Lit - BlogFlock

Jeffrey Hansen - Rain Taxi

2025-09-11T16:19:48.000Z

Non-Zero-Sum Untitled No. 125
Oil on Paper, 30 x 22 Inches

Visual artist Jeffrey Hansen has lived and worked in the art community of Lowertown, St. Paul since 1994. In 1991 while attending the College of Visual Arts he opened his own workshop and studio in the downtown area of White Bear Lake. Following three decades of experimentation, evolving practices, and a re-discovery of circular motifs, today he is concentrating on his own concepts and minimalist techniques of abstract expressionism in non-subjective symbolism and geometric form. Jeff’s renewed take on various artistic methods and disciplines is creating a body of work that conveys a new vision of artistic interpretation and iconographic value.

His 'Non-Zero-Sum' series of circular patterns has been exhibited in New York, Denver, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Florida, and in many local MN exhibits including at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Phipps Galleries, Gamut Gallery, Hallberg Center for the Arts, Eagan Art House, Northfield Arts Guild, Art Reach St. Croix, Sower Gallery, Paradise Center for the Arts, Beckmann Gallery, and many others. Visit him at jhansenartist.com.

The post Jeffrey Hansen appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Volume 30, Number 2, Summer 2025 (#118) - Rain Taxi

2025-09-11T15:59:59.000Z

To purchase issue #118 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Lauren Markham: Language and Catastrophe | interviewed by Elizabeth Brogden
Zack Kopp: The Future Is Unwritten | interviewed by Michele McDannold
Mai Der Vang: Light as Kin | interviewed by Tiffany Troy

FEATURES

The New Life | comic by Gary Sullivan
Peter Gizzi: An Appreciation | by Dennis Barone

PLUS: Cover art by Areca Roe

NONFICTION

FICTION

POETRY / MIXED GENRE

COMICS

Existential Comics: Selected Stories 1979–2004 | R. Crumb | by Paul Buhle

To purchase issue #118 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

The post Volume 30, Number 2, Summer 2025 (#118) appeared first on Rain Taxi.

James Schuyler: The Absolute of Feeling - Rain Taxi

2025-08-21T16:05:08.000Z

by Claude Peck

“Bliss is such a simple thing,” wrote James Schuyler. Also, “the wires in my head / cross: kaboom.” Navigating these opposite shores in a tumultuous life while leaving behind wondrous, one-of-a-kind poems was Schuyler’s mystery and his miracle.

Schuyler, hailed by critic Helen Vendler as “Whitman’s legitimate heir,” was born in 1923 and died in 1991; the decades since have seen publication of his Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), art writings (good), diary (better), letters (best), and a gem-filled volume of uncollected poems—but no full-length biography until now. Informed by research and interviews dating to the mid-1990s, Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35), is packed with detail.

Long may this remarkable “Life” live, and may it lead hordes to discover what David Lehman has called “the best-kept secret in American poetry.”

A Room of His Own

In September 1986, when he was sixty-three, Schuyler lived at the Hotel Chelsea, on the sixth floor, with French doors opening onto a skinny iron balcony above busy 23rd Street. Schuyler had agreed to let me audio-record him at home reading some of his love poems for a gay radio program I hosted in Minneapolis. (Only later did I learn of Schuyler’s stage fright, a phobia so severe that he had never given a public reading.)

Schuyler lived in conditions that seemed scandalous for a Pulitzer Prize winner and leading light of the New York School of poetry. His room at the fabled, shabby Chelsea had a tiny galley kitchen, a single bed, a few dusty houseplants, and a portable typewriter; books, typescripts, and vinyl records were strewn about; on the walls were paintings and drawings by such friends as Joe Brainard, Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, Anne Dunn, and Darragh Park.

As he sat in the room’s sole comfy chair, taking sips from a glass of light-brown iced coffee, Schuyler read slowly and clearly, his “esses” sounding a bit like “eshes.” He read eight poems from the “Loving You” section of The Crystal Lithium (Random House, 1972). I asked for a few more. He said no. Then he agreed to read “A Blue Towel” from Hymn to Life (Random House, 1974)—an ode to happiness about a day at the beach with a lover. It ends with “Quiet / ecstasy and sweet content” and wonders “why are not all days like / you?” The “you” is both day and lover, and the rhetorical question, from a man who survived so much chaos and sour misfortune, is supremely touching.

