National Poetry Month
We're publishing original poems every weekday throughout the month of April!
"Passing" by Kay Iverson
“A year I did not expect to survive is / passing while tarantulas are out looking / for lovers. My muscles, my softest organs, / have exacted anniversary.”
"El Niño" by Ae Hee Lee
“There’s a season / for everything, / even for disaster.”
"bryht mouth" by Eleni Sikelianos
“we found foilage on our tongues / driving cocodrilos and crocodiles to market / found milk instead of miracles”
"Three ants crawling the surface of the moon" by Sawako Nakayasu
“Who said anything about wailing. Who said anything about humans. Who said anything about ant spirituality, ant pilgrimages, on earth or on the moon or anywhere at all in the universe.”
"When My Brother Visits We Play Hide and Seek" by Steven Espada Dawson
“Next week we’ll lift a fistful of tío’s dirt weed—his rocking / chair cure for foggy eyes.”
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Interviews & Reviews
Diane Gottlieb interviews Jessica Jacobs about Unalone
“...one of the greatest challenges and gifts of writing this book was that it forced me to look at not just the darkest parts of the world but the darkest parts of myself.”
Venya Gushchin reviews Michael Chang's Synthetic Jungle
“More than anything, once again, Chang’s poetry is fun and liberatory, confronting expectations of what the genre ‘should be’ head-on.”
Richie Hofmann interviews Callie Sisket about two minds
“...poems are ceaseless echoes of poems that come before them. The elegy has become the most common, the most pervasive genre of poetry. So, we are all echoes and diminishments.”
Nina Moses reviews Eliza Barry Callahan's The Hearing Test
“Callahan’s deft hand, bobbing and weaving down these many avenues of thought, suggests a promising confidence from a writer just getting started.”
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| Announcing a 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. |
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New Fiction & Columns
Rumpus Original Essay: "Crows in this Part of New Delhi" by Shreyasi Sharma
“...this crow, who I have not yet completely understood; this crow, who is now becoming a vessel for all my memories related to crows—this crow is building a nest.”
Rumpus Original Comic: "Your Ripples" by Sarah Maloney
“Death was the stone. Skipping across the surface...” |
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 | Join The Rumpus on Instagram Live on April 7 at 3:30 PST / 6:30 EST for Small Press Sunday with Janet Rodriguez! Small Press Sunday is a look inside the presses who make your favorite books. Our next press is BOA Editions with director of publicity Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer!
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 | Tune in to The Rumpus Live on InstagramWednesday, APRIL 10 at 3 p.m. PST / 6 p.m. EST for the next segment of Show Us Your Desk! Greg Mania's next guest is Justinian Huang, author of THE EMPEROR AND THE ENDLESS PALACE.
Born to immigrants in Monterey Park, California, Justinian Huang studied English at Pomona College and screenwriting at the University of Oxford. He is now based in Los Angeles with Swagger, a Shanghainese rescue dog he adopted during his five years living in China. THE EMPEROR AND THE ENDLESS PALACE is his debut novel. An unpredictable roller coaster of a debut novel, The Emperor and the Endless Palace is a genre-bending spicy romantasy that challenges everything we think we know about true love.
In case you missed it, watch the recording of the last episode featuring author Katya Apekina here.
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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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