About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Carmen Gimenez Smith
Positive The Rumpus Carmen Giménez Smith owes a lot to American feminist and Latina forebears, and she deftly honors the debt. Cruel Futures is kinder than its title suggests ... This is vital language for our time.
Kevin Goodan
Rave The Rumpus Anaphora matters artistically, politically, and historically, and is especially welcome now, when writers with close ties to long-marginalized groups need to be heard with more urgency than ever ... In Anaphora, Goodan once again earns his place where fine poetry is a living, breathing creation of hard-earned, essential grace.
Rita Dove
Rave The Rumpus Dove’s poems from forty two years ago, which is where this book begins, all display a crystalline sound and composition. They read as if they were always meant to be. If the book’s pages were in a loose binder, I could toss them in the air and when they landed quote from the leaf that was closest to me. They are all worthy of high praise and deep ingestion ... Writing about Dove is, as I hope I have made very evident, a multi-layered exercise in gratification, and one of the layers includes apprehending her particulars of the cruelties and beauties the world imposes, and the complex strength displayed by countless individuals.
Stevie Smith
Rave The Rumpus Smith confronted the collective political suffering of her people, and while she was often unlucky in romantic love, she was publicly admired. She was fearless about saying she was afraid, and that helped her make fear tolerable, as it surely must have for her audience ... Smith is at her best when she revisits the countless ways an aching, lonely heart can connect in spite of itself.
Juan Felipe Herrera
Rave The Rumpus “This poetry should be read many times, to go as far beyond surface as possible.”