As I was leaving, we hugged and he called me “sweetie.” It surely was not a day like any other. We subsequently traded a couple of letters, but Schuyler and I never met again. In the five years before he died, his stage fright tamed, Schuyler gave nine public readings, starting in 1988 with a legendary SRO appearance at the Dia Foundation in New York City at which, Schuyler later exulted to a friend, “I was a fucking sensation.”

“No Juvenilia”

Aided by candid autobiographical revelations in the poems, Schuyler fans already know the highs and lows of his adult life. His early life is another matter. Schuyler wrote in his Diary in August, 1985, “Anyone who ever wants to write my biography will have his/her work cut out for her/him, since virtually no documentation or juvenilia exist.”

Given our tendency to sift an artist’s youth for the point where the weather shifted and they diverged from mere mortals on their path to greatness, it is gratifying to glean new details unearthed by Kernan about Schuyler’s early years.

He was born to Marcus James Schuyler and Margaret Daisy Connor in Downers Grove, Illinois, in 1923. His father, of Dutch ancestry, grew up on an Iowa farm until leaving home and becoming a printer and later a journalist with social-justice leanings.

Kernan points out that James worked on his high-school newspaper, perhaps emulating his father, and that “the dated, daily nature of newspapers is reflected in the great many Schuyler poems that bear dates and immortalize particular days.”

The poet’s mother, of English and Irish roots, grew up in Albert Lea, Minnesota. Her mother, Schuyler’s “gentle grandma Ella,” was fondly remembered in several later poems. James’s maternal grandfather committed suicide at twenty-nine by drinking morphine.

Margaret had a college degree and worked in Chicago and later in Washington, D.C., in jobs that aligned her with progressives and early feminists. She got into law school at the University of Chicago, though she never enrolled. Academically at least, James fell far from his mother’s tree. Though bookish in his youth (he memorized big chunks of Wallace Stevens), he was a poor student in high school and flunked out of Bethany College in West Virginia after less than two years. The turbulent 1960s and ’70s were his most productive years as a poet, yet this son of lefties rarely mentioned politics, civil rights, Vietnam, Nixon, or gay liberation.

When James was six, his parents divorced. His mother remarried building contractor Berton Ridenour (“an old book burner” and “a big phony,” per his stepson). By 1937, after a few years in D.C., the family had moved to East Aurora, New York, twenty-five miles from Buffalo.

The college dropout enlisted in the Navy during World War II but went AWOL eight months later on a sex-and-booze bender in New York City. His “undesirable discharge” for homosexuality came after he spent three weeks at hard labor at a bleak military brig on Hart Island. Schuyler didn’t say or write much in later years about his abortive Navy career, which Kernan asserts was “not only traumatic, but shameful and embarrassing.”

John Ashbery and James Schuyler, Great Spruce Head Island, ca. 1968 (Photographer unknown, James Schuyler Papers, Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Department of Special Collections, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California)

To New York, Italy

The immediate postwar years found Schuyler in New York, working a dull job at the Voice of America and taking up with Spanish Civil War hero Bill Aalto, a strapping Finn with a violent streak. A modest inheritance from Schuyler’s paternal grandmother financed the couple for two years in Europe, mostly in Italy, where they shared a house in Ischia with W.H. Auden and his partner, Chester Kallman. Schuyler typed poems for Auden. He learned enough Italian to tackle some translations of Giacomo Leopardi, whose poems Schuyler loved. Visitors to Ischia included Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Picasso biographer John Richardson (with whom Schuyler had “intense, rough sex” on a terrace).

Schuyler and Aalto split after nearly five years together, and Schuyler returned to New York in 1949. Writer Anatole Broyard, in his vivid memoir Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (Crown, 1993), recalls this as a time when rents were cheap and “the streets and bars were full of writers and painters and the kind of young men and women who liked to be around them.”

Crucially to the future of American letters, Schuyler came to know a lot of people in this free-wheeling creative coterie, but two were of special importance: “James Schuyler’s close friendships with John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, which began in early 1952 and lasted, in O’Hara’s case, for most of the decade, and in Ashbery’s to the end of Schuyler’s life, determined the direction of his life and work.”

