Between Sex and Death: Deborah Landau’s Soft Targets
Perhaps the most memorable image in Deborah Landau’s fourth collection of poems, Soft Targets, occurs in the first poem, which also serves as a preface and introduction to the book as a whole. While...
View ArticleA Divine Comedy of Experience: Hannah Ensor’s Love Dream with Television
In a 2005 essay entitled, “Serious Art That’s Funny: Humor in Poetry,” poet Matthew Rohrer quotes the Revered Literary Critic, who uses the term, “comedians of the spirit” to throw shade on poets who...
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers about her new book The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons (Acre Books, March 2020), sonnet crowns, formal experimentation, the Mars rover,...
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Barbara Berman’s National Poetry Month Shout-Out
The Blue Absolute by Aaron Shurin Nightboat Books, February 2020 Aaron Shurin is the former director of the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at the University of San Francisco. He belonged the...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #214: Sarah Kersey
When I learned that Sarah Kersey, a woman and poet of color, is by profession, an x-ray technologist, I felt compelled to talk to her about how that might inform her writing and reading. Kersey is an...
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Beyond Anger and Sorrow: On Poetry, Pleasure, Politics, and Offense
Off and on, and in various ways, I’ve been corresponding with Jaswinder Bolina since first soliciting work from him in 2011. We seem to look at certain aspects of poetry and politics in similar ways,...
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Vijay Seshadri
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Vijay Seshadri about his latest collection That Was Now, This Is Then (Graywolf Press, October 2020), obsolescence in poems, submitting to the human condition,...
View ArticleDesire Makes Storytellers of Us All: Anthropica by David Hollander
I’ve only encountered a handful of long postmodern novels that I’ve found coherent and genuinely fun to read. Usually it’s one or the other—the book pursues the execution of a concept with dogged...
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A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing
NONFICTION Que sais-je? In a dream once, I traveled toward my mother on the back of red-brown horse, through towns and cityscapes and heavy night and gray fog and merciless winds. Geography was...
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Reimagining Place in the Pandemic
How has our sense of “place” changed during the pandemic? Are you a knowledge worker who migrated to a “Zoomtown” on Planet-COVID? Were you a cashier who’s now called a front-line worker because you...
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