Language as Both Salve and Poison
What I have seen, what we have seen, is language forced into the service of violence. A rhetoric of desperation and devastation molded into the incomprehensible, then vomited out in images and words...
View ArticleDrawing a Line
Because borders are so weird, words proliferate. Along with arbitrary, nonsensical violence—and strange, unpredictable exceptions—people talk a lot and lots of papers get filed, even as all of it is,...
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Winning the Game of Thrones Like a Girl
“When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.”–Cersei Lannister Now that the ships have set sail, the wildfire has settled, and winter has come, it’s time to see...
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The Rumpus Interview with Annie DeWitt
Few writers can assemble a sentence with the elegance of Annie DeWitt, whose work I first fell for in the pages of NOON a couple of years ago. To be more accurate, my admiration arrived in the ear, as...
View ArticleTo Speak Unsatisfactorily
To memorialize a tragedy, one must inscribe unmistakable significance into reticent materials, attempting to curb the natural processes of forgetting and obsolescence.For The Nation, Becca Rothfeld...
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The Rumpus Interview with Ben Ehrenreich
I should tell you that although I haven’t known him too long, I became instantly fond of Ben. I live in a small area of Los Angeles along the LA River between Echo Park and Glendale. The river covered...
View ArticleHow a Poet Tackles Today’s Violence
I’ll start again by telling you that this is a body. A body that bears the weight of its makers. A body that’s trying to tell a story, without making it pretty, but this is perhaps where poetry fails...
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Anne Raeff
I met Anne Raeff in 1989, shortly after I moved to New Mexico from Minnesota to attend graduate school. Anne had moved there around the same time, to escape New York. A mutual friend, Cynthia, thought...
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The Rumpus Interview with Monica Sok
Monica Sok never stops working. Though we didn’t share any classes together during our overlapping year at the NYU Creative Writing Program, I knew enough about her poems not to miss Year Zero, her...
View ArticleIntervening in the Everyday
For BuzzFeed Reader, Tamerra Griffin speaks with Claudia Rankine—author of Citizen and recipient of one of this year’s MacArthur Genius fellowships—about police violence, forms of protest, and how she...
View Article“I Knew at Once I’d Never Last”
At Catapult, Nicholas Ward writes about loving and leaving football, and the violence we push against and get back, in a piece aptly titled, “There Is No Violence Here”:But in high school, something...
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: (On My Throat)
“We can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.” –Audre LordeWhen has enough time passed for me to write it—how long do I have to wait before I am not in it...
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The Rumpus Interview with Brit Bennett
I sent someone a photo I had taken of a page from Brit Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers. It was a passage written from the perspective of Luke Sheppard, the local pastor’s son. I told him it reminded...
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Multitudes #1: What Is a Haunting?
We are pleased to announce Multitudes, a new column at The Rumpus, which will feature the work of writers of color, actively seeking underrepresented voices and perspectives. We hope that the writers...
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The Rumpus Interview with Lee Clay Johnson
Nitro Mountain is a stunner of a book, one that remained with me long after I finished the last page. Johnson is a master of creating characters you’re immediately invested in, bringing them to life...
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The Rumpus Interview with J.D. Vance
“I was one of those kids with a grim future,” writes J.D. Vance in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. In his childhood in an impoverished, Appalachian community,...
View ArticleLois Lowry on Lord of the Flies
Lois Lowry takes to the New York Times with her story of reading Lord of the Flies for the first time at age sixteen, and how her perspective on its portrayal of children and violence has (and hasn’t)...
View ArticleArm’s Length
With a deep understanding of colonizing narratives, Emma Bracy at Hazlitt assembles historical and personal snapshots to form a record of the ongoing dehumanizations that have led to this continuing...
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The Rumpus Interview with Jane Alison
While Jane Alison was hard at work translating a series of erotic passages into plain, charged English for her fifth book, Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid, another story kept...
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The Rumpus Review of Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation
D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation opened to both protest and critical acclaim in 1915. Griffith’s film captivated audiences at a time when Ku Klux Klan membership was on the rise, expanding...
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