Schuyler loved the early works of John and Frank (both Harvard grads); Schuyler wrote that, in turn, they “made me feel that I wasn’t just a poet who was being tested but that I was a poet”—the encouragement was “the most important moment of my life.” The three men—all gay but with varying degrees of openness about it—along with Kenneth Koch and Barbara Guest became known as the New York School of poets.

The “school” was at best a loose alliance, with clear differences among its main writers, but united by friendships, time and place and a shared love of painting, ballet, movies, music, cartoons, collaboration, and a “manner” that was anti-didactic, conversational, miles from the high seriousness of Pound and Eliot, more like “jazz that someone like Prokofiev might write.”

Schuyler’s thrill at meeting Ashbery and O’Hara did not prevent a major setback soon after, when he had a manic episode that led to his first psychiatric hospitalization, a stay that lasted ten weeks. While there he wrote the early short poem, “Salute,” which opens with a statement-question: “Past is past, and if one / remembers what one meant / to do and never did, is / not to have thought to do / enough?”

Kernan argues that A Day Like Any Other is not intended as a critical biography, though the book contains thought-provoking discussions of a handful of key poems (“The Crystal Lithium,” “Dining Out with Doug and Frank”). Of “Salute” Kernan points out the irony of a poem written in a mental hospital with a title that in Italian means “health.” I also can’t help hearing in the line “to do and never did” an echo of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be.”

Schuyler’s 1950s mixed sex, love affairs, and art with prodigious amounts of drinking. He and the charismatic, hyperkinetic O’Hara shared an apartment, jobs at MOMA, and a hectic artistic and social life. Schuyler was gathering the stuff of poems, but not writing many of them.

With his boyfriend, pianist Arthur Gold, Schuyler returned to Europe for several months. He met lifelong friend, Fairfield Porter, as well as other painters, chief among them Grace Hartigan and Freilicher. He wrote the novel Alfred and Guinevere (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1958).

It was an era when poets wrote about painters, and painters painted their poet friends. Collaborations flourished. In 1955, Schuyler began contributing short reviews for Art News magazine. He and Ashbery co-wrote, line by line over many years, the comic novel A Nest of Ninnies (Dutton, 1969).

Instability

In addition to his precarious mental state (variously diagnosed as severe depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia) Schuyler was “precariously housed for much of his life,” a fact reflected in many poems, as noted by perceptive British scholar Rona Cran. Yet he is rightly celebrated as a superb poet of place whose poems often begin with the view out his window, whether urban, suburban, rural, or psych ward. In 1959, for one example, Schuyler fled a Hamptons rental after a breakup, couch-surfed in Hoboken and the East Village, then hacksawed his way into the apartment on E. 49th Street that he once shared with O’Hara, which by then was condemned, padlocked, and roach-infested.

Housing-wise, Schuyler was ostensibly better off when, beginning in the early 1960s, he lived outside New York City: in Southampton with Porter, his wife Anne, and their children, and at the Porter family summer home on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine. Along with a Vermont house owned by friend and writer Kenward Elmslie, these bucolic places fueled the poet’s endlessly inventive, original way of writing about flowers and trees, the ocean, weather, and light. Though remembered as his happiest years, they were also fraught, as Fairfield was in love with Schuyler, creating myriad complications.

After the Porters finally asked him to leave in the early 1970s, Schuyler lived in a succession of crummy New York rooms, including one where he started a fire in bed, burning himself so badly that he required skin grafts.

At a New York bathhouse in 1971 Schuyler met and began an intense affair with Robert Jordan, a Brooks Brothers salesman with a wife and kids in New Jersey. Liked by few of James’s friends, “Bob” nonetheless inspired Schuyler’s tender, vulnerable “Loving You” poems.

Despite chronic poverty, well-documented mental breakdowns, and sketchy housing, Schuyler’s writing flourished in the 1970s, with the novel What’s For Dinner? (Black Sparrow Press, 1978) and four of his five poetry volumes published between 1969 and 1980. This output included the masterful long poems that anchored his final four books.

In his last twelve years, thanks to a network of friends, a trusted shrink, a caring physician and a multiyear stay at the Chelsea, Schuyler experienced more stability—seeing old and new friends, eating out, enjoying New York.

Schuyler mostly narrates his poems from a condition of gratitude. Dark-themed poems are notably rare. How was it that a man “so tormented by demons,” as David Lehman put it, “would be, in his best poems, so skillful at conveying what happiness feels like?”

