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Fragments of a Paradise - Rain Taxi

2025-04-22T18:56:11.000Z

Jean Giono
Translated by Paul Eprile
Archipelago Books ($18)

Long before dictating the eight chapters of Fragments of a Paradise, Jean Giono spent three years translating Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; during World War II, he pursued this nautical theme with an homage to its author, Pour saluer Melville (“To Greet Melville”), published in 1941. Later, almost five years into the Nazi occupation of France and having been under suspicion of pre-war pacifism and wartime collaborationism, Giono conceived a Moby Dick à la française, turning Ahab’s anger into a scientific expedition to the South Atlantic in a surreal blend of science and poetry. These circumstances call for reading Fragments of a Paradise as both a literary feat and a testament.

Critics have seen the novel as a divide in Giono’s work, a shift away from the tragedy of the world that defined his earlier works. In Fragments of a Paradise, the main topic is no longer man’s confrontation with nature but his enchantment with it. Depending on one’s education or social status, the gateway to enchantment can be a child’s innocence, a scientist’s reasoned understanding, or the delightedly fearful awe of past legends. Officer Larreguy, a graduate of the prestigious engineering school Centrale, has an awakening that relies on all three when on a visit home he notices an unusually large ox footprint that reminds him of the winged bulls guarding the gates of the city of Nineveh he had learned about during history classes.

This quixotic quest for Arcadia leads the ship’s captain to the most remote island on earth, Tristan da Cunha, after struggling through angry seas and skies with pre-industrial tools (the only radio on board remains unused, and the sailing vessel is a three-mast corvette). This unmooring process, says Giono at the end of the book, is the only way to fight the dulling of one’s senses from the pettiness and boredom of a routine in which the deadly tanks and airplanes of war have replaced nature’s wonders. Fighting “the most terrifying thing a man can imagine: to be inanimate,” the book concludes, “This is why all the men on the ship are hastening to find a soul within themselves.”

The ship’s quest, however, remains unfinished. Michael Wood, in his pertinent introduction, lists critical interpretations but does not address whether Fragments of a Paradise should be considered a finished work. The open-ended status of the novel is in character with its focus on the dualities of life/death, good/evil, creation/destruction, and nature/civilization. Giono hinted at revisions, calling the eight chapters a “future poem”—perhaps emulating his friend C. F. Ramuz, who wrote “poetic novels.” On the other hand, Giono typically wrote quickly, and rarely made any corrections to his texts.

An armchair traveler who lived most of his life in a small town in southeastern France, Giono had an encyclopedic book knowledge of geography and foreign cultures. Interestingly, he does not list these disciplines among the expertises possessed by his fictional crew: “Zoology, Botany, Geology, Paleontology, Bacteriology, Hydrography, Oceanography, Meteorology, planetary Magnetism, atmospheric Electricity, and Gravity.” In the fourth and fifth chapters, the reader is served a heavy dose of what critics call “borrowed information” in the vein of Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Joseph Conrad—or for that matter, Giono’s own readings of the complete works of 18th-century naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who was a founder of the theory of ecological succession, and Jules Dumont d’Urville’s multi-volume Voyage de la corvette l’Astrolabe, published serially from 1830-1833. Giono also drops clues about his knowledge of current sea exploration; expeditions to the island of Tristan da Cunha in the 1920s and ’30s made the island popular, and the sporadic discovery of Antarctic islands in the 1930s by French expeditions perhaps explains Giono’s captain’s choice of a reconnaissance area between the 66th parallel and the Tropic of Cancer.

The novel’s structure is supported by Giono’s use of both poetic and scientific language, with shifts between scientific prose, nautical jargon, rank-and-file sailors’ idioms, and dialogues replete with vieille France formulas of politeness. The first three chapters are pure poetry. The Franco-Basque crew sees a giant stingray and sperm whale through the eyes of medieval writers and in the language of John Milton, so they are unable to explain the sea creatures’ extraordinary feats of light, sound, and smells. These are explained more scientifically by the captain and the ship’s officers in the following two chapters, with a profusion of details to anchor them in verisimilitude. Poetry returns when Noël Guinard, the storekeeper, climbs to the top of Tristan da Cunha, fulfilling Giono’s idea of complete solitude and preparation for death. Poetic images are scattered through the chapters; technicolor visions of monsters and sunsets and a symbiosis between land, sea, and sky unmoor the mind as surely as the motion of wind and water. Paul Eprile’s conscientious and sophisticated translation must be commended for sparingly “paring down” the original text and preserving its stylistic richness.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

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Patriot - Rain Taxi

2025-04-18T15:53:30.000Z

Alexei Navalny
Translated by Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel
Knopf ($35)

by Grace Utomo

For some, the difference between what if and what is is a single character. For others, it’s the gulf between silence and annihilation. Alexei Navalny, intrepid critic of Vladimir Putin and leader of Russia’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, chose the latter. Navalny’s memoir, Patriot, which blends traditional narrative, prison diaries, and social media posts, was released posthumously by his widow Yulia Navalnaya in October 2024 after the opposition leader was allegedly killed in one of Russia’s most brutal penal colonies. From surviving assassination by chemical agent in 2020, to 295 days of torture and solitary confinement during 2023-2024, Navalny remained steadfast in his dissent.

Although Navalny composed Patriot in spaces ranging from a tranquil asylum in Germany to a punishment cell above the Arctic Circle, the book’s tone is strikingly consistent. Its opening captures the author’s tongue-in cheek approach to both politics and memoir: “Dying really didn’t hurt. If I hadn’t been breathing my last, I would never have stretched out on the floor next to the plane’s toilet. As you can imagine, it wasn’t exactly clean.” Navalny describes his near-fatal poisoning—believed to have been ordered by Putin in response to Navalny’s carefully documenting Russian political corruption, as well as his two attempts to run for political office—with humor and irony without overplaying either.

As Patriot progresses, Navalny reveals that the memoir he’d begun writing to uncover the truth about his mysterious “illness” has morphed into something else: the saga of an unbreakable battle with the Kremlin. Navalny never doubts the truth will prevail, but his glasses are not rose-colored. He wrote to followers shortly before his death:

Nineteen years in a maximum-security penal colony. The number of years does not matter. I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Whether “life” is defined either by the end of my life, or the length of the life of this regime.
The sentencing figure is not for me. It is for you. . . . Putin must not achieve his goal. Do not lose the will to resist.

Notably absent from Navalny’s messages to supporters and prison diaries are details of what he endured during 295 days in solitary confinement—perhaps an indication of Navalny’s focus on the cause of Russian freedom and of his reluctance to proclaim himself a martyr.

Crucial to Patriot is Navalny’s sensitivity as a husband and father. Starvation and sleep deprivation should desensitize the most high-minded empath, but Navalny remains tender. Halfway through his imprisonment, he writes to his wife Yulia: “I hate glass. Because for six months now I’ve only seen you through glass. In the courtroom, through glass. During visits, through glass. . . I adore you, I miss you. Stay well and don’t get discouraged . . . As for the glass, sooner or later we’ll melt it with the heat of our hands.” This missive demonstrates Navalny’s resolution to lift others up, though a birthday message to his son Zakhar also reveals regret over the collateral suffering Navalny’s activism inflicts on his family:

    What sort of pathetic greeting is it to send a letter to your son on his fourteenth birthday? What kind of memory will that be of being close to his father?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
    Let’s face it, you don’t get to choose your parents. Some kids get stuck with jailbirds.
    But it is on my children’s birthdays that I am particularly aware why I’m in jail. We need to build the Beautiful Russia of the Future for them to live in.

Few of Patriot’s readers in the U.S. will risk imprisonment, torture, or assassination for our ideals, yet Navalny’s call to unmask lies and elevate truth invites global application. This trenchant memoir might prompt us to ask ourselves: What are we doing today to make the world a better place tomorrow?

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Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

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High Solitude - Rain Taxi

2025-04-16T17:02:21.000Z

Léon-Paul Fargue
Translated by Rainer J. Hanshe
Contra Mundum Press ($21.50)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Picture dragging yourself from bed with mounting anxiety in a small and dingy (yet Parisian, so not all bad) flat to the windows overlooking a boulevard and adjacent alleyways abuzz with city life. Looking out at streets you once rambled as a youth in jubilant company, with literature and art coursing through the veins, you now feel dejected as you begin a series of notes on Parisian city life. The writing isn’t some tell-all exploitative tale concerning now-famous lives of those you once knew. Rather, it’s a series of inner visions relating the strife and turmoil, sometimes imagined, that can be found in abundance on the city’s streets. Your name is Léon-Paul Fargue, and your book is High Solitude.

Fargue’s idiosyncratic book resists easy classification. Are these tales autobiographical? Yes and no. Are they fiction? Sort of. Might they be essays cast in fictional glow? Perhaps, at least sometimes. Whatever it may be, the book certainly contributes to the literary lineage of the flâneur, that indelible Parisian lurker of corridors and street cafes: “How sad it was to walk on and encounter the utmost end without finding anything of what I had loved or hated! I was lost in a forest of strange noctilucas, in a helpless city that hovered like a hawk over the stampede. I recognized everything and I recognized nothing.”

The streets of Paris are a central theme, if not an outright character, in High Solitude; the descriptive detail and moody tenor of Fargue’s writing gives them an eerie glow. There’s also an edgy despair embroidering these scenes as outer and inner experience jostle against each other: “These endosmoses between the past and myself, these returns to experience, the gone-by, the ground-down, I am exhausted, I am overwhelmed, I am drunk with them.” As if trapped in a grim arcade, Fargue implores, “What can I do to avoid these hordes of myself that go up the avenues, stand in line at the stations, occupy café tables?” He doesn’t really have any answers, but on occasion proffers a learned observation or two: “Order offers mortals pillows. Disorder puts them on the road towards the possible.” These occasional morsels of guidance encourage readers along Fargue’s lonely peripatetic journey.

Lacking cohesive narrative attraction, High Solitude does stumble here and there, only to recover and doggedly continue. Such is life, it suggests—although Fargue’s anecdotes and reflections magnify aspects of it few discover on their own.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

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What Good Is Heaven - Rain Taxi

2025-04-09T18:05:05.000Z

Raye Hendrix
Texas Review Press ($21.95)

by Jennifer Saunders

A remarkable debut collection, Raye Hendrix’s What Good Is Heaven interrogates kindness and mercy while exploring love’s complicated gestures. In “Animal Instinct,” the speaker remembers finding a squirrel “fallen from its piney drey, eyes still sealed // with birth” while walking in the woods with her father and dog. She jerks the dog’s leash to prevent it from eating the squirrel; her father tells her to “leave it to die quickly— / let the dog have his merciful doggy way.” Instead, she brings it home to “a slow death over days / in the rust of a long-dead hamster’s cage.” The adult speaker wonders how “to know when kindness / means crush instead of heal.”

