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In the Wake of His Damage
All the sleeping women Are now awake and moving. – Yosano Akiko (1911) For all women who already know this narrative; For all women touched by the Great Writers, named, unnamed, and some listed as...
View ArticleENOUGH: Please Have a Seat
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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Black Panther and Strong Women
Like a lot of American women growing up in the fat free-soaked 1990s, I put myself on my first diet when I was in elementary school. Even though I’m black, I’ve assumed a role in the general American...
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Taking Control and Staking a Claim: Erin Adair-Hodges’s Let’s All Die Happy
If one of the secrets to comedy is timing, then one of the secrets to comedy in poetry must be control over rhythm and form, those timekeepers of the reading act. Or so it seems from reading Erin...
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The Thread: The Masked Man
In the beginning, He was the word. The word of the house, the word of vocation, the word of study, of thought, of art. When Western writers wrote an everyman, of course, they wrote about themselves:...
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Make Your Choices: A Conversation with Chris Kraus
Before she became her own character in I Love Dick, the 1997 cult novel cum sleeper hit cum TV show, Chris Kraus was a writer. With her latest book, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography, she...
View ArticleA Façade of a Woman: R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries
Faces lit up if I walked into a room, the liking a light I could refract, giving it back. Phoebe, oh, I love that girl, people said, but it’s possible they all just loved their reflected selves. I...
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Removed
A node can be a turning point. A node can also be a vertex, a place where lines in a network cross or meet. It can be a knot, a bond, a small lump or mass of tissue in your body, a pathological...
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Finding Atonement in the #MeToo Era
Atonement in my ultra-Orthodox Jewish childhood was a white chicken, fat and stunned, gripped by the wings and swung above the head. This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my atonement....
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Emboldened to Ask: A Conversation with Natalie Singer
It was the cover that first piqued my interest in Natalie Singer’s debut memoir, California Calling: A Self-Interrogation. The wide, bright, concentric, circles in rainbow colors, the sans serif...
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The Thread: Near Miss
In 1991, I was ten years old. I lived in a tiny, picturesque mountain town on the north shore of Lake Tahoe—the kind of place with a definable “tourist season,” the kind of place where “nothing” ever...
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A Séance of a Book: Talking with Allie Rowbottom
Most of us can remember the wiggly, brightly colored, gelatin-based dessert from our childhood. But what do we really know about Jell-O, one of the most recognizable brands in American history? Where...
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Katie Ford
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Katie Ford about her latest collection, If You Have to Go (August 2018, Graywolf Press), the role of theology in poetry, sonnets and sestinas, and earned...
View ArticleBeyond Beowulf: Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife
In Beowulf, perhaps the best-known epic poem, Beowulf, the hero of the Geats, helps Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, to defeat Grendel, a monster that threatens Heorot, the king’s great hall. Beowulf...
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Dream Big: Hillary, Made Up by Marianne Kunkel
As I was reading Marianne Kunkel’s debut poetry collection, Hillary, Made Up, a phrase kept passing through my mind like ticker tape—”the wish to replace it with something else.” For a while, I...
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Transgressing Familiarity: Talking with Thomas Page McBee
Thomas Page McBee’s new memoir, Amateur, is a powerful exploration of the costs of toxic masculinity and the joys of an authentic life. It is also a classic fight story. Superbly written and keenly...
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Slow Burn: A Conversation with Katie Jean Shinkle
Ruination opens with two girls sitting on a mattress in the front yard making out during a super storm. A nuclear bomb has been detonated, but no clear enemy is ever defined, just a mysterious “other.”...
View ArticleHard to Swallow: Allie Rowbottom’s Jell-O Girls
Allie Rowbottom’s debut memoir and family history, Jell-O Girls, opens with her spooning Jell-O into her dying mother’s mouth. It’s ironic, given their family history, that Jell-O is the only thing her...
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A Lumpy, Misshapen Book: Talking with Elissa Washuta
Certain books are so multidimensional, so arresting, that I have more questions than my experience as a reader and book critic can answer. I want to talk about them, and to promote them, but I can’t do...
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Learning to Co-Exist with Fear: A Conversation with Vivek Shraya
How do you survive—and thrive—when our culture’s gender policing penalizes failure to conform, often to destructive ends? Bullied as a boy for being too feminine and harassed as an adult trans woman...
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