National Poetry Month
We're publishing original poems every weekday throughout the month of April!
"Vultures, Then" by Jai Hamid Bashir
“Then, there is another creature: jewel-eyed / like a housefly’s wings in paradise, caught / in the shape of a girl.”
"In This Poem, My White, Jesus-loving Dad with Glasses and Bad Jokes is Undead" by Daniella Tootsie-Watson
“Jesus is his favorite. I ask him if he loves God or me more, / and he says he has to love God more. In this poem, / he loves me more.”
"The Quietest Disco in Brooklyn" by Adam Falkner
“You are star-fished, stretching / in the scratchy lawn of August when they / rise around you like wildflowers stepping out / from wallpaper.”
"On the Other Side" by Amanda Johnston
“From my window, I see the / children’s prison. Juvenile detention / sounds softer than it is.”
"Field Notes" by Tariq Luthin
“the boys are long gone; no trace / that any of us had been here, save / for the pasture’s greenery bent / into the soil” |
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A look inside
THE WRITERS WELCOME KIT |
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| | | The key feature of The Writer’s Welcome Kit is its online coursebook, which is packed with lessons and exercises on the life, craft, and the practice of writing. |
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We've just launched a new Rumpus offering: The Writer's Welcome Kit, a 5-week asynchronous course to guide beginning writers as they establish their practice.
As an early sign-up BONUS, writers who join by MAY 21 can take part in a FREE live accountability class along with the self-directed course. These meetups will feature additional lessons, tips, and tools surrounding the topics of each week, community discussions, and support from class founder, Paulette Perhach, as well as guest visits from Rumpus editors. This is also our chance to hear feedback from folks on what they enjoy and would like more of from The Rumpus as we decide on future class, workshop, and seminar offerings.
Purchase the course now through May 21 and you’ll receive a sign-up link to join the group. Please note all meetups will take place live on ZOOM on Wednesdays from 6:30–7:30 p.m. EST. The meet up dates will be May 22, May 29, June 5, June 12, and June 19. Attendance optional, but we hope to see you there!
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Interviews & Reviews
Caitlin Coey interviews Ellen van Neerven about Personal Score
“As books often do, they take their time, and they take their time to find a form that not only fits the works’ contents but perhaps how the author sees themself in the world.”
Kassia Oset reviews Nicolette Polek's Bitter Water Opera
“...the narrator recognizes the sprinkles of pixie dust in her own life story and learns that art is not a substitute for living.”
Stephanie Feldman interviews Sarah Langan About A Better World
“Anyone with a degree in thermodynamics knew the world was getting hotter. It was going to cost a lot of lives and a lot of money.”
Elaina Friedman reviews Sylvia Legris's The Principle of Rapid Peering
“Her musical lines, varied as birdsong, don’t shy away from alliterations that stick to the roof of the mouth...” |
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New Fiction & Columns
Rumpus Original Column Voices on Addiction: "Last Drunk" by Anne Palmer
“I find pictures of him with Roy or all of us, Max as a sober person. I want him to remember that things can be different and that he was not always like this.”
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| Letters in the Mail (from authors!) |
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Letters in the Mail from authors is a Rumpus subscription in which you receive an actual, postmarked letter from one of our favorite writers in your IRL mailbox twice a month. All letters are non-promotional, include a creative prompt, and have a return mailing address in case you'd like to write the author back!
Up next, an author letter from . . .
May 1: Morgan Parker is the author of five books, most recently the essay collection You Get What You Pay For. Previous titles include Who Put This Song On?, a young adult novel; and the poetry collections Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by the New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.” She lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Shirley. Subscribe by April 30! |
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Next up in our Indie x Indie
POETRY BOOK CLUB:
Girl Work by Zefyr Lisowski
x Noemi Press |
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For our September 2023 - August 2024 selections (and possibly beyond!), we’ll focus on great new poetry collections AND hear from the indie publishers behind the books with our new Indie x Indie Poetry Book Club format!
Join by midnight May 15, to receive our JUNE Poetry Book Club pick Girl Work by Zefyr Lisowski and join our subscriber-only conversation with author Zefyr Lisowski, Katie Kosma The Rumpus'sEnough column editor, and a representative from Noemi Press.
As a subscriber, we'll send you a copy of this book the first week of June and you'll also be invited to an exclusive online video discussion with the book's author + the author's editor + a Rumpus Editor and fellow book club members. Subscribers are encouraged to join in the chat with their questions before and during the conversations. These will take place on the Rumpus' Crowdcast channel and will remain available to subscribers for 1 month after they take place.
About JUNE's Poetry Book Club Selection: Girl Work, a book-length meditation on sexual violence and feminized labor, centers hybrid-form and prose poems exploring haunting, labor, sexual trauma, and the assertion of a gender- nonconforming self in our current political moment. Written in injunctions to the self, to past assailants, and to friends, Girl Work, challenges canonical representations of pain as punitive, redemptive, or separable from the environmental conditions it springs from. Throughout Girl Work, a self is restored from the detritus of memory—flashes of sexual violence, pop cultural touchstones like the movie The Ring, the music of Ke$ha, the sudden death of a father, the paintings of Henry Darger, and more. Winner of the 2022 Book Award from Noemi Press.
About the author:
Zefyr Lisowski is a trans and queer writer, artist, and North Carolinian currently living in NYC. She's a Poetry Co-editor for Apogee Journal and the author of Blood Box, winner of the Black River Editor's Choice Award from Black Lawrence Press and released in fall 2019; she's also the author of the microchap Wolf Inventory (Ghost City Press, 2018) and a 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop Fellow. Zefyr's work has appeared in Literary Hub, Nat. Brut., Muzzle Magazine, and DIAGRAM, among many other places; she's also received support from Sundress Academy for the Arts, McGill University, the New York Live Ideas Fest, the Blue Mountain Center for the Arts, and the 2019 CUNY Graduate Center Adjunct Incubator Grant. A three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, she also goes by Zef.
About the Press:
Founded in 2002, Noemi Press is a 501(c)(3) literary arts organization dedicated to publishing and promoting the work of emerging and established authors and artists. Noemi Press relies on the support of those who believe in the future of literature. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation today.
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Reader Support Keeps The Rumpus Going! |
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Founded in 2009 in San Francisco, CA and now based in Asheville, NC with readers and editors all over the US and abroad, The Rumpusis one of the longest-running independent online literary and culture magazines. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love. Often, we are an emerging writer's first notable publication, which is something we’re really proud of. We believe that literature builds community—and if reading The Rumpus makes you feel more connected, please show your support! Our Membership and subscription programs along with tax-deductible donations made to The Rumpus through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, help keep us going and brings us closer to sustainability.
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