The animal world often provides Hendrix with fodder for such meditations. In “The Bats,” the father and daughter find baby bats frozen to death. The daughter reaches for them, but her father

says to leave them for the wildcats
             and the dogs that run the mountain

he asks me to be more like
             winter                     beautiful but hard

he says despite my softness
                                             everything must eat

The poem “Mercy” shows the inverse: kindness dressed as harm. Here, child and father find a near-dead raccoon, and this time he “gave me the rifle / said it was time I learned // mercy.” The father’s efforts to push the softness out of his daughter is not an unkindness but an attempt to armor her against the violence of the world.

Just as kindness and harm are intertwined in these natural scenes, so too do they interface in human relationships. As a Southern queer poet, Hendrix understands that people and places one loves can do harm. “Daughter” begins:

I was loved with a Bible
              a belt        I ate Ivory

soap          I was sent out
              to choose the switch

Perhaps even more tremulously, it ends:

He once told me         (made me
               swear to keep it secret

to never tell my sister)
              that he loved me the most

Thus is the recipient of the father’s greater love also the recipient of his greater harm. In “Bloodletting,” Hendrix writes directly about the relationship between care and harm:

if the Greeks can be believed
then opening a vein
is Hippocratic: violence
cloaked in an oath of care

Hendrix also interrogates their own complicated love of a Southern home that has not always loved them back. They depict their hometown of Pinson, Alabama as a place where roads are “pothole-pocked / and going nowhere,” “the people are proud // to be holdout Confederates,” and the corrupt Mayor is replaced by “another reclining in his chair.” “But there’s jasmine here,” Hendrix counters; “There’s light.”

In “Pinson” and in What Good Is Heaven as a whole, the litany of details accumulates with force. Noticing and holding them itself seems to offer a proof of love—who but a lover could write “the algae // a million emeralds sunk just beyond / the shore”—but Hendrix gestures at their own love through these observations as well. Some of the softness the father in these poems had hoped to temper remains, and Hendrix’s readers are the lucky beneficiaries of its survival.

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Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

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Near-Earth Object - Rain Taxi

2025-04-08T16:00:11.000Z

John Shoptaw
Unbound Edition Press ($25)

by Lee Rossi

Poetry can be personal, but as T. S. Eliot famously insisted, it can also be impersonal. Can it ever be both at once? In his latest collection, Near-Earth Object, John Shoptaw mixes disparate elements—formal and informal, autobiographical and traditional, and, yes, personal and impersonal—creating a work that takes various paths to express the existential crisis of our time: the effects of climate change.

From the outset, Shoptaw offers a guided tour of various disasters and disaster zones: the asteroid Chicxulub, clear-cut forests, the North Pacific Gyre, climate refugees, desertification in the Sahel. It’s not pretty. “Dry Song,” which beautifully reworks some of the basic motifs of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” reveals the terrifying reality of salmon unable to reach (or leave) their spawning beds because streams are running dry:

But the drought has pierced to the mountain route
and shown me rock under the shrunken mantle
and sand it fed to the river mouths, barring
salmon on their redds from salmon in the sea.

“Back Here” takes the tack of using the patois of “Swampeast” (southeast Missouri), Shoptaw’s boyhood home. “We believe in everything life has given us,” the speaker says—the few good things, the many disappointments. “We believe in you,” he tells the prodigal poet, but goes on to say, “Honestly, we don’t know what to believe. / We don’t believe you do either.” Finally, though, the speaker admits: “We know. The earth is dying. We get that. / . . . / Naturally, we’ll do what we can. / Only please don’t ask us / to change our climate for yours.”

Employing skewed formalisms in many of the poems, Shoptaw emphasizes that resilience and creation are as much a part of our behavioral repertoire as violence and despoliation. He craftily leans into the little-used “Poulter’s Measure” (a popular Renaissance meter) for an antic anecdote about the fried chicken of his youth. The poem begins with memories of a visit to a boyhood chum:

We play with our trucks out back in the dirt, where plump
red hens peck for bugs but keep clear of the hackberry stump.

Then checkers on linoleum in the kitchen
where Chuck’s mom in a red housedress turns: Cornflake fried chicken?

The music is charming, but there are deeper currents. Comparing himself to his friend, the speaker notes:

I grew on the wrong side of the rails but the right
side of the river in Missouri, Chuck on the wrong side

of both.

Shoptaw also likes large canvases; the final sequence in the book, “Whoa!,” revisits the myth of Phaeton in light of the environmental woe already upon us. Throughout the work’s twelve parts, Shoptaw offers many of the traditional pleasures of the long narrative poem, among them learned lists (flowers, decaying glaciers, unrepentant polluters), elaborate similes, and inflated rhetoric. Shoptaw’s list of “wide-waking annuals and perennials,” for example, is as specific and delightful as Milton’s famed list of flowers in “Lycidas” without dispelling the somber and elegiac tone of the whole:

snowdrops, crocuses, daisies and daylilies,
rice in flower and maize in silk,
woozy jasmine and heady grapevines . . .

Of course, all these pleasures are in service to a larger design. As our modern-day Phaeton (here cleverly named “Ray”) courses recklessly, he disturbs the jet stream and sends untimely cold snaps on New England and New York, causing disaster around the globe:

Coulters
and ponderosas, yellowed and browned, engraved
with trilobite grooves by pine-bark beetles
wintering northward, had turned from trees
into tinder.

Notice how Shoptaw’s four-beat lines evoke but don’t slavishly imitate Old English accentual verse, the alliteration deployed almost casually to reinforce the drive of the narrative.

Ray, it might be noted, is clueless, but at least he has the excuse of youth and inexperience. Not so “the fossil lordlings / . . . out / sledding with their kids in Central Park”; “Where’s the heat?” they want to know, their cluelessness a testament to their motivated ignorance. Since this is a mock epic, retribution is called for, so in Shoptaw’s telling, Earth herself fires a lightning bolt at Mister High and Mighty, ejecting him from “his plump white boy’s life.”

What Shoptaw offers readers, then, is not an answer but a fantasy of reprisal, one with no more impact on social policy than the tagging of a freeway overpass has. Perhaps that’s what most writers do—scrawl texts in hopes it might shock us into saving ourselves from tragedy. Few, however, do it with the force and elegance of Shoptaw.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

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Be the Strange You Wish to See in the World: An Interview with John Madera - Rain Taxi

2025-04-03T20:58:59.000Z

by Rone Shavers

If the subaltern could speak, John Madera’s Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, $18.95) would highlight exactly what they’d say. Every work in this collection of experimental short fiction mines and limns the interior struggle of someone living at odds with their perceived or all-too-present reality, characters that veer from existential crisis to socioeconomic crisis to literal crisis to physical crisis and all the way back around again. And yet, who among us can really blame them? In the new fresh hell of our current political administration, where every day starts with What now? and ends with WTF, Nervosities strikes a chord because it happens to be as timely and necessary as it is prescient. Madera is a prolific, prodigious writer and literary critic, so the reader can readily expect nothing less than a careful detailing of our current, almost constant societal and political breakdown.

John Madera manages and edits Big Other, an online journal that specializes in showcasing innovative and experimental creative work. His poetry and prose have appeared in Conjunctions, Contrapuntos, Hobart, and Salt Hill, and his criticism has been published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Brooklyn Rail, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Rain Taxi. What follows is an interview conducted the old-fashioned way: by correspondence.

Rone Shavers: How would you define “experimental” writing, and do you consider your work to be experimental?

John Madera: Defining can be a kind of confining, especially with a term like “experimental,” where any kind of gesture toward exactitude—in this case about its fundamental nature, range, scope, meaning, etc.—will betray any number of holes in the so-called whole. So as this slippery thing falls out of our hands—when was it ever in our hands?—this is getting out of hand!—let’s observe it less as what it is and more as what it does.

Another way of answering this question is to continue the play of the formlessness of forms—forms themselves potentialities, things whose thingness comprises deformation, transformation, and conformation (this last term I’m using as a chemist might)—by playing with the form of the interview qua interview, a possible adventurous endeavor where I might answer every question with a question, echoing playful texts like Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? and William Walsh’s Questionstruck, both of which are entirely composed of sentences end-stopped by question marks. We could also—as Lance Olsen does in one section of his marvelous prose object Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel After David Bowie—publish only the answers to the questions, which would foreground the instability inherent within questions, absence in this case making the mind further wander.

Here’s another way of answering by not answering, at least not with any kind of exactitude: you, the you who might be reading this, might recall yourself back to a biology class where you were charged to perform a dissection of a frog, which, its etherized state notwithstanding, nevertheless revolted you, this experiment ultimately a palpable model of biological studies, including vertebrate anatomy, evolutionary adaptations, and physiology. However new the experience might have been for you, however enlightening the results had been for you, the experiment ultimately had likely not resulted in any new findings; that is, your experiment likely hadn’t contributed anything toward broadening scientific knowledge in a general sense. The results are predetermined in such an experiment, in other words. But then there are scientific experiments where the results are not only not predetermined but have arguably changed our understanding of reality. All to say, there’s a range of experimentation, which you might say begins with the “historical,” which arguably one needs to absorb or reenact in some form or another before proceeding toward the opposite end of that range: an end that knows no limit, an end that is an endless beginning: the realm of the radical imagination.

So as in science, there’s a range of what might be called “experimental” in art. Alas, most of what’s published is at the bottom of that range, experiments like the abovementioned dissection, where the results just foreground already known conclusions, where what is written is just another cold, bloodless corpse destined for the garbage can: putrid refuse as opposed to fruitful refusal. Fortunately, however, there are writers who have and are experimenting at the highest levels of that range, whose works make the impossible possible, works that take the givens that everyone else who works with language uses only to problematize those givens, ultimately offering something that reveals previously hidden “knowledge,” further potentialities, more questions—works, moreover, that deterritorialize the stratifications of the state, the market, the temple, of imperialism, consumerism, fundamentalism.

Great filmmaker Robert Bresson said, “Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.” And I’ll add: make thinkable, what, without you, might perhaps never have been thought; make readable what, without you, might perhaps never have been read; make feelable what, without you, might perhaps never have been felt; make audible what, without you, might perhaps never have been heard; make touchable what, without you, might perhaps never have been touched; make tasteable what, without you, might perhaps never have been tasted; make smell-able what, without you, might perhaps never have been smelled.