Kernan’s essential, readable, sensitive biography offers keen fresh insights but doesn’t fully answer this seeming anomaly. For that, we can with robust pleasure return to the poems, as in “Afterward,” where Schuyler gives a disarmingly simple account of the end of two recent hospitalizations:

It’s
funny to be free again: to
look out and see
the gorgeous October day
and know that I
can stroll right out into
it and for as long as
I wish and that’s what I
do. This room needs flowers.

Editor’s Note: The following poems, read by James Schuyler in his room at the Hotel Chelsea, were recorded by Claude Peck on 9/20/1986. They are copyright Claude Peck and used by permission.

“Letter to a Friend: Who is Nancy Daum” from The Crystal Lithium (1972)

“A Blue Towel” from Hymn to Life (1974)

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Feature

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

The post James Schuyler: The Absolute of Feeling appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Ingenious - Rain Taxi

2025-08-13T15:32:22.000Z

A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist

Richard Munson
W. W. Norton & Company ($29.99)

by Rasoul Sorkhabi

“Ingenious” is how the famed polymath Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) referred to industrious persons, including those in his own family. In sixteenth-century England, the Francklynes were farmers who owned land (though they were not aristocrats); Benjamin’s grandfather and great uncle were blacksmiths and his father, who sailed to America in 1683 at age twenty-five, ran a business making soaps and candles in Boston, where Benjamin was born in 1706—the fifteenth of seventeen children in the family. According to author Richard Munson, Franklin used the word “ingenious” seventeen times in his own autobiography; Munson has used it as the title of his new biography of the founding father that focuses on Franklin as a scientist.

Munson, whose previous books include biographies of Nikola Tesla and Jacques Cousteau, has reintroduced Franklin to our political discourse at a critical point in U.S. history: 2026 will mark the 250th anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. The political history surrounding this landmark event is of course well known, but people often forget that the founding fathers were supportive of science and technology, believing them crucial to the progress of the nation. Franklin, in fact, was the first American widely celebrated for his science and inventions. As Munson states early in the book, he “faced the world with wonderment and systematic study—offering rich perspectives on the Enlightenment and the American experiment.”

Ingenious opens with Franklin’s iconic kite experiment in 1752; it was the culmination of his work on electricity and lightning. Franklin did not possess the modern understanding of electrons and electromagnetic radiation, though he was the first person to show that electricity is a flux from a “positive” to a “negative” charge. He also coined the term “battery” after building one by using multiple Leyden jars (the first device that could store an electrical charge), and after demonstrating that lightning is a form of electrical discharge, he invented lightning rods to protect high buildings from fires. Franklin’s 1752 book Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America was a pioneering work highly popular in Europe, and arguably inspired others to continue to research electricity and develop the applications we all use today.

Coming from a poor family, Franklin did not have a full school education. He was, however, a voracious reader (his home library shelved 4,000 books) and a clever experimenter; Franklin’s first invention, according to Munson, was swimming flippers to speed up his favorite sport. After fleeing from Boston to Philadelphia at age seventeen, Franklin established himself as an innovative printer and a popular publisher (of the Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanack). His social inventions in Philadelphia blended the public good with his private gain; his Leather Apron Club and subscription library service were valuable contributions to the area’s intellectual life but also placed him at the cultural heart of the city. Theologically Franklin was a Deist, but he mingled freely with various religious denominations from Quakers to Freemasons. His appointment (with a trivial salary) as Postmaster of Philadelphia enabled him to sell his newspaper across the colonies and to source varied content. Franklin had a salesman’s sense for people’s needs and tastes; in Poor Richard’s Almanack he included catchy maxims (e.g., “Haste makes waste” and “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”) to turn a yearly informational resource into a publishing phenomenon.

Franklin conducted his kite experiment at age forty-two, exactly halfway through his life; by then he was a wealthy man and could retire to devote the rest of his life to science and diplomacy. The middle chapters of Ingenious cover the second half of Franklin’s life and depict a man in his full glory—as a world-famed scientist and inventor, as well as a first-rank American diplomat who played a leading role in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, an alliance with France in 1778 (which Franklin’s popularity as a scientist in France helped cement), a peace treaty with Great Britain in 1783, and last but not least, the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Franklin’s life spanned almost the entire eighteenth century. Ingenious reveals his paradoxical but good-spirited personality: He loved celebrity, and yet in his last will, he declared himself simply as “Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, printer.” He refused to seek patents on his inventions because, in his own words: “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.”

