National Poetry Month
We're publishing original poems every weekday throughout the month of April!
"Removal, Return" by Anthony Cody
“In the follows / of whom I will never meet / my grandfather appears / perpetually.”
from "with al-hudoud" by Siwar Masannat
“What words have I for justice to offer? / Here too is gender in a bottle, gender in a jar / pickled and graying.”
"Sir?,' 'Ma'am?,' and Other Things I Miss" by KB Brookins
“Let my children speak truth and watch you / empty every bin, light every match, / set fire to everything so I have nothing to miss”
"Biological Woman" by Chrysanthemum
“why must I fish for explanation / as if gravity needs / disproving?”
"On the Bus Ride from Arkansas to Michigan, the Window Frames Me" by Suzi F. Garcia
“Out the window, the moon teaches me patience, / waits her turn. My death would not complete anything, but / maybe it could be a beginning.”
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Interviews & Reviews
Shara Lessley interviews Sarah Ghazal Ali about Theopanies
“The image—seen, conjured, constructed—as epiphany is what awakens my senses and brands a poem into my marrow.”
Anushka Joshi reviews three novels by Amit Chaudhuri
“What Chaudhuri best demonstrates in these early works are his formidable abilities as a storyteller.”
Rachel Khong discusses Real Americans and The Stone Home with Crystal Hana Kim
“To both marriage and novel writing, there are challenges, annoyances and frustrations, but also really deep satisfaction, joy, belonging, intimacy, transcendence.” |
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New Fiction & Columns
Rumpus Original Fiction: "Trinity" by Jessica Goldschmidt
“The only time I didn’t cry was immediately after being born. I just slid quietly from my mother’s birth canal and slept for a day. When I woke up, I was crying. I haven’t stopped since.”
Rumpus Original Essay: "How to Feed a Dying Body" by Xi Chen
“Our duty to the dying was to provide comfort, but our duty to their aggrieved friends and family members was less straightforward than that.”
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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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