Name Tessa Rumsey Education University of Iowa | Role Poet | |
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Books The return message, Assembling the Shepherd: Poems | ||
Life
She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and of the Visual Criticism department at California College of the Arts.
Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, The New Republic. She lives in San Francisco.
Awards
Works
Ploughshares
Review
In The Return Message, Tessa Rumsey composes herself in the aftermath of “a love affair that ended badly.” Behind every lyric is a debris field of emotional wreckagebetrayal, miscarriage, broken engagement. Even the “cherry blossoms” are “caught. / Inside the static loop of loss.” If “all forms of landscape are autobiographical,” as Charles Wright once suggested, then what we have here in the “mountain streams of No-Where” is the poet at an impasse. But bleak as that seems, The Return Message is not mired in the morbidly confessional; whatever her personal losses, Rumsey investigates the idea of love from a philosophical perspective. Rather than croon about heartache, she seeks ontological answers: if romance is only a biological impulse, then why, after intercourse, do I still long for my partner? “Does the soulexist?”