RS: Do you consider yourself to be a “difficult” writer? What does literary difficulty mean to you?

JM: Easy makes me queasy: if the opposite of “difficult” is “easy,” would any self-respecting writer, not to mention any other person—whatever that is—want to be easy? Easy is synonymous with obedient, conciliatory, placating, going-along-to-get-along. The easy person is a people-pleaser who makes, says, or does things everybody likes. The easy person does everything they can to fit in, always asks for permission, steps and fetches, and the like.

To make something vitally unusual requires that one be “difficult,” requires an indominable obstinacy along with total vulnerability, a knowing steadfastness in the face of great unknowing, likely misunderstanding, possible censure, ridicule, ostracization, etc.; it requires rugged determination and patience that may on the surface look like foolhardiness or intransigence in the face of so-called reality, but which is really heartful pluck, whimsical vim, and empathetic elasticity.

That said, it’s not a willful difficulty that genuinely adventurous, generously subversive writers aim for; they don’t deliberately and mean-spiritedly set up obstacles for the unsuspecting reader to overcome, the act of which strikes me as a kind of sadism. The aim—or, better to say, the process such writers live within—is one where they set up difficulties for themselves, organize challenges that compel them to go beyond their current abilities, to go beyond, moreover, what society’s planners, the disciplinarians, the authorities, the professional managers, the haters, the naysayers, etc., say is their place, which is “nowhere” in the worst senses of the word.

All to say, difficulty is a pleasure, the pleasure of getting lost, of stumbling around in the darkness of the unknown, of the impossible.

RS: How would you describe your ideal reader?

JM: We live in a society where most people don’t read, the act not in its most substantial, life- and love-affirming sense of the word, anyway, a society where reading, which is to say, immersive reading, is such a rare act as to be something sacred, miraculous.

So, in a way, my ideal audience in this a-literary wasteland would be people who might be incredibly resistant if not outright antagonistic toward what I’ve written, where the experience of reading the fictions I’ve composed starts after they’ve closed the book. My desire in this respect is something like great filmmaker Jacques Tati’s wanting “the film to start when you leave the auditorium.” That said, I do see myself working within a continuum where even if my writing goes largely unread, it still contributes to what is possible in a reading experience. Every so often—and I say this with profound gratitude—I receive a discerning response to something I’ve written by people who are not only discerning readers but extraordinary writers in their own right, the experience of which serves, albeit temporarily, as a kind of affirmation that my work is necessary.

RS: Several of the stories in Nervosities, like “An Incommodious Vehicle of Recirculation,” are written without any paragraph breaks, making them similar in style to the works of writers such as Thomas Bernhard. What extra layer of meaning is added to the work when writing without period or paragraph breaks, as opposed to a more conventional, “reader-friendly” style?

JM: I love Bernhard, though I hadn’t read anything by him by or during the time I was writing Nervosities. The story “An Incommodious Vehicle of Recirculation” takes its structure, its circular form, from Finnegans Wake, and its title is a play off a phrase from same. Circularity, mortality, love, travel, and language figure as major themes in the story for a character who despises the “general lack of precision, the same kind of attitude responsible for people using the same word for so many things, stretching its meaning toward a multiplicity of meanings, but at the expense of making the word less meaningful, less full of meaning, where more actually meant less.” [182] I’d say, besides James Joyce, if there’s a primary influence on the appearance of long paragraphs in my writing, it’s Henry James, whose circumambulatory sentences tend to delightfully sprawl. Another possible influence in this regard is William H. Gass’s various extrapolations on sentences, particularly “The Architecture of the Sentence.” Gass’s own sentences about Henry James’s sentences are as attentive to scaffolding, sonorities, etc., as the James sentences he’s rigorously and lyrically examining.

As for “reader-friendly” style, what the so-called mainstream mainly shovels out are “gripping,” “relatable,” ultimately timid texts that titillate, works that intentionally confuse melodrama for deep feeling, or that flatter the reader’s ego, lure them into thinking they’re smarter than they actually are, and more besides. Thinking about such empty seductions, this quote from John Barth comes to mind: “In art, as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.” The descriptor “gripping” should be an alarming one, should warn us that the text is something like a raptor that might capture you in its claws and wrench you apart piece by piece. But “violence” is missing from such texts, especially what you might call “generative violence.” They don’t, to paraphrase Dickinson, make me feel as if the top of my head were taken off. They aren’t, to paraphrase Kafka, axes to chop up the frozen sea within us. They don’t, to paraphrase Evenson, worm around inside our heads. Whatever violence those “gripping” texts have is the violence of the state, the status quo, the addictive whatever. Their grip is the grip of the bully, the police, the spectacle, the prison, the church, the corporation, etc. Moreover, those “gripping” texts are what Lyn Hejinian, in “The Rejection of Closure,” calls “closed texts” (which only allow for a circumscribed interpretation) in contrast to “open texts,” where “all the elements of the work are maximally excited” and invite multiple readings and interpretations.

In short, I don’t want to read a “gripping” book. I want to read books that beautifully, provocatively, mysteriously elude my grasp.

RS: Most of your stories, paragraphs, and even sentences are demonstrably longer than what many readers are accustomed to encountering. What intellectual point or aesthetic effect do you think you achieve by writing at such length?

JM: Long, compared to what? Long, yes, compared to the so-called hot take, the snippy snippet, the snarky comment, the rushed judgment. Long when it doesn’t correspond to the dictates of the attention deficit society, the TL;DR society, a society long conditioned by educational systems designed to dumb us down, government propaganda designed to make us pliant and obedient, and corporate media designed to keep us amusing ourselves to debt and death.

In any case, I agree with Viktor Shklovsky, who in “Art as Technique” wrote: “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.” I think that’s one of the many things a carefully constructed “long” sentence does: it prolongs perception, the act or event of which, unless one is vigilant, one rarely enacts or experiences, to one’s own detriment, not to mention the detriment of one’s community and beyond.

RS: In the story “Reflections of a Walking Ruin,” you make mention of “discordia concors,” something perhaps best defined as “unity gained by combining disparate or conflicting elements.” The idea of harmonious discord could also very well define the overall the aesthetic style of this collection. Do you think discordia concors reinforces or subverts our current literary landscape?

JM: The discordia concors as it operates in “Reflections of a Walking Ruin” might be compared to the conception of the “Third Space,” a liberatory continuum formulated through language where each actor is necessarily a hybrid, a dissolve of borders between identities, histories, and other stratifications. Sentential convolutions and physical perambulations intertwine in “Reflections of a Walking Ruin” to form a narrative in which speculations on the nature of meaning, the act of translation, the question of representation, the logic of the inventory, and the formation of character (artificial and otherwise) act to displace comforting notions of identity and plurality, not to mention space and time. It’s a subversive space, in other words, that will, with any luck, alter actual spaces in real time, similar to the ways objects are willed into existence by the force of the imagination in Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Moreover, I think of the discordia concors as a kind of utopic space, an affirmative space, an actualizing of the “impossible,” something like Foucault’s conception of “heterotopia,” a transformative, liberatory space, where the seemingly illusory is made real.

RS: In several stories, you mention “thinking about thinking”—what’s sometimes referred to as meta-cognition. By doing so you hint at a character’s deep(er) interior life that the reader is only partially privy to, which makes me wonder: Given that the reader is denied access to the entirety of your characters’ mental lives—we only know what the narrative, or better still, what the characters often choose to tell us—do you think that literature is still the best medium for conveying our interior lives and thoughts? Or, to go one step further, do you think literature is still a socially useful way to connect?

JM: What might be happening in those stories is the intimation that however much “access” a writer might give to a character’s interiority, said access will always only and necessarily be limited. I would argue that most people aren’t aware of the goings on of their own mind, let alone any fictional characters’ “minds,” which, of course, leads to all kinds of trouble and misery.

Literature is just one among many ways to convey interiority, just one of among many ways to foster connection. Such conveyance and connection require a “diversity of tactics,” to employ a term used in vital forms of solidaristic activism.

RS: Many of your titles are thematic; they don’t directly allude to the events or situations within the story. Why is that?

JM: I’m no Heideggerian, but I do agree with the philosopher’s argument that the relation between subject and object, mind and body, part and whole, etc., is ambiguous at best. Here I recall Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” where so-called subject and so-called object reverse positions, which I’d like to imagine was inspired after a reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s journals, where he wrote, “What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.”

Seems to me most writers of prose don’t give much thought to the titles of their stories, essays, and books, whatever they eventually use seemingly slapped on it; the titles are, at best, merely indexical or decorative. It’s a lost opportunity, really. Titles can be used to circumvent and otherwise subvert what follows.

RS: Most of the characters in Nervosities seem to be caught in the throes of an existential crisis—they’re searching and striving for a sense of meaning that’s gone missing from their lives. Are you making a larger statement about this particular moment in the world? Is your work trying to capture the essence of our current human condition?

JM: In a way, anyone attentive to the order and disorder of things is in some kind of existential crisis—unless they have, through enormous discipline, liberated themselves from the traps of hope and fear; have gone beyond the unquestioning acceptance of so-called reality, of the so-called reliability of our perceptions, of the seeming solidity of objects, not to mention of time and place.

As for essences, I don’t think my writing captures the essence of the human condition, because I don’t think there are essences, not of things, ideas, or entities, all of which are socially constructed, and therefore unstable, even largely imaginary. And even if essences did exist, the human is a multiplicity, a multi-variegated thing that invariably eludes capture. So let us observe this multiplicity as a worlding, of words, images, ideas, of differences as opposed to identities, of appearances that are also disappearances and vice versa.

RS: Many of your characters are stuck in a maze of meandering thoughts, while also constantly made aware of the presence and absence of physical bodies. Please speak about these aspects in Nervosities.

JM: Like so many of us, some of these characters sometimes fall prey to the false notion that there is some kind of separation between mind and body, this illusion of asynchrony, on the one hand, opening up the possibility of seeing how much of the goings-on of consciousness is actually made up, the realization of which can be quite liberating, and, on the other hand, potentially reinforce the false idea that some kind of tangible separation of body and mind is already the case or that it’s even a possibility.

RS: The importance of words—both the power of words and the necessity of being precise with one’s words—is highlighted in many of the stories in Nervosities. It’s perhaps best articulated in “Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan,” where you write, “We love to name names, and by ‘we’ I mean, those of us who take pleasure in knowing the names of things, naming synonymous, we think, with knowledge, yes, but also with authority and ownership.” There’s a lot to unpack in that line (especially in terms of the story’s subject), but I simply want to ask if you can speak about why your characters think a misnomer, a generality, or a cliché is enough to trigger an existential or societal collapse. Do you hold the same belief?

