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Ruminate | Kristin George Bagdanov

Ruminate

Editors Ruminate: On the Poetry of Exposure

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Cover Image for Ruminate Magazine: Exposure

” Exposure

“A vulnerability index measures exposure. In climate science, it estimates the resiliency of communities that will bear the brunt of rising temperatures and seas. In social work, it identifies who should be prioritized for services according to their health and fragility. In the financial sector, it gauges a consumer’s level of economic insecurity and stress. In all cases, to be exposed is to be subject to harm.”

Read more about the poetry of Exposure & order your copy today. (25% of all proceeds will go to a local sexual assault victims advocacy center (SAVA).

Editors Ruminate: Hauntings

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As I sit down to write this reflection, I feel an overwhelming sense of dread. Not for the task at hand, but for the future. Is this what haunting is? I’ve never been one to believe in ghosts, at least not how they tend to be portrayed in movies and books. Specters don’t confine themselves to our simple dichotomies of absence and presence, life and death. They are both and they are between. Haunting is an atmosphere produced by these intra-worldly beings: specters of past lives, of present violence, of the seemingly unalterable conditions of what world will be. The four long poems in this issue will haunt you. You will see in them the faces of children who have been relegated to sacrifice zones; how the smallest measure of matter becomes the destroyer of worlds; how a home buckles under the weight of its history.

Read the rest of my Editors Ruminate on Issue 47: Hauntings

Ruminate Issue 45: Unfinished

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My Editors Ruminate blog for issue 45: unfinished is up! I hope you enjoy!

“Un- is the prefix of negation. Its identity is opposition, its power, reversal. Finish, on the other hand, signals completion, achievement, and conclusion. Self-help books proselytize the benefits of list-making, how completing daily tasks will make me fitter, happier, more productive.”

Purchase the issue here.

Ruminate Issue 44: Small

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The new issue of Ruminate is here and so is my Editors Ruminate blog. Get a sneak peek at these beautiful poems and order a copy today.

O small ones,
To be born!

—“Eclogue,” George Oppen

Small often means vulnerable. As when one person uses power to make another feel small. As when an individual seems insignificant within a sprawling system. Or when a hurricane decimates a city and we witness the extreme precarity of life. But smallness can also be a source of strength. It’s no surprise that this theme is often repeated in children’s stories: The Little Engine That Could, Jack and the Beanstalk, Thumbelina. Smallness can be the glitch in the system, the wrench in the machine. It can also be a line of poetry that reconfigures how we see the world. An image that unlocks something new. The poems in this issue explore the many implications and iterations of small, from subtle gestures of kindness to passing moments that accumulate to become something bigger than even the poem can hold.

Read more here. 

 

Ruminate Issue #43: Opening the Door

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The summer issue of Ruminate is out! One of the things I love most about Ruminate is how it generates conversation. Each issue opens with notes from our readers on the theme and closes with notes from contributors. I’ve decided to join in the conversation with a regular feature called Editors Ruminate, in which I reflect on how the poems work together in relation to the theme of Opening the Door. Order yourself a copy of Issue 43 then read my take here.