BY THE RUMPUS
December 20th, 2019
It’s true that 2019 was another difficult year in so very many ways, but it was also a banner year for reading.
While we know that 2020 will find us facing ever more political upheaval, fighting endless uphill battles for equality and freedom, and screaming into our pillows at night, we can also assure you that there will be great literature to bring us solace, to inspire and enlighten us, and to offer us moments of escape.
If a title is marked as a Rumpus Book Club or Poetry Book Club upcoming selection, you can receive this book before its release date and participate in an exclusive conversation with its author! Just head to our store and subscribe today! And, thrill any and all readers on your holiday shopping list with a gift subscription! And, gift subscriptions come with a certificate you can print out and put under the tree—a perfect last-minute present!
Below are books Rumpus editors are eagerly anticipating that release between January 1 and June 30. Here’s to a happy New Year!
Rift Zone by Tess Taylor (Red Hen Press, April 7, 2020)
Taylor’s much-anticipated third book traces literal and metaphoric fault lines—rifts between past and present, childhood and adulthood, what is and what was. Circling Taylor’s hometown—an ordinary California suburb lying along the Hayward fault—these poems unearth strata that include a Spanish land grant, a bloody land grab, gun violence, valley girls, strip malls, redwood trees, and the painful history of Japanese internment. Taylor’s ambitious and masterful poems read her home state’s historic violence against our world’s current unsteadinesses—mass eviction, housing crises, deportation, inequality. They also ponder what it means to try to bring up children along these rifts. What emerges is a powerful core sample of America at the brink—an American elegy equally tuned to maternal and to geologic time.