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Queer Logic: Females and My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
In the tenth grade, emboldened by youth, I pinky-swore to the most popular girl in school that I was bisexual. I did it for the challenge, to see her uncomprehending look as she tried to reconcile that...
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Interrogating Grief: A Converstion with Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang’s interview was conducted from her hands-free device in her car, as she left work—she’s the program chair of the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles—as she got...
View ArticleThe Joypain of Parenting: Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State
The Golden State is a novel so dialed into its own rhetorical structure and method of execution, so confident in its delivery, that anyone who is writing fiction today would do well to study its...
View ArticleOn Loss of Land and Loss of Girlhood: Taneum Bambrick’s Vantage
Vantage, Taneum Bambrick’s debut collection, is an unusual book. With novelistic commitment to character portrayal, this collection comprises, in lyric prose and documentary poems, a clear-headed...
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A Vocabulary for Apostates
English lacks a word to describe a parental body falling through space. The event renders language unusable to the child, the bystander, the witness. I watched when I was ten. My mother staggered and...
View ArticleENOUGH: Reciprocal Testimony
ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, fiction, comics, and artwork by women and non-binary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and...
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Spotlight: “In Pursuit of a Better Me”
The feeling of wanting to become a better version of one’s self—of wanting to be a thinner and more beautiful self—is often a toxic feeling. In the past, I have struggled with my body weight and the...
View ArticleENOUGH: Beautiful Teeth
ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, fiction, comics, and artwork by women and non-binary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and...
View ArticleFrenetic, Excitable, and Direct: Sylvie Baumgartel’s Song of Songs
Sylvie Baumgartel’s debut book of poetry, Song of Songs, released last September from FSG, takes its title, in a grand artistic tradition, from the Bible’s Song of Solomon. Sometimes also called the...
View ArticleENOUGH: Something More Like Men
ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, fiction, comics, and artwork by women and non-binary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and...
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Moments of Reawakening: Talking with Cathy Park Hong
“Because we know we won’t be believed, we don’t quite believe it ourselves.” “It,” according to poet Cathy Park Hong, being the many insidious racist experiences Asian Americans live with that are...
View ArticleENOUGH: Brave Takes Away My Permission
ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, fiction, comics, and artwork by women and non-binary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and...
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Radical Enough
The first time I visited your house, there was a rifle in the corner. I called to mind the latest news reports detailing the violence committed by white men with guns. Then, detecting no tendency...
View ArticleENOUGH: The Telling of It
ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, fiction, comics, and artwork by women and non-binary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and...
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Bodies Are Not Metaphors: Talking with Brit Bennett
About a year ago, a very friendly representative of an eco-friendly energy provider knocked on my door to extol the benefits of switching to a more sustainable source of energy for my home. Before he...
View ArticleENOUGH: Habit Makes Violence the Norm
ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, fiction, comics, and artwork by women and non-binary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and...
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An Exploration of Belonging: Talking with Donna Hemans
Jamaica-born writer Donna Hemans has been said to hear “life sung by a chorus, not a single voice.” Her plots are as intense as thrillers yet as resonant as poetry, and the lyricism and emotional...
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Losing the World
Babies are fascinating—and frustrating—because they are resistant to organizing frameworks like language. In an infant’s early years, many caregivers speak in “motherese,” a simplified, higher-pitched,...
View ArticleConstant Motion: Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
There was a time when Marcelo Hernandez Castillo made a secret of his life. Hernandez Castillo, who crossed the Mexican border with his family at the age of five, grew up in the shadow of his father’s...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: What Happens to Girls
On the way to the drugstore, my mother tells me what her father did to her when she was a girl: she and her sisters, huddled in a bed in a house by the LeClaire dump, rats scratching across the...
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