JM: Looking at history, I can sadly attest to the fact that misnomers, generalities, and clichés can, do, and will have devastating consequences on society.

In “Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan,” a tragic accident sends the narrator into a spiral of doubt, of identity, of his very sense of reality, indicated largely by his inserting much of what is said, either by himself or others, in scare quotes, the scariness of it made scarier by his verbalization of the punctuation marks. This tendency of the character may seem extreme, but what it does is textually foreground a certain kind of uncertainty of language, even and maybe especially at its most precise.

As for beliefs, I don’t think characters have any, not in the way we think of us having beliefs. As for whatever it is that these characters hold that we might call “beliefs,” I’d say, no, I don’t hold the same beliefs of any of my characters. I’m not even sure if they are or even were “my” characters.

That said, while I do believe that language can be and maybe always is a kind of subterfuge, an apparatus at several removes from “suchness,” “isness,” and “thereness”; a sedimentation of linguistic and cultural conditions; it is also a mechanism for liberation and awakening—as much a portal as it is a tool as it is a weapon as it is a force as it is an environment.

RS: Who are your literary influences?

JM: Here are some of the literary influences on the writing of Nervosities: John Ashbery’s elliptical collages, John Barth’s ingenious disruptions of genre, Joseph Conrad’s liquid lyricism, Robert Coover’s unruly mythmaking, e. e. cummings’s visual innovations, Samuel R. Delany’s subversive fabulism, Emily Dickinson’s “slant” syntax, Don DeLillo’s steely awareness, Stanley Elkin’s heady, circumlocutory descriptions, William Faulkner’s innovative temporal structures, Leon Forrest’s inventive fusions of myth and history, William Gaddis’s virtuosic satires, William H. Gass’s sentential cathedrals, John Hawkes’s visceral phantasmagorias, Henry James’s rigorous, relentless precision, James Joyce’s adventurous structural and syntactical play, Ursula K. Le Guin’s anarchic sensibilities, Herman Melville capacious seeming-longueurs, Marianne Moore’s allusive perspective shifts, Thomas Pynchon’s wild, nonlinear tale-spinnings, William Shakespeare’s everything, Wallace Stevens’s philosophical intro- and extrospection, and Virginia Woolf’s luminous lyricism.

RS: What about your intellectual and/or theoretical influences?

JM: Great minds think unlike. That is, many ideas, etc., have inspired me in my processes of being and becoming, like Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of the poetic image, Étienne Balibar via Spinoza’s concept of the transindividual, Roland Barthes’s palping pleasures of the text, Jean Baudrillard’s icy formulation of the hyperreal, Judith Butler’s expositions on the constructedness of gender, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theorization of the rhizome, Jacques Derrida’s explosive deconstructions, Frantz Fanon’s diagnoses of the psychopathologies of colonization, Michel Foucault’s taxonomies of power, Édouard Glissant’s formulation of opacity, Stuart Hall’s defining race as floating signifier, Donna Haraway’s attacks on anthropocentrism, Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspectivism, Peter Sloterdijk’s atmospheric ontologies, and much more besides.

My intellectual and theoretical influences would have to also include a host of artists working in other genres, each for whom the worn-out phrase “less is more” is at the very least a laugh: visual artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mark Bradford, and Pepón Osorio; musical artists like Anthony Braxton, John Coltrane, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk; filmmakers like Peter Greenaway, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Wong Kar-Wai. The list is endless, really.

Engaging the work of all of the above is all part of the continuum of study, practice, and performance that I daily create for myself, a continuum that’s also a kind of destitution, a fugitivity, an exile, an ungovernability, a vital continuum within a web of poetic relations, all of which is under near-constant threat and attack, alas.

RS: What do you want people to take away after reading this collection?

JM: Ultimately, my greatest hope is that as someone is reading or has finished reading Nervosities, they are inspired to make something: make art, make love, make out, make up, make space, make time, make room.

RS: Do you have any final thoughts to share?

JM: Deepest gratitude to you, Rone, for such an expansive reading of Nervosities and for your astute questions about it and beyond. Also, deep admiration for your own writing. Silverfish is a marvelous book, to say the least. Bravo!

As for final thoughts, how about my manifesto for living a radically imaginative life? (There’s some repetition below but some things bear repeating. Some things bear repeating. Some things bare repeating. Some bears repeat things. Bare things repeat some. Etc.) Here it is:

Be the strange you wish to see in the world.

Make, that is, create, form, arrange, enact, and/or perform, a living.

Make more than you consume.

Make study, practice, and sharing/performance your daily continuum.

Keep lighting the good light.

Stand your underground.

Remember: There is no absolute being, only resolute becoming.

Take the path of most resistance as often as you can.

Get lost.

Work outside of and against the state.

Say nay to the naysayers.

Do something every day for someone else.

Honestly face reality, which means acknowledging, properly addressing, etc., the good along with the bad, and everything in between, a lot if not all of which is always mutable.

Acknowledge, celebrate, and express gratitude for all the positive things that are happening for you, your family, friends, colleagues, etc.

Ask for help when you need it.

Daily do at least one thing you love, that brings you joy, that turns you on, etc.

Daily do at least one thing that brings you closer to a creative goal.

Daily do at least one thing that brings you closer to a vocational goal.

Eat healthily and heartily.

Exercise and exorcise.

Get a good night’s sleep.

Have I mentioned singing and dancing? Have I mentioned cooking? Have I mentioned reading?

Have I mentioned taking a bath? Have I mentioned getting lost? Have I mentioned going wild?

In any case, I’ve found these practices to be helpful through even the best of times; in fact, they help to prolong them. That said, the list above is not meant to be a substitute for any therapeutic practice, regimen, etc.

Be vulnerable and uninhibited. That is, endeavor to open yourself to the life-affirming possibilities of the radical imagination against death cult capitalism’s command for us to police, imprison, and kill our dreams, visions, etc., not to mention our lives and the lives of others.

Do everything you can to free yourselves from convention, from received thinking in all its forms, moreover from the society of the spectacle, the society of surveillance, discipline, and control.

Speak the unspeakable. Write the unwriteable.

Feeling helpless? Ask for help. Help others. Do what you can do. Whatever you can do is enough. If you can’t do anything, do that. Whatever you do, don’t beat yourself up.

Fallow periods are sometimes necessary. Respect it, if that’s what it is. That is, do everything you can to plow and till the field even as you necessarily leave it unseeded. But how do you know if this, whatever it is, is such a period? Hard to say, but here are some things to remember as you figure it out or not: Art is food. That is, it’s absolutely necessary, not some decorative frill or gratuitous thrill. You’re a farmer. Get to work. Also, eat and eat well, lustily, and without apology. I’m still talking about art but do this with your other meals, too. Moreover, be honest. Be fearless. Go crazy. Disobey. Do something every day for someone else. This could be a meal. Express gratitude for what you have, even if it’s “only” for the vision of a future feast.

The programmed homogeneity of social media, which is just a node of corporate media’s manufactory of consent and dissent, makes it enormously difficult but not impossible to discover or re-engage with worthy artists and other revolutionaries, doggedly working in the margins. So, seek out and otherwise engage such people’s work as part of your daily creative practice. Regularly publicly share your findings as a way of building community, because it in some way micropolitically circumvents the abovementioned homogeneity, conformity, and servility.

Champion the underdog in this dog-eat-dog world. That is, champion and otherwise support marginalized artists, visionaries, revolutionaries, and radical networks of cooperatives, democratically self-managed enterprises, etc.

Rebel, refuse, repeat.

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Interview

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

The post Be the Strange You Wish to See in the World: An Interview with John Madera appeared first on Rain Taxi.

The Mariner's Mirror - Rain Taxi

2025-03-31T16:57:48.000Z

poems by Damion Searls

$10 plus $4 shipping in U.S., $10 international shipping
36 pages, perfect bound
published 2025

After years on the sea of reading, the mariner reflects on what he has seen, and what he has seen reflects him . . . “I have collected all the hard words together, he says,” Searls writes about the author of the first-ever manual of letterpress printing—but it turns out there are no hard words, only textures, feelings, “sheets of sound” and meaning that add up to a way of experiencing the world.

Purchase in U.S.

International Purchase

About the author

Damion Searls, one of the most admired and prolific literary translators of our era, has translated books from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch by dozens of classic modern writers, including Proust, Rilke, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, and six Nobel Laureates—among them the most recent recipient of the prize, Jon Fosse. In addition to his lauded work as a translator, Searls is also the author of The Philosophy of Translation, The Inkblots (a history of the Rorschach Test and biography of its creator), and the story collection What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going; his first novel will be published in fall 2025 by Coffee House Press. Visit him at damionsearls.com.

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Volume 29, Number 4, Winter 2024 (#116) - Rain Taxi

2025-03-18T15:33:23.000Z

To purchase issue #116 using Paypal, click here.
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INTERVIEWS

Tara Campbell: Digging, Dancing Gargoyles | interviewed by Allison Wyss
Wendy Chen: Honor the Past While Making the Future Our Own
| interviewed by Michael Prior
V. Joshua Adams: To Speak in More Than One Voice | interviewed by Ken Walker

FEATURES

PLUS: Cover art by Alex Kuno

FICTION REVIEWS

NONFICTION REVIEWS

POETRY REVIEWS

ART/COMICS REVIEWS

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Ziba Rajabi - Rain Taxi

2025-03-18T15:32:08.000Z

Ashk (Tear)
Acrylic on Muslin and Canvas, Found Fabric, Thread

Ziba Rajabi (b.Tehran, Iran) received her MFA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and her BFA from the Sooreh University, Tehran, Iran. Her primary practice is focused on painting, drawing, and fabric-based installation. She is the recipient of the Jerome Foundation Mid-Career Artists Fellowship and the Artist 360 Grant, a program sponsored by the Mid-America Arts Alliance. Her work has been included in a number of exhibitions, nationally and internationally, such as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; AR, CICA Museum; South Korea; Masur Museum; LA; 21C Museum, AR; Conkling Gallery Minnesota State University, MCAD Gallery, MN; Araan Gallery, Iran; The II Platform, UK, among many others. She has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center, Terrain Residency, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Visit her at zibarajabi.art.