Franklin’s death in 1790 in Philadelphia at the age of eighty-four was mourned in the U.S. as well as Europe. Munson remarks that perhaps the most symbolic tribute was given by the French printmaker Marguerite Gérard, who created an etching (“To the Genius of Franklin”) which portrayed old Ben as a Zeus-like figure and bears a Latin caption that can be translated as follows: “He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”

Ingenious ends by discussing how perceptions and writings about Franklin’s life and legacy have changed over time. Many have criticized Franklin because he owned slaves, was a womanizer, and fathered a son out of wedlock. Generations facing economic depressions have cherished Franklin’s virtues of industry and frugality. Political historians have highlighted Franklin’s key role as a founding father, and historians of science have focused on his scientific achievements. Readers interested in learning more about the latter may also find Benjamin Franklin’s Science (Harvard University Press, 1990) by I. Bernard Cohen and The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (Basic Books, 2006) by Joyce Chaplin highly informative. Even (or perhaps especially) after 250 years, Franklin’s is a great life story to read.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Nonfiction Reviews

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

The post Ingenious appeared first on Rain Taxi.

As Necessary as Cupcakes: An Interview with Rachel Trousdale - Rain Taxi

2025-08-04T16:03:46.000Z

by Stephanie Burt

Rachel Trousdale is a poet and scholar; her critical studies to date include Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination (Palgrave, 2010), as well as the essay anthology Humor in Modern American Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2017). Her debut full-length collection of poems, Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem (Wesleyan University Press, $15.95), was selected by Robert Pinsky for Wesleyan University Press’s inaugural Cardinal Poetry Prize. Inhabited by crows, yetis, coral reefs, and aliens, these poems playfully examine the intensity and conflict of romantic love, the entropic joys of parenthood, illness and grief, and the ways our physical loves and intangible losses teach us responsibility to the world around us and illuminate our most important relationships—whether with other humans, wild spaces, or works of art.

Stephanie Burt: Often your poems make me smile, or grin, or laugh; they make unserious, loving requests, or playful allusions, or absurd leaps. You’re known as a scholar and critic of humor in modern poetry. How does your scholarship on the topic speak to your poems that embody it?

Rachel Trousdale: My scholarship focuses on laughter that comes from fellow-feeling. While we can laugh for a thousand reasons—embarrassment, confusion, aggression—the laughter I’m most interested in comes when you suddenly recognize part of yourself in someone else. I’m also a big fan of the improvisational comic riff, which gains its humor from surprising variations on a theme; when this works, it can make a whole new pattern snap into shape. When my poems are funny, I hope it’s because they’re doing one of those things—not so much playing with comic incongruity as finding surprising congruences.

SB: In “Optics Lab,” you write, “That’s how you make sestinas—with a laser.” When and how do you see your own poems as made things, as craft objects? When and how do you see them as kinds of speech, as communication in time between persons, instead? Is there even a difference?

RT: I like to make things with my hands. I bake bread; I used to make pottery; I’ve recently started sewing. The purpose of baking bread is to nourish and to give pleasure, and even if I eat the whole loaf myself, the bread can achieve this goal—but it’s better when it’s shared, because if I give slices of bread to my kids and they slather them with butter and eat them, I get the additional pleasure of watching people I love enjoy the food, and the nourishment takes more forms.

It’s the same with poems. If I write a poem and am satisfied with it, that is probably because I’m happy with it as a made object: its parts fit together in a way I find pleasing. So in that sense, I think all my poems are craft objects, even if the “craft” elements are not always the kind of thing you’d talk about in, say, a craft class. But I’m happiest when the poem is also talking to someone who is not myself, whether that someone is a real-world reader or the ghosts reading over my shoulder. Of course, the best of all is when you get a response.

SB: Your life has led you to many places, and to more countries than most of us get to visit. How have those travels informed your approach to writing poems?

RT: One of the things travel teaches you is to question your premises. When you’re in an unfamiliar place, especially somewhere you don’t speak the language, questions as simple as “Where is the coffee?” and “How do I get a ride to this address?” can turn into research projects or philosophical enquiries. Did you know that building numbers in Tokyo are assigned by the order in which they were constructed within a given block, rather than by their relative locations? So the simple task of trying to get across town turns out to be a challenge to your sense of order and structure. I hope some of my poems do something similar.

