National Poetry Month
We're publishing original poems every weekday throughout the month of April!
"Lessons From My Family" by Ariana Brown
“When you leave us, only tell the good stories. If you tell the others, tell them in a language we won't know to look for.”
"Full Benefits & S.S. Checks" by Steven Leyva
“how to walk in the light of your own sunset :: how to manage
being afraid :: favorite punch :: the color of sunset”
"Iterations, Or Milkweed Isn't Poisonous for Butterflies" by Maya Marshall
“I jogged through the forest preserve. Then later, I traveled parks and ponds. /
I drove South on the highway past murals. One said: THINGS TAKE A LONG TIME.”
"Plot Summary" by Lauren Camp
“to dissect geologic shrines how to tune a flute so much / negative capability in me I couldn’t play notes even as instructed yet / without learning I memorized seasonal notches like drowning”
"The Stomach is the Origin of All Ghosts" by Ina Cariño
“goodbye, mountain fogs. goodbye, fish & rice. / no more cousins whooping during dances, / no more of the woven red & black cloths”
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Interviews & Reviews
Jennifer Fliss interviews Clare Beams about The Garden
“I’m passionately committed to the right of unlikeable protagonists to exist—maybe especially unlikeable female protagonists—and to the artistic need for them sometimes.”
Spencer Gaffney reviews Ryan Chapman's The Audacity
“Chapman uses the imminent collapse of the business to craft a pair of opposing character studies.”
Haley Sherif interviews Brooke Shaffner about Country of Under
“We are in a time of reckoning when love means stretching to hold hard truths, dark histories.”
The First Book: Christina J. Cooke and Broughtupsy
“Thank God for fiction to remind us of the humanities that, in our haste to pursue justice, we are often quick to gloss over or outright forget.” |
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Next Week: WOMEN WHO LEAVE
Virtual Event! |
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| Did you miss our offsite event at AWP last month? Join us April 18, 8 PM EST/5 PM PST for a conversation and Q&A with Sonora Jha, Lyz Lenz, Maggie Smith, & Reema Zaman. Hosted by Kelly McMasters and presented by The Rumpus. These 5 writers explode traditional story arcs of a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, they explore alternate ways to move through narrative--in fiction, memoir, essay, and poetry--and reach toward the more complex and powerful movement of moving on. Suggested donation of $20. Pay what you can, no one turned away due to lack of funds. All proceeds after processing fees will support The Rumpus's 2024 contributor pay. Please consider buying these authors books through Bookshop or from your local indie bookstore. |
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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 . . .
April 15: Annell López is a Dominican immigrant. She is the author of the short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason, winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, forthcoming in 2024 from the Feminist Press. A 2022 Peter Taylor fellow, her work has received support from Tin House and the Kenyon Review Workshops and has appeared in American Short Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. López is an Assistant Fiction Editor for New Orleans Review and just finished her MFA at the University of New Orleans. She is working on a novel. Subscribe by April 14!
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Next up in our Indie x Indie
POETRY BOOK CLUB:
Death Styles by Joyelle McSweeney
x Nightboat Books |
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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 April 15, to receive our MAY Poetry Book Club pick Death Styles by Joyelle McSweeney and join our subsciber-only conversation with author Joyelle McSweeney, a Rumpus editor, and Nightboat Books Co-Founder and Editor Kazim Ali.
As a subscriber, we'll send you a copy of this book the first week of MAY 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 May's Poetry Book Club Selection: In this follow-up to her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney proposes a link between style and survival, even in the gravest of circumstances. Setting herself the task of writing a poem a day and accepting a single icon as her starting point, however unlikely—River Phoenix, Mary Magdalene, a backyard skunk—McSweeney follows each inspiration to the point of exhaustion and makes it through each difficult day. In frank, mesmeric lyrics, Death Styles navigates the opposing forces of survival and grief, finding a way to press against death’s interface, to step the wrong way out of the grave.
About the author: Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of eleven books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. McSweeney’s recent books include Death Styles (Nightboat Books, 2024) and Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020), which earned her the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her 2014 essay collection, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, is widely regarded as a visionary work of eco-criticism. With Carmen Maria Machado, she was the guest editor of Best American Experimental Writing 2020. She also collaborated with Don Mee Choi on translations of two short stories by Korean modernist Yi Sang, featured in Yi Sang: Selected Works alongside translations by Jack Jung and Sawako Nakayasu (2020). With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at Notre Dame.
About the Press: Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcens boundaries, by publishing books rich with poignancy, intelligence and risk.
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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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