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Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport 2025 - Rain Taxi

2025-02-28T18:16:34.566Z

Rain Taxi’s Twin Cities Literary Calendar is once again publishing its pocket-sized Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport—and offering readers fun ways to visit the stores and win discounts and prizes. Our annual Bookstore Passport celebrates both Independent Bookstore Day (this year taking place on April 26, 2025) and our metropolitan area’s bounty of great community-based bookstores!

Illustrated by local artist Kevin Cannon, the Passport is FREE to pick up at any participating store (list TBA) between Wednesday, April 23, 2025 and Sunday, April 27, 2025. During these five days, travel to as many participating Twin Cities area bookstores as you can, because you can get your Passport stamped at each store you visit during that time span for a future discount at that store and a chance to win great prizes!

How It Works

While this Passport can serve as a year-round guide, during the days surrounding Independent Bookstore Day, Rain Taxi and the stores invite you to get your Passport stamped to collect discount coupons and enter to win even more! Challenge details will be available soon — please check back.

How to Enter

Entry details will be available soon — please check back.

Participating Stores

The list of participating stores will be available soon — please check back.

A Prague Flâneur - Rain Taxi

2025-02-19T17:26:28.121Z

Vítězslav Nezval
Translated by Jed Slast
Twisted Spoon Press ($19)

by Allan Graubard

For those who enjoy strolling around a city they know well or don’t, which they live in or visit; who have no particular destination in mind; who wander at different times, drawn by places and people they encounter and which, for intimate reasons, captivate them, will find an ally in A Prague Flâneur. Its author, Vítězslav Nezval, founded the Czech Surrealist Group and was one of the leading poets and writers of the avant garde. A Prague Flâneur is Nezval’s paean to the city, his city, then on the brink of disaster: The Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia was complete by March 1939, soon after the publication of the book.

The flâneur, of course, comes to us from mid-19th century France. In The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire depicts the figure as a stroller who observes in poignant detail what he encounters in and around a city but who keeps his distance, preferring to represent the experience in solitude, visually or with words. Some eight decades later, Nezval reveals the legacy of the term anew. Inspired by Prague’s polyglot architecture, mechanized systems, distractions, crowds, and those rare spaces (streets, parks, playgrounds) that can transform the normal urban chaos we expect, enjoy, or endure, Nezval orchestrates the city’s analog—the book.

Nezval’s writing style mirrors the kind of critical-poetic journalism with which surrealists captured the currents of cities—particularly their marvelous, disorienting, delirious, or dreamlike aspects. A Prague Flâneur is replete with historical descriptions of this or that street, building, restaurant, or café, and how they played in Nezval’s life— from his days as a poor, hungry university student to his rise as a literary figure—as well as brief sketches of writers and artists important to him. As he describes it, Prague takes on a multiform, resonant charge, socially proscribed but personally invented.

After Nezval, others continued to revive the legacy of the flâneur as they conceived it. A decade on after World War II, the Situationists’ dérive (their drift through the city) provoked theoretical remarks on a new context: psychogeography, a term they coined and which, as things go, now appears as a sub-discipline of geography. Heightening the stakes for Nezval, though, are two pivotal events that bring an often-feverish poise to his writing: the immanence of World War II and the fate of the Surrealist Group.

The former stems from the September 30, 1938 signing of the Munich Agreement, by which England and France ceded to Nazi Germany the Sudetenland, then part of Czechoslovakia—a Hail Mary to delay the onset of war that Nezval knew would fail; the only question was when. Anxiety percolates through the book, sharpening its tempered edge. The planes that fly above Prague presage the battle to come. The country arms only to fall months later, betrayed by its allies.

The latter involves Nezval’s split with the Surrealist Group, the repercussions of which followed him and now cannot help but appear as subtext to the book’s exuberant, elegiac tone. The cause of the split was partly political: Nezval supported the USSR, despite the terror Stalin unleashed on his opponents. The majority in the group criticized Stalin’s hunger for victims, which included leading Russian poets and artists, Communist revolutionaries, and uncounted allies or bystanders. Most were put on trial, given sentences, exiled to the Gulag, or executed. There was no possibility of rapprochement.

Nezval’s recognition that only the USSR could mount a force equal to that of Nazi Germany and wage war against it to victory was true enough in retrospect. The other members of the group—whom, oddly, Nezval never names—re-organized and continued on. Perhaps for emotional balance, Nezval recounts his friendship with André Breton and Paul Éluard: the mutual esteem they held for each other, several experiences they shared in Prague, and something of their rich collaborations. A somewhat specious critique of psychic automatism follows, which allows Nezval to clarify how he would write from then on (faced with the immanence of war, cultivating the absence of intention was not something he prized). Be that as it may, when Nezval leaves his apartment, he enters a realm that he creates: the city as his avatar, with chance their conductor.

A Prague Flâneur lives up to its title in a fraught historical moment through which Nezval sought a way to live without sidelining in his writing the inspiration Prague gave him and that he now gives the reader: walking through it, loving and fighting in it, playing out his days and nights with a keen sense of what makes it all unique, even funny (a satirical escapade with an escaped crab its capstone).

This translation, finely done by Jed Slast, is of the rare, unexpurgated first edition with photographs by Nezval, which hit the streets in the fall of 1938, coincident with the signing of the Munich Agreement. Given the consequences of that agreement and the Nazi conquest soon to come, Nezval had the book pulled from its bookstores so that he could delete passages that might compromise him with Nazi authorities, including his celebration of Stalin and his cutting portrait of Hitler as a young agitator of the lumpenproletariat in seedy Berlin beerhalls. An appendix carries that content and the edits Nezval made.

Characteristically, Nezval ends the book with a brief paragraph that recalls the narrative’s through line. It has a solitary atemporal quality—not yet mythic, but almost so. Place it as the first paragraph in the book and it works just as well. Is it an ending or a beginning? For Nezval, it could be both:

Oh Prague, I turn you in my fingers like an amethyst. But no. I just walk, and I see in the magical mirror of dusty crystal that is Prague the animated expression of someone who is fated to find himself and to wander, to find himself through wandering.

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Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

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Clean - Rain Taxi

2025-02-18T18:26:28.374Z

Alia Trabucco Zerán
Translated by Sophie Hughes
Riverhead Books ($29)

by Dimitris Passas

It all begins with a laconic advertisement in the newspaper: “Housemaid wanted, presentable, full time.” Thus, Estela Garcia, a young woman from a rural community populated by a largely underprivileged population in the southern Chilean island of Chiloe, comes to the big city of Santiago to become the housemaid of an upper-crust household. Estela’s employers (only referred to by her as señor and señora) and their young daughter Julia, are the sole actors in this claustrophobic environment of class discrimination, cultural distinctions, and the struggle to endure a dreary life in which monotony quenches any form of meaning and distorts one’s sense of time and reality.

In her second novel, Alia Trabucco Zerán revisits themes that dominated her first work, The Remainder, which dealt with the residues left in Chilean society by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. In Clean, the strictly domestic setting expels everything that takes place outside the house where Estela works as a cleaner, servant, and nanny. Trabucco Zerán offers as a backdrop Chile’s Estallido Social—the riots that erupted in the winter of 2019 after the sudden increase in the metro fare—yet the totality of her tale unfolds inside the house where Estela works.

The story starts with Estela being arrested for suspicion of foul play in Julia’s death. Sitting behind one-way glass, Estela narrates directly to silent interrogators, determined to tell her own story. She often interjects comments directed to all those who may hear her—which of course includes us, the readers—urging them to keep notes of seemingly trivial details that are destined to play a major role in the story to come. As she says: “you have to skirt around the edge before getting to the heart of the story.”

Clean is not a typical domestic suspense novel, however; its prose blends the humdrum of Estela’s quotidian existence with her breakout insights and shrewd observations regarding universal, diachronic questions. As our narrator says, “This is a long story, my friends, . . . It’s a story born of a centuries-old tiredness and questions that presume too much.” Estela knows that she will never become a part of society’s upper echelons. Her wealthy employers’ thinly veiled hostility and distrust render her an outsider, bound to remain a stranger as long as she stays in the job. But she never leaves, and she voices the reason in the most austere and accurate of ways: “I never stopped believing I would leave that house, but routine is treacherous; the repetition of the same rituals . . . each one an attempt to gain mastery over time.”

One of the most striking elements of Clean is the way Trabucco Zerán sketches the contours of her youngest character. Julia is headstrong and inflexible, and her reactions to various emotional stimuli suggest that perhaps she should be visiting a specialist. However, her doctor father rejects this idea and keeps her as close as possible to teach her only what he deems necessary. As Estela’s crystalline narration illuminates the hidden dysfunctions and corrupt relationship dynamics in the family, it becomes evident that Julia’s detached parents and unloving upbringing have traumatized her from a very early age.

Sophie Hughes, who also translated The Remainder, again delivers Trabucco Zerán’s prose into English with skill and precision. While its distinctive mood may alienate genre-oriented readers, Clean is a slim but sparkling novel that will grab the attention of those who value literature that speaks truth to power.

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Fiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

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Autobiography of a Book - Rain Taxi

2025-02-06T20:31:28.770Z

Glenn Ingersoll
AC Books ($24)

by Mike Bove

How does a book become a book? Do authors have actual creative agency, or are they instruments of unseen forces, translators of an unspoken language? These questions are the beating heart of Glenn Ingersoll’s Autobiography of a Book, an inventive, fun, and wildly philosophical reading experience.

In the Romantic era, artists and writers rediscovered an ancient musical instrument played by invisible currents: the Aeolian harp. Named for the Greek god of wind, it’s essentially a set of strings fixed to a long hollow box placed before an open window or on a flat surface outdoors; the strings convert wind energy into sound, haunting and ethereal. The Romantics loved the Aeolian harp as a metaphor for how the artist is simply a tool of nature, a way for natural forces to make themselves known.

Autobiography of a Book begins with a question followed immediately by an answer: “When does life begin? Life begins with an utterance. A word.” It is not the first nor the last question the book asks its reader, and gradually it becomes clear that Book itself, the protagonist and narrative voice, is asking because it really wants to know: What does it mean to exist, and how is life lived? “When did you know you existed? Does a cat know it exists? Does an elephant? What about a monk or a nun?”

This investigation of existence is often playful, framed with disarming humor and wit. It might be tempting to dismiss Book’s continual self-questioning as naive navel-gazing, but to do so would be to miss Ingersoll’s ability to echo the unconscious questioning that takes place in the human mind at any given moment. We are constantly at play with questions, seeking answers we may never get: How did I get here, what do I do next, what am I for? Book’s voice pivots from sarcasm to humility and authority and back again, proclaiming, “Reality is whatever I say it is.” We can’t deny that in so many ways our reality is a construct of our bouncy, confused minds, constantly filtering stimuli and making sounds out of the breeze.