SB: Your lovely and gentle“Self-Portrait as Noble Pen Shell” constitutes a response to which of the following: a. Keats’s “To Autumn”; b. Marianne Moore’s “The Paper Nautilus”; c. Marianne Moore’s “The Fish”; d. William Carlos Williams’s “By the road to the contagious hospital”; e. Come off it, Stephanie! Please select one and only one answer. Explain the reasons for your choice.

RT: The answer is absolutely B, which stands for Bizarre, because it is bizarre to write a response to “The Paper Nautilus” that (on the surface) lacks mothers and children. But they’re both about protecting something fragile, and the threat of starvation, and hope.

SB: Works for me. What’s the difference between writing (and revising) a prose poem and a lineated poem? Do their shapes work, for you, in different ways? How do you know when a prose poem is finished?

RT: There’s no room for talkiness in a prose poem, because if you let extra words in, it starts behaving like regular prose. And you don’t have the luxury of line breaks as a way to build in surprises and double meanings, so you have to make the most of other opportunities for multiplicity. I find prose poems much harder to write and am somewhat surprised to discover how many I’ve written, because you can’t depend on the form to keep your focus.

SB: Some humor sounds Jewish. Some Jews sound humorous. Almost all Jews have a humerus. You and I identify as Jewish. Does some of your humor, to you, sound Jewish? Or Jewish American?

RT: My sense of humor is probably the most Jewish thing about me. I learned to love puns, irony, comic critique, and playful rhyme from family members like my songwriter uncle John Meyer, from Sondheim and Gershwin lyrics, and from the inspired, anti-authoritarian nonsense of the Marx Brothers. “Old Joke” in particular isn’t just a Jewish poem, it’s a New York Jewish poem. But as with the Marx Brothers, you don’t have to be Jewish to get the jokes; what I think of as the Jewishness of my humor isn’t a set of references so much as a set of comic techniques—particularly the ironic deflation of pretense and the free-associative crescendo.

SB: Your astonishing and generous “Syllabus” constitutes a response to which of the following: a. The dearth of poems about raising and caring for more than one child; b. Robert Frost’s “Directive”; c. Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”; d. The emotional challenge of raising children during the reign of our current Mad King; e. That Robert Hass poem with the blackberries that absolutely everyone used to read until we got tired of it (complimentary); f. Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt’s “The Palace-Burner.” Please select only one answer, and please justify your choice.

RT: The letters b and d are mirror images of each other, so if I choose one, the other is implied. When “Directive” walks you up the mountainside, it’s walking you backwards, past all those slowly closing cellar-holes, to a lost play house. In “Syllabus,” my little family of four is all walking together away from the house, the rest of the way up the hill, to learn the names of things and what you can eat. “Directive” is about nostalgia, looking back to the children; “Syllabus” is—I hope—about looking forward, with the children, toward a future where we will have to know far too much about Mad Kings but where there will also be blackberries.

SB: Well now I’m alarmed, since Robert Frost’s “Directive” is the scariest poem in the American language: dude wants to kill us. You, however, can save some of us! No, really, you can. Please don’t feel you should have to justify anything in the following answer, but can you talk about justifications, defenses of poetry, and the moral charge (or lack of it) underlying your delightful verse and prose?

RT: Some time in the fall of 2020, after the summer of shutdowns, the small bakery near our house reopened, and we were able to go in again and buy cupcakes. It completely changed my relationship with art and what art is for. My spouse and I had spent the previous few months holding on by our teeth, working full-time jobs from home with no childcare for our preschool-aged children and worrying about our elderly parents. And now here was a tiny transaction we could make, in person, that resulted in pure, unambiguous pleasure. It was the best thing to happen to us for months. And I thought: I want my poems to do this for people—I want to make moments of definite happiness. Because joy isn’t trivial, even if the things that make it can seem silly. Good poems aren’t all cheerful, and they mostly don’t have rainbow sprinkles on top, but they are just as necessary and important as cupcakes.

SB: Most of your references in Five-Paragraph Essay speak to the sort of literature you might expect an English department to teach, from King Lear to Robert Frost and WCW. You’ve also read a great deal of non-realist fiction, including work in (or else adapted from) Russian literature as well as folk and fairy tales. Do any of those kinds of writing and storytelling influence these poems in ways that we might not see?

