The Rumpus Saturday Essay: Me Be Pretty One Day
When I was younger and lonelier and knew more about other people than I did about myself, I thought what I wanted was to be pretty. I thought of it as an existential status, pretty. I thought: if I...
View Article“Who the Hell Cares About Anne Sexton’s Grandmother?”
When we read a piece of fiction, we don’t assume—or at least we know we’re not supposed to assume—it’s a faithful recreation of an event in the author’s life. But what about when we read a poem?For...
View ArticleIt Ends With Eating a Strawberry
It might be snowing outside, but April is still National Poetry Month, and Tin House has a wonderful interview up with poet Ellen Bass. Read about her writing routine, the Miss America Pageant,...
View ArticleDear Son or Daughter
Here is the problem in writing letters to your kids—perhaps especially as a writer, who has arguably spent her entire professional life writing letters to everyone who isn’t her kids: How do you...
View ArticleIn Plain Sight: The Vanishing of Ellen Bass
In late December 2013, poet Ellen Bass received an email from a former student that she thought must be a joke. The New Yorker had just launched a podcast in which a writer whose work had been featured...
View ArticleThe Amazing Disappearing Woman Writer
I read this essay about beloved writer Ellen Bass here on The Rumpus—a terrific essay by Ellen F. Brown—with some dismay. Because, here was a writer I admire (and have admired since twenty years ago),...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat With Camille Rankine
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Camille Rankine about her new book Incorrect Merciful Impulses, student loan debt, history, and trying to be a writer every day.This is an edited transcript of...
View ArticleThe Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jericho Parms
Jericho Parms’s debut essay collection Lost Wax is part meditation, part lyric, part inquiry on topics such as art, love, loss, identity, memory, and coming of age. A loosely chronological personal...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Martelli
Jennifer Martelli’s bold, subversive poems are driven by a fierce agency of desire and exploration. Her work meditates on one’s sense of power in the world, engaging readers specifically with raw,...
View ArticleNotable San Francisco: 12/28–1/3
Wednesday 12/28: Back in the day, when Isaac Fitzgerald used to host the monthly Rumpus variety show at The Make-Out Room, comedian Nato Green was a frequent and popular guest. Tonight, he’ll be...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Nikki Wallschlaeger
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Nikki Wallschlaeger about her new collection Crawlspace, why she chose to work with the sonnet form, and how segregation in American never ended. This is an...
View ArticleWhat to Read When You Want to Feel Thankful
November is upon us, and whether the temperatures are dropping where you live or remaining unseasonably warm, Thanksgiving is just around the corner. At The Rumpus, we’ve decided to kick off the...
View ArticleYes, and: Simulacra by Airea D. Matthews
To begin, there is nothing not interesting about Airea D. Matthews’s debut collection, Simulacra, selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. And I don’t use...
View ArticleOur Own Bodies: A Conversation with JoAnna Novak
Eating disorder narratives tend to orbit one of two types of protagonists: “poor little rich (very thin) girl terrified of her budding sexuality” or “hyper-disciplined alpha female with severe...
View ArticleThe Thread: Mother Me
Rapunzel has been haunting me. Rapunzel, one of the few Grimm’s fairy tales that has an active, living mother as a main character. More commonly, most of the mothers, all of the good ones, are dead. Of...
View ArticleWoven from Dreams: A Conversation with Kiki Petrosino
In 2008, I enrolled in a graduate workshop at the University of Louisville where the professor had made a course pack featuring poems from recently published collections and upcoming debuts. The first...
View ArticleMy Mother’s Tongue
My favorite photo of my mother and me features a car accident. We are walking down a sidewalk, holding hands, wearing long cotton dresses. Ahead of us, a sedan has crashed through the window display of...
View ArticlePropelled by Questions: Animal by Dorothea Lasky
Dorothea Lasky’s Animal is a collection of prose written primarily for the Bagley Wright Lecture series and published earlier this fall by Wave Books. The original lecture, “Poetry and the Metaphysical...
View ArticleQuiet, Radical Defiance: The Equivalents by Maggie Doherty
In 1954, Tillie Olsen was living in San Francisco’s working-class Mission District, and her hands were full. She was working multiple non-career jobs, leading community organization and activism, and...
View ArticleFundamentally, Necessarily Vulnerable: A Conversation with jamie hood
Out last December from Grieveland is how to be a good girl, the debut book by jamie hood that was named a “Best Book of 2020“ by Vogue. This 170-page hybrid collection of poetry, diary entries, and...
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