Austin-based multi-instrumentalist Guy Forsyth about The Freedom to Fail, his first studio album in six years. In a touching aside about his daughter, Forsyth explains the album title: “…she can only grow…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    First, Grant Snider puts us in the right frame of mind and Steven Kraan personifies Sunday. In the Bay of Fundy, between Maine’s northeast coast and the western shores of Nova Scotia, lies an island called Grand Manan, whose windswept…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    Thanksgiving is still three weeks away, but it’s never too early to express our gratitude. MariNaomi shows us how it’s done with a concise list of the things she is thankful for, which includes “the tenacity of young me, who…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    First, Diana Whitney reviews Cynthia Cruz’s poetry collection, Wunderkammer, meaning “cabinet of curiosities.” This is a book of “delicious… detail.” Cruz’s poems, Whitney declares, “have a wry sense of humor that tempers the traumas they reveal.” The poet, who was…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    First, Grant Snider’s favorite things, in rhyme. In The Last Book I Loved, Richard Kramer delves into the “determined and effective” Judith Schneiderman’s memoir, I Sang To Survive. A “propulsive drive” lies behind the Auschwitz survivor’s writing. “What I love…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    First, take a walk down memory lane with David Hajdu’s visual memoir of his favorite bar, Bradley’s, boasting art by John Carey. And in the Sunday Essay, Jordan Rosenfeld takes a frank look at the many ways a mother’s boldness…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    First off, Grant Snider unfolds one of our most dogged clichés. More than one hundred and fourteen years ago, an uprising broke out in China that eventually became known as the Boxer Rebellion. But according to Jennifer Cheng, the movement…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    Meet Invincible Eric. Then, Matthew Daddona reviews Carl Adamshick’s “empathetic” collection, Saint Friend. The poet employs a “smooth and elegiac rhetoric that is more concerned with sonic repetition than it is flawless consistency.” Adamshick’s book is worth a look for…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    This Sunday, Ted Wilson turned five. Happy anniversary, Ted! In the latest “Last Book I Loved,” Michelle King finds a kindred spirit in Sylvia Plath, who, the first time she kissed husband Ted Hughes, allegedly bit his cheek and drew blood.…