Fun isn’t always part of the process of being. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, as Book freely admits: “I don’t want to be written right now. If you are reading me, that’s okay, I guess. You are just looking. But being written—it feels too much. It feels as though I am being wrenched from the spiritual to the . . . to the mortal.” One of Ingersoll’s primary narrative devices is Book’s vacillation. In one section, Book might be resentful of the reader, of being thrust into existence; in the next, Book might fawn over the reader’s benevolence: “it is only due to your unexpected mercy, it is only because of your infinite compassion, the grace you grant with a blink of your eye. It is for you I live. Without you I am nothing. Nothing!”

The visual design of the book also deserves attention. Autobiography of a Book begins with bright white type on black pages that slowly lighten to gray, mirroring the darkness of non-existence from which Book gradually emerges. About halfway through, the pages are light enough to warrant a shift from white type to black. Appropriately enough, Book’s first works in black type are “I am alive.” From here the pages continue to lighten, and by the time the book concludes, they are fully white, signaling Book’s achievement of existence, total and complete.

Just as the Romantics saw themselves as Aeolian harps, translating the vibrations of nature into poems and paintings, so too does Ingersoll harness the invisible forces residing within an author. The result is Book, who cajoles the reader into offering it life—for just as music needs a listener to hear it, so too does Book need a reader to read it. With Autobiography of a Book, Ingersoll invites the reader into a truly collaborative thought exercise and makes it both fulfilling and fun.

Mixed Genre Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

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Here, There and Nowhere - Rain Taxi

2025-02-05T16:46:29.194Z

Valery Oisteanu
Illustration collages by Ruth Oisteanu
Spuyten Duyvil ($30)

by Bill Wolak

Valery Oisteanu’s Here, There and Nowhere depicts a life savored intensely in the moment—one that risks everything with every single breath. As Oisteanu states in the collection’s foreword, “My poems are spontaneous recollections of traumatic events, fragments of forgotten dreams, nebulous states of mind, illogical episodes and subliminal sequences of ecstasy and redemption.” These poems offer somnambulant marathons into the unconscious, trances that reach out like embraces of moonlight, sporadic erotic wildfires, and of course, a truckload of unabashed surrealistic provocations.

Like César Vallejo, Oisteanu offers a poetry of committed enactment rather than intellectual contemplation. Take “The Revolutionary Cultural Exchange”:

Struggle is a state off mind, awakened consciousness
Defend your rights, resist, persist, walk to the edge of life and death
The military invaders will hang themselves with tools of suppression
Freedom continues to grow in the harshest terrain
As clenched fists and open brave hearts march on

Clearly, Oisteanu isn’t waiting around for either the revolution or the apocalypse. He advocates a more active approach, as he states in “We March”:

We march and we march some more
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We march for the end of wars and for better human rights
We march in the polluted streets and demand clean water
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And we march for the women trafficked abroad
And for the workers dying at work
We march in our sleep
We march all night
We march ’til we die.

Extending his vision to all corners of the globe, Oisteanu’s poems about the war in Ukraine are exceptionally moving, and his “Navalny Blues” is simply heartbreaking. But just as he protests the current state of contemptible affairs, Oisteanu is also hopeful about the future. Love is where he grounds that hope, and in fact, Here, There and Nowhere is dedicated to his fifty-year relationship with his wife Ruth (who provides twelve color collages). “My Wife Ruth” contains extraordinary descriptions—“Her breasts move counter-clockwise to each other / . . . / Her hands create the secret greenhouse / Her songs make the flowers sway and shiver”—and praise of erotic love permeates the book:

Sweat on sweat, the lovely lover chanting improvisations;
these love chants remain suspended in the air.
No one is giving up their fantasies,
no one records their salty dreams.

There is always something stunning, surprising, or enigmatic in an Oisteanu poem. Sometimes it’s a startling title (“Landscape of Unfinished Dream,” “The Subway in the Sky,” “Rent My Shadow”); sometimes it’s an astonishing first line (“This is a poem inside a poem”; “Welcome to the end of the mind”; “No more sleeping on the roof of imagination”). As a surrealist, he is no stranger to the marvelous, and his poems abound in striking linguistic transformations. Consider what he does with the image of trees in “The Peace Enigma of Stillness”:

Herds of trees in the distance
Wailing below a dark undertow
Some fall toward the empty sky
Burning with the speed of an invasion
How hard they try to become birds

Perhaps Oisteanu himself best describes what his poetry aims for in “Madness Unlocked”:

We revolutionize clouds from within,
we purge ourselves of sentimentalism,
of avant-clones, of bourgeois culture.
No more brainwash of hip academia
back to the roots of blues and jazz.

What else, after all, should poetry do in the face of disasters of the changing climate, horrors of ever-widening wars, and the stubborn persistence of worldwide pandemics, but “save the holy madness of Life”?

Uncategorized

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The Nature-Loving Spirit of Bruno K. Öijer - Rain Taxi

2025-01-30T21:51:29.459Z

by Emil Siekkinen

Born in 1951, Swedish poet Bruno K. Öijer has been publishing his work in his native country since the 1970s, yet to date only one of his books, The Trilogy (Action Books, 2020), is available in English translation (although as the title suggests, it comprises three books written in a series). This must change, for as humanity’s assault on the planet grows to epic proportions—waterways are poisoned, forests are felled, slaughterhouses overflow with suffering, and the climate spirals out of control—Öijer has much to say about it; his poetry confronts our exploitive relationship with nature and reveals a profound compassion for life. In this essay I will discuss Öijer’s two most recent collections published in Sweden, 2014’s Och natten viskade Annabel Lee (And the Night Whispered Annabel Lee) and 2024’s Växla ringar med mörkret (Exchange Rings with the Darkness); the translations of quoted passages are my own.

Öijer’s sense of empathy is part of a theme of lifelong alienation that has permeated his work. In “Fantasin” (“The Imagination”), the poet recounts having to write a grade school essay after summer break:

I wrote that I found an injured spider
and mended its leg with tape
when July had passed, the injury had healed
and I could release the spider
I saw it quickly scurry away in the yard
among the dandelions and grass

Öijer’s imagination reflects a nature-loving spirit (no matter that his fable also metaphorizes the imagination itself). Intriguingly, his speaker assumes the role of caretaker to a creature that many people fear and kill without hesitation. To Öijer, perhaps, imagining a relationship beyond fear may be the key to greater kinship between humans and the natural world.

Dreams are another fertile terrain in Öijer’s work. In “Drömträdet” (“The Dream Tree”), a “you” shakes the trunk of the titular tree, causing its leaves to fall and cover the ground, which then falls asleep and dreams. Perhaps this reflects nature’s cyclical essence, which doesn’t produce waste or garbage—or perhaps the ground dreams of a future beyond the Anthropocene:

dreams of the wheel tracks that are gone
the place they led to is covered with grass
only crumbling wooden crosses remain
with unreadable names and dates

Öijer cannot be called an optimist, but he does offer hope that humanity’s destructive advance will eventually be tempered. In “Romans” (“Romance”), clouds (some of which may be traces of air traffic and other sources of human overconsumption) are white wounds in the sky—yet somewhere the sky is not disfigured in this way, and “the roads must first / ask the forest for permission.” In our world, of course, other rules apply. Trees are seen not as living ecosystems but as raw materials; in “Sången”(“The Song”) the landscape is enveloped “in a melancholy, lamenting song” when a spruce is felled, and in “Asfalterade hjärtan” (“Paved Hearts”), the poet highlights the contrast between “the scent of autumn leaves” and the “piercing, unbearable sound” that has replaced it as people methodically saw down everything beautiful.

Öijer prefers nature’s fellowship, and the wolf is one of his totems. In “Varg” (“Wolf”), he claims:

I have already
handed over my soul to the wolves
who take it with them
and wrap it in their own song
hunted on the ground and from the air
they have nothing left to prove
but run endless miles
leaving this world behind

Few animals are as misunderstood and feared as wolves, but the notion that the species harbors an insatiable thirst for human blood belongs in folklore. In his poetry, Öijer often returns to the idea that he (or at least his poetic persona) is an outcast, pursued and hunted—as is the case for many who position themselves outside societal norms and expectations—and it is this version of the wolf that Öijer writes. Figuring the wolf in this manner allows him to feel compassion for the wolf and its existential circumstances, which really are the same for all living beings. As Öijer writes in “Miraklet” (“The Miracle”):

the miracle
when a child is born
and a wolf
and a bird
and a blade of grass

The echo of Whitman here is unmistakable, and Öijer is often compared to his fellow Swede (and Nobel Laureate) Tomas Tranströmer; like them and many other poets, Öijer is a source of wisdom and a servant of life. Here’s hoping more of his work will be brought into English.

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Dead Weight - Rain Taxi

2025-01-29T17:26:28.582Z

Essays on Hunger and Harm

Emmeline Clein
Knopf ($30)

by Olivia Q. Pintair

When Emmeline Clein began writing her debut essay collection, Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, she originally planned to document female hysteria. Her subjects would be fictional and non-fictional women branded with that diagnosis by a misogynistic culture that pathologizes and fetishizes the pain it produces—women hallucinating into their wallpaper, sobbing in hospital hallways, and wasting away in the folds of Y2K tabloids. Her focus shifted, though, as Clein has said in interviews, when she realized how many of the figures she was researching shared struggles with disordered eating. As Clein began “to harmonize with a ghost choir” that includes medieval anorexic saints, anonymous Tumblr users, Ottessa Moshfegh protagonists, Simone Weil, Cass Elliot, Karen Carpenter, and many of us readers, the book transformed into an attempt to frame disordered eating within the context of the systems and industries that profit from it.

Tracing the cultural and medical histories of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and orthorexia, Dead Weight undoes several tricks of the light. Through investigative reporting, criticism, and prose, Clein reveals that disordered eating is not a solipsistic malady; rather, it is an integral weapon of a racist, classist, and misogynistic society that depends upon the age-old lie that sick and sad young women are crazy, unreliable narrators. To undo that lie’s prismatic refractions, Clein shows us how common and culturally incentivized disordered eating is. Meditating on the casual gore of modern womanhood, she excavates the cultural, economic, and political underbellies of an epidemic wrought by and for a capitalist world. The result is a manifesto against “dissociative feminism” and the “lethal culture” that Western beauty standards empower.