RT: It’s funny—when you asked about Moore earlier, it made me realize that many of the overt Norton Anthology-style references in this book are to poets I want to argue with. I’ve been tempted to offer a prize to the first student who correctly identifies the three obvious Shelley references in the book. (The prize is homemade brownies. Email me. Undergraduates only.) But Shelley isn’t one of the poets whose books I open when I read for pleasure or company—he’s part of the Big Intellectual History that goes into the classes I teach—whereas Keats is much harder to find in my book, although his poems are the ones I actually recite to myself for comfort at the dentist. No one has influenced my work more than Moore, but her presence is less obvious.

And yes, I read non-realist fiction of many stripes, including Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Andrew Lang’s rainbow of fairy books. Rushdie and Bulgakov, for me, perform some of the same transformative associative leaps I admire in the Marx Brothers, or in the poetry of Harryette Mullen—creating patterns which combine long-established meanings and references on the one hand with the fruits of coincidence on the other. And, as a counterweight, a fair amount of science writing: Oliver Sacks, or Einstein’s general-audience book on relativity, which, despite their totally different content, sometimes follow a similar process of discovery.

SB: What’s the best Andrew Lang fairy book? Or the right first one for people who never got given Girls’ Books when we were girls? Your magnificent and open-ended “Narrative of the Tribal Bard” responds to which of the following: a. Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”; b. Kenneth Koch’s “Mending Sump”; c. Recent scholarship on the high intelligence and social behavior of crows; d. Watership Down; e. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls”; f. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Five Ways to Forgiveness. Please do NOT try to justify your choice.

RT: None of the above: “Narrative of the Tribal Bard” is a direct translation from the cawing of the crows in my yard. I should probably have disclosed in the notes that I don’t actually speak Caw and am working entirely from Corvo’s New Standard Caw-English Dictionary, but I think I’ve captured the essence.

SB: I’m not going to trust any dictionary compiled by Baron Corvo, but OK. Your pentameters and your Sapphics sound fluently conversational, and your free verse (like Bishop’s, Hayes’s, MacNeice’s) plays off against the background of the pentameter. Can you tell us something about your metrics, or about your relationship to received metres?

RT: The first poems I wrote were all strictly metrical, and like a lot of us, I find meter useful in part because it reminds me to find the right word. I’m glad I didn’t start by writing free verse, because the years I spent writing only in meter helped me learn to concentrate. But that’s an answer about meter as method of composition, as opposed to meter as a formal element of poetry.

SB: You get to spend the next six months anywhere on Earth, so you can write your next book of poems there. You can’t take your kids or loved ones, but they will not know you’re gone, due to faerie time distortion; you’ll get back home, from their perspective, just two days after you left, so it’s not irresponsible to go, and you don’t have to pick your location with their welfare in mind. Where do you go, and why? How does the site affect the poems you write next?

RT: Fortunately, faerie time distortion also distorts space, which means I can find an isolated mountain cabin within twenty minutes’ walk of a major research library. I would like to go there, please. I will arrive with a clear proposal for a manuscript about the local birds’ foraging behavior, but when the six months are up I’ll discover that instead I’ve written a series of love poems to my absent family in the form of a medieval recipe book featuring ingredients I was able to raise in the little garden behind the cabin.

SB: Sometimes I think you and I share tastes and preferences and then I run into an answer like that, which reminds me that even our close friends contain Bizarre Hidden Depths. Watch out for Robert Frost, who might be hiding in the sugar bushes. What’s in the recipe book? More seriously, or perhaps less seriously: What’s next for your poetry?

RT: I’ve been working on a sequence of poems giving the answers to questions asked of an imaginary advice column. Just the answers, not the questions. Galileo writes in for help, and several characters from fairy tales. One of the poems, “Dear Ilsabil,” made it into Five-Paragraph Essay, but I think the rest may want to be a chapbook, or the skeletal system of a longer manuscript. But more generally, I want to write things I haven’t read yet.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Interview

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

The post As Necessary as Cupcakes: An Interview with Rachel Trousdale appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Success! - Rain Taxi

2025-07-24T22:19:44.000Z

Hi there!

Thank you for registering to attend the Rain Taxi 30th Anniversary Exhibit Opening Night Reception on Tuesday, October 7 at 6:00 pm at Open Book. Simply check in with event staff when you arrive; your ticket(s) will be reserved under your name.