Across Dead Weight’s thirteen essays, Clein navigates the rabbit holes of Reddit feminism, the aughts-era Tumblr-verse, diagnostic hierarchies, the eating disorder recovery industry, modern wellness culture, Ozempic’s arrival to mass markets, and the unsettling allure of bimboism. Her voice is sharp and familiar, moored to a sense of solidarity with the people living and dying along the faultlines she documents. In most autobiographical accounts of eating disorders, Clein writes, “the only way to survive seems to be renouncing your suffering sisters . . . I’m trying to find out what might happen if we blame someone other than each other and ourselves for a change.”

Clein quickly dispels any expectations for the nostalgic and bone-laden accounts of eating disorders that readers may be used to. Instead, she recasts the often-isolating struggle as a collective one. In one essay, Clein explores how phases of capitalism mirror disordered eating patterns:

If bulimia was the eating disorder of Reaganomics and millennial girlbossery, and anorexia was the eating disorder of aughts-era austerity, [injectable weight loss] drugs might foster an eating disorder for a new age of technocapitalism, wherein we try to recast hunger as just another inconvenience we can eliminate with an app.

Elsewhere, Clein traces the normalization of eating disorders in a culture of ubiquitous commodification. “Eating disorders are good for capital,” reads one essay, which traces “the chain of money that leads from eating disorder treatment centers, weight loss companies, CBT companies, and pharmaceutical companies back to the same pool of investment capital.”

As Clein probes statistics and anecdotes, it becomes clear that disordered eating is not a mark of girlish insanity or vapid self-interest, but an apparatus of late capitalism. Women and femmes are peddled a beauty standard that remains a thinly veiled prerequisite for financial and social success, then are pathologized for trying to reach it. “Heroin chic is back,” The New York Post announced in 2022—Ozempic makes it easy now. As most anyone on the internet could attest, social media algorithms incentivize conformity and drain our energy to rebel. We seem to lose something when we follow their rules—and also when we don’t.

“I’m trying to be honest here: I’ve always wanted to live the kind of life that ends up in a story,” Clein writes, leveling with her audience. The women who starve themselves in books or on screen, she acknowledges, are often main characters, and maybe that is what the supposed trade-off is: Submit to the role, and you could be the heroine. But as Clein continually reminds us, those stories “are fiction,” repeated enough that they have become not only a cliché but also a narrative propping up several multi-billion-dollar industries and a conglomerate of mental illnesses with one of the highest collective death rates in the world.

For Clein, writing Dead Weight was an effort to humanize suffering people who, like the Victorian women drowning in white dresses in 19th century British and American literature, are usually romanticized in media but dismissed in real life. Like Simone Weil, Clein understands the visceral way in which the question of how or whether to eat is also a question of how or whether to be; the Self, as an experience and as an imagined ideal, is her primary interest. Early on in the book, she asks readers to picture the archetype of the “skinny, sexy, sad girl” as an ideal self that floats out at sea, “purring false promises from just over the horizon line”; she then points out that like those literary women whose misogyny-induced deaths are so predictably written as romantic inevitabilities, this archetype didn’t swim out to sea of her own accord. “Someone stranded her at the vanishing point . . .” Clein writes, “and they don’t want us to reach her because then we might save her, convince her she’s been lied to like the rest of us.”

Advancing toward the menacing clarity of that realization like a chess player, Clein refuses to talk down to her readers or underestimate their agency. She is interested in a political future beyond both the commodification of pain and the avoidance of it. “I have a question for bimbos and dissociated girls alike,” she writes in the collection’s coda. “How are we shaping our bodies and behaviors to become desirable to the most powerful, according to their value system?”

As Clein contextualizes her subject matter within existential questions about selfhood and solidarity, Dead Weight becomes relevant not only to those suffering from eating disorders, but to anyone trying to remain feeling and alive in a capitalist world that commodifies selfhood at the chaotic clip of a panopticonic auctioneer. The Self, Clein posits, is not an asset that should either escalate in perpetuity or submit to disappearance, but a synthesis of experience, alive insofar as it risks its own imagined stasis toward relationship and connection. Undermining narratives of our own isolation and insanity could destabilize industries that profit from them, Clein argues. “We don’t have to be solo heroines on lonely journeys; we can also be sisters and friends, side characters in someone else’s story . . . We can, maybe, even be the person who changes it.”

At the end of the book’s penultimate essay, Clein returns to consider the roots of her own suffering from disordered eating:

I watch my adolescent body get thrown like a pebble into a pond. The blame ripples out, past my therapist, another woman floating on her back in the water, into green fields of money and men. I see magazines filled with waifish models and . . . the Instagram ads . . . offering me mental health quizzes and meditation for women apps and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix show and diet tea. I see the eating disorder memes and weight loss progress Instagram accounts and slim, smiling influencers, and wonder how I could have ended up anywhere but at the bottom of the lake.

“It can be politically mobilizing to feel the weight of that pain,” Clein said in a conversation with Rayne Fisher-Quann published in Nylon; “it makes me want to be alive in order to try to change it in what little ways I can so that maybe some younger girl doesn’t have to feel this bad.” Ultimately, Dead Weight is an offering born of Clein’s commitment to doing that—to envisioning a world in which girlhood isn’t a minefield of diet trends, where genuine human connection renders dissociation unnecessary, and where bodies are land and not property. In this world, Clein dreams, the lake might not be a place where people drown or disappear, but an expanse where we might find each other. This is a world she can see, she promises—not over a horizon line, but somewhere closer.

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YOU - Rain Taxi

2025-01-28T18:01:28.045Z

Rosa Alcalá
Coffee House Press ($17.95)

by Christopher Luna

Rosa Alcalá’s fourth poetry collection is a thrilling masterpiece filled with prose poems that challenge and disturb as they dig deep into the terrors that women face. Throughout, readers are also invited to contemplate the complexities of voice and perspective in literature.

An introductory piece outlines where fear begins for women and girls and prepares readers for the unconventional approach of the text. Alcalá makes an important decision to rely upon the pronoun “you” to tell her story. At first it may seem that this allows her to remain one step removed from the painful memories she shares; “Isn’t the second person a form of hiding?” Alcalá asks. But the poems that follow fully explore the slippery magic of the pronoun “you”—how it can alternate between standing in for the reader, the author, and an ever-shifting cast of characters.

Alcalá tells us from the start that “I was trying to write a book about my mother,” but “that in the absence of her I mothered myself all over again with worry, / which is how I mother.” In this light, the “you” in every poem has the potential to be the poet, her mother, her daughter, another woman, or even womanhood itself, and sometimes more than one of these at the same time. Alcalá seeks to bear witness to the violence committed against women, but “being my own witness was itself a risk. How can / I see events unfolding when the body is completely symptomatic / of other bodies, including / its own.” She continues:

The problem with memory is that only words can re-create it for others.

Each word its own past and desire
for a future.

Each word, each sentence, a fragment.

And how do you untangle from the telling the speaker’s motives?

Later in the book, in “A Girl Like You,” the poet uses the second person to address both herself and a person she wrote about for her first real assignment as a journalist: a thirteen-year-old girl “whose tender body was discovered next to the Cuban bodega where your mother would send you for bread.” In the second half of the poem, the dead girl talks back, taking Alcalá to task for using the tragedy to further her career:

You want to know who did it, how it could have happened to me and not you. You want to weave it into a cross to protect the door to your daughter’s room. Or worse, for a poem. . . . Was your first intention to make my murder elegiac? Remember when you couldn’t pronounce that word correctly, when others saw you as you were, a girl who knew so little but elbowed herself to the front to be heard.

Nearly every poem contains horrific gut punches as well as sentences of such sublime beauty that you may temporarily forget their disturbing subject matter. Alcalá uses her fear as a map, seeking “narrative logic to order the / mess of memory” while never losing her faith in language’s potential to express the ineffable and reveal the truth about our lives. In this bold and innovative work, she has achieved her stated goal to “leave my daughter this book as manual, as heirloom; like my mother’s wedding dress in the unreachable part of my closet, both glamorous / /and warning.” Charles Olson once proclaimed that poems are “high energy constructs”; Alcalá’s YOU contains writing so powerful it may cause your heart to combust.

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An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance - Rain Taxi

2025-01-24T16:56:29.219Z

Diana Oropeza
Future Tense Books ($12)

by Eric Bies

In 2014, Semiotext(e) published a short posthumous work by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, an effort to circumscribe an entire universe of artistic loss in eighty breathless pages. That book, The Missing Pieces, does its darnedest, encompassing some five hundred items, from incinerated manuscripts and shredded letters to unfinished poems and vanished papyri. It’s the kind of book that will make one wonder whether, finally, more has been lost than found—whether, like the unfinished trilogy of Gogol’s Dead Souls, more shall remain destined to persist in the realm of ideas than ever come to exist.

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance, a beguiling new book by Diana Oropeza, is similarly slim, but it’s the opposite of breathless. With plenty of white space to spare, it’s a book to linger over, its relaxed arrangement calling to mind a line from Borges regarding The Book of Imaginary Beings: “Our wish would be that the curious dip into it from time to time in much the way one visits the changing forms revealed by a kaleidoscope.”

Indeed, Borges presides as a kind of patron saint over Oropeza’s book as a whole; a quotation from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a story that exemplifies the Argentine maestro’s penchant for blurring the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, serves as an epigraph. In the same way that Borges counterfeited entire bibliographies, crafting fragments from old books that never really existed while never allowing the reader to doubt his belief in their reality, Oropeza has devised a series of vanishings that might as well have happened. Some of her sixty-odd pieces of nanofiction strain while others shoot right past the limits of credulity, bleeding into surrealism here and magical realism there, but each piece’s tone is assured, sincere if not solemn.

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance is fun-loving enough to describe illusionist David Copperfield disappearing the Statue of Liberty (and obvious enough, at times, to incorporate such tired territory as the Bermuda Triangle), but at its deepest points, Oropeza’s half-page inventions are earnest invitations to bear witness to everything that slips away. Reading them might not produce laughter or tears outright, but the book’s valences—mourning, absurdity, liberation—are easy enough to detect.

Flash fiction lives and dies by a fire that has mere seconds to light up a space, so it would be a mistake to jump into this book expecting Chekhov. But the parables of Kafka, the riddles of W. S. Merwin, the microcosmic visions of Lydia Davis—these are Oropeza’s touchstones, and when she’s good, she’s as good as any of them. No one sentence does her associative and often syntactically surprising style justice, but a line like “I found myself speaking inside a poem of Akbar’s, speaking of an atomized absence, speaking of ants carrying home the names of new colors” can give you an idea. Many of Orozepa’s scenarios are so memorable, so exacting, so self-contained, it’s a wonder the author managed to pin them down at all: “As it is told, the ghost had bitten a child on the hand. The following day, the child shocked everyone by suddenly playing the piano like a master.”

That Oropeza has a flair for economy doesn’t mean the work is slight. A piece titled “Translation,” for example, all but demands to be read three times in a row. This is how it opens:

In Spanish, “ojos” are “eyes,” but my dad hears the word “ice,” which is the English word for “hielo,” which is pronounced like “yellow.” The word for yellow in Spanish is “amarillo,” which is also the name of a place in Texas, nearly 500 miles from the Mexican border. Which translates to a seven-hour drive from home, which is actually shorter than my father’s workday. At his job, he translates for the housekeepers who often don’t speak English so they often don’t speak to anyone except my father, except to say “housekeeping” before they knock on the door and “es clean,” to let the front desk know the room es clean. The hotel staff think it’s an accent causing the mispronunciation of “is” but actually “es” is Spanish for “is,” so the women are not wrong, they are translating.

Perhaps some things will always be lost in translation. Meanwhile, An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance sheds new light on loss, clarifying fresh facets of our prismatic reality even as it complicates old ones. Orozepa’s signal debut can be read in an afternoon, but it will compel you to remain in its orbit.

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The Third Realm - Rain Taxi

2025-01-23T17:41:28.598Z

Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translated by Martin Aitken
Penguin Press ($32)

by Sam Tiratto

In Sigrid Undset’s historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, the titular character has an apocalyptic vision while prostrate on the cold stone floor of a cathedral: Saint Olaf himself bursts forth from his shrine and raises an army of the dead to go greet the Lord in prayer; the skeletons don their original muscle and flesh and follow in Olaf’s “blood-stained footsteps” for their new and eternal life. Wracked by guilt and the exhaustion of motherhood, Kristin beseeches Saint Olaf to pray for her.

One hundred years after the publication of Undset’s famed trilogy, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the origins and the possible effects of such a vision in his latest novel, The Third Realm. The book continues the variegated story of a mysterious celestial event in modern-day Norway set forth in his two previous novels: The Morning Star ends as the mystery arrives, its story focused on the generally unconnected lives of nine ordinary Norwegians; The Wolves of Eternity digs into semi-autobiography as a young man in Cold War-era Norway uncovers a family secret that involves a Russian woman whose mother fell in love with a Norwegian man. The trumpet sounds at the end of Wolves by placing us back in the present, in awe of the frightful event that is only just beginning.

As in the medieval world of Kristin Lavransdatter, evil stalks the land in The Third Realm. The devil, black metal, nihilism, and even the unstable inner self are recurring themes as the nine characters grapple with swiftly eroding senses of security in an increasingly frightening world. Determined readers of the two preceding books may start to find payoff when some of the characters posit that the bizarre shifts in their lives—accidents, medical miracles, horrifying news stories—may be related to the celestial event. Jarle, a brain researcher obsessed with the inner lives of the comatose, seeks meaning beyond mere coincidence when he notices inexplicable electrical signals from a “brain dead” patient. So too does the detective piecing together the mystery of a grisly murder first witnessed in The Morning Star. Could the celestial event have anything to do with it? Other characters laugh at the superstition, and some are gripped by fear; one, a minister, doubts her own faith. But all are unsettled.

Knausgaard is well known for his digressive style, but unlike the six-volume autobiographical My Struggle series, where philosophical tangents come from the author directly, here his extensive references come through his characters. As the series deepens this has the effect of making the characters feel less distinct and more like varying personas of one another, or perhaps different versions of Knausgaard himself. It is fitting that one of them, Jarle, should spend a few moments musing on Pessoa, “that champion of the meaningless”—like Pessoa’s heteronyms, Knausgaard’s fractal personalities reveal more about each other the further inward into themselves they look.

The Third Realm does spend more time with the characters’ spouses and friends, and the unnamed Norwegian town in which the novels are set is starting to feel like a symbiotic web, a neural network; each new development in the characters’ lives sends ripples through the community of the unknown. Like Undset’s Kristin, each character is fighting doggedly to maintain a grip on themselves in the face of the alienation of society—as well as the chilling realization that Satan may really, truly wander Norway’s fjords and fells. The smell of sulfur lingers.

Knausgaard invites patience and contemplation in The Third Realm, its title itself an allusion to one character’s cosmology of humans’ relationship with the divine. The book may be to some a meditation, to others a dissertation, and to others still a digression. Where The Wolves of Eternity felt laser-focused on revelations about the nature of consciousness—replete with a full-length essay concerning death and the Russian cosmist Nikolai Fyodorov—this book seems to falter (or, perhaps more generously, replies with doubt) when it is asked to provide a clear philosophy. At times some characters feel perilously close to figuring it all out before getting distracted or second-guessing themselves. This dallying makes for poor suspense, but it forces the reader to return to the difficult act of contemplation. Rather than Saint Olaf’s dead, we may be greeted with Hamlet’s father—a supernatural mystery still, but one concerned more urgently with matters of the living than those of the dead.

The Third Realm encourages readers to set aside the explanations they had in mind for the previous installments’ events and to consider new ones. The return of the dead is constantly revisited as a theme, but it passes through the perspectives of the novel’s many characters and the limited information they are given. We suspect that the dead will rise, but will it be through the return of Jesus? The rise of Satan? The mythology of Saint Olaf? The dead returning is the stuff of nightmares, but wouldn’t it also make life triumphant? Knausgaard takes a treacherous step forward into the world unpierced by human thought. We have no choice but to follow.

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Poems 2016-2024 - Rain Taxi

2025-01-22T17:51:28.804Z

J.H. Prynne
Bloodaxe Books ($50)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Most poets deliver the proverbial “brick” of a collected works only in their final years, or else leave it to be delivered posthumously by others. Not J.H. Prynne. Since his 300-page 1982 gathering Poems, which collected all he felt worth preserving at the time, Prynne has delivered three subsequent “bricks”: 1999, 2005, and 2015, the last of which approached 700 pages. Now at eighty-eight years old, he’s added the equally colossal addendum Poems: 2016-2024. It is a magnificent, startling output during what might be the poet’s closing years of writing life.

This volume gathers thirty-six collections ranging in length from relatively brief sequences of a dozen or so pages up to the full-length Of Better Scrap (Face Press, 2019). Across this period the small yet inventive Face Press in Cambridge, England has been Prynne’s faithful publisher, responsible for originally publishing twenty-four of these titles, many of which were slim chapbooks printed on fine paper with care given to best represent the work as physical document. While these qualities are impossible to completely carry over to a larger collection, some attention has been afforded to details of the original publications. For instance, poems from Dune Quail Eggs (Face Press, 2021) appear in a larger print, centered upon the page, with extra spacing between individual words, likely similar to their chapbook appearance:

Green foist   crust mound
                    met
drain plume feast bride
                    eye
nails thumb avoid trail
                    bay
ghost braid prune force
                    toy

Other variances in font and size, or decorative section numbering, have been likewise carried across with a few of the collections, along with an accompanying image from the original versions here and there. For those new to Prynne’s work, this choice offers some awareness of the poet’s initial conception.

Prynne’s penchant for pushing towards the edges of language—often to an opaque abstraction—rarely offers any familiar foothold for readers expecting common levels of coherence, as in “Or But Invaded”:

other-worldly. Even surly toasted double joint dent
scented bell air surfactant lizard, tolerant pink win
arrant count radiant immunise. Into prize, instead
fast ahead confuse at the window endowed likewise
twist, then vaporise.

This might lead unfamiliar readers to charge that Prynne sets one word after another according to some arbitrary ordering. Yet Prynne wagers that there’s depth worth exploring in “the theme of arbitrariness.” In his talk “Stars, tigers and the shape of words,” which he delivered in 1992 at Birkbeck College, London, Prynne explained:

Briefly stated, the theme of arbitrariness concerns the nature of the relation between the sense or meaning of a linguistic utterance (spoken or written) and the forms of its expression or performance. If a language is considered as an evolved set of signs or codes, do the items of its production (words, sentences, speech-sounds) bear any distinct and significant individual relation to meaning or idea; or does the relation of message to medium make sense only within the context of the system, and not at the level of individual items?

Certainly, in a poem such as “Or But Invaded,” punctuation and sentence structure remain intact even as the individual words are often estranged from general semantics—yet the potential meaning of each word has been added to, enlarged. Associations emerge from out of the possibly arbitrary order; “tolerant pink win” might be the dawn or dusk hour at which “air surfactant lizard” emerges from their lair. It’s difficult not to associate some intention, even if exact elements remain murky.

On rare occasion, Prynne drops in an uncharacteristic acknowledgement of a poem’s circumstances, indicating, for example, by the note “34,000 ft.” that a poem was written while traveling on an airliner, perhaps on a flight to or from China as is his wont. There are also what might be taken as outright cheeky moves, like the epigraph for Memory Working: Impromptus: “Always have a point in mind / when you resolve a scale line” is attributed by citation to Pianogroove, an online piano school with the motto “the world’s best piano teachers—at your fingertips.”

In some poems, Prynne hits a decidedly different tonal note: “To catch slant sunlight as cat prowling, in earth warming from cold in browning tints, twigs in fashion with new glints to show upswelled. Light wind in morning, to activate a day aloud, ahead already remembered, chill now but soon declared and voluntary.” Such clearly descriptive lines of beauty are reminiscent more of a passage from Emily Dickinson’s Letters than what’s expected from Prynne. In addition, there are the koan-like “Travellers’ Tales” (note the plural possessive) at the end of Memory Working, which present riddling allegories explicitly set in a natural setting, à la fairy tales.

Then there is the hilarity of Snooty Tipoffs (Face Press, 2021) with jagged rhymes (“Music in the ice-box, music by the sea, / music at the rice-bowl, for you as well as me”) found throughout its five sections, in each of fifty-six parts except for the final section, which ends on:

      57
For you I’d do
    the whole thing through
below, above
    for now, for love.

The expanse of Prynne’s output during these last eight years is astounding. Poems: 2016-2024 shows an unparalleled poet holding forth at the height of his powers, from the sheer jubilance of titles (such as Passing Grass Parnassus (Face Press, 2020), with its epigram “Sing different songs on different mountains”) to the final sentence of “Penance at Cost” from Foremost Wayleave (Face Press, 2023):

Compunction ructions burnous turnabout riotous break
pressure gauge caramel kerbside far and wide intertidal angled
stairway apple crumble cinnamon evenly cloven down to earth.

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