You will receive a confirmation email shortly. We look forward to seeing you there!

The post Success! appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Not Even the Sound of a River - Rain Taxi

2025-07-24T18:51:48.000Z

Hélène Dorion
Translated by Jonathan Kaplansky
Book*hug Press ($20)

by Alice-Catherine Carls

The St. Lawrence River has shaped the history of Québec from the end of the ice age. Its banks are places of solitude, solace, and remembrance; it feeds, nurtures, loves, kills, buries, and memorializes, reducing human time to surface glimmers. A river of immigrants’ arrivals and soldiers’ departures, the majestic waterway dominates Hélène Dorion’s 2020 novel Pas même le bruit d’un fleuve, whose title she borrowed from a poem by Yves Bonnefoy to highlight the river’s impact on one family.

In Dorion’s multigenerational tale, the river first takes away Eva’s fiancé, who dies in 1916. Her daughter Simone’s fiancé, Antoine, having lost his Irish immigrant parents in the sinking of the Empress of Ireland in 1914, subsequently drowns in the St. Lawrence while sailing in 1949. Simone’s life seemingly belongs to the river—and her daughter Hanna inherits the proverbial fog of grief perpetuated by family secrets when Simone passes away. Just as Simone wrote poems to assuage her grief, Hanna embarks on a journey to reconstruct her mother’s emotional survival, swimming against tide and time to piece together a story laden with lilt and gravitas.

Dorion cites numerous European poets, including Rilke, Baudelaire, and Kathleen Raine, to get at the profound currents connecting these three generations of women. A poem by Hector de St. Denys Garneau, a poet and painter who died in 1943 at age twenty-one and is credited with sparking the Quebécois literary renaissance of the 1950s, similarly echoes a quatrain by Dante in which the Italian Renaissance poet compares the renewal of life to the rebirth of a tree in spring. And what is life if not a series of renewals, some happier than others? Dorion’s previous novel translated into English by Jonathan Kaplansky, the autobiographical Days of Sand (Cormorant Books, 2008), offers a clue about the rootedness of this remarkable feminine solidarity: “My mother’s footsteps, my grandmother’s footsteps—from the lake to the ocean, by way of the river separating them, how many of these traces does my memory carry?”

Kaplansky’s translation is as fluid and majestic as le fleuve St. Laurent or as the musical pieces Dorion recommends in a note at the end as companions to Not Even the Sound of a River. Besides faithfully rendering the rhythms, sounds, and meanings of Dorion’s sentences, Kaplansky’s word and phrase choices sharpen details and images, making them resonate further. This “found in translation” effect confirms Kaplansky’s deep affinity for Dorion’s smooth transitions from nature to emotions to philosophy and back, a style that has earned her wide recognition and readership in the Francophone world. Anglophone readers now have an excellent opportunity to catch up with Not Even the Sound of a River.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Fiction Reviews

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

The post Not Even the Sound of a River appeared first on Rain Taxi.

The Ocean in the Next Room - Rain Taxi

2025-07-23T20:09:50.000Z

Sarah V. Schweig
Milkweed Editions ($18)

by Walter Holland

In The Ocean in the Next Room, Sarah V. Schweig captures the flat affect of our digital lives by using a brand of oddly understated language to reflect uncertainty and dissociation. Drifting through mindless work routines and instances of first-world guilt, the collection moves through social notions of packaged enjoyment and family relations with an estranged viewpoint. Distracted, preoccupied, and ruminative, the speaker of these poems hovers in a twilight state between her laptop screen and the daily realities of social and environmental collapse.

A quiet observer, the speaker watches her daily performance of gender and transactional relations with her husband, a man who is paradoxically intimate and unintimate. Her deadpan narration about their relationship in the long poem at the heart of the book, “Unaccompanied Human Voice,” suggests a destabilized America:

When he lies down and blindly reaches for me,
I think of the economy of time. It’s thought

we’re grateful to lease our lives away, or should be.
Into our work-issued computers, we empty out

our minds. My husband and I pour our work
into our work-issued computers, connecting

and verifying through a virtual private network
neglecting to look up and at anything for hours.

Happy to be here! Happy to help! No problemo!
Just wanted to circle back on this! Can you circle

back on this? Can you approve my PTO?
Thanks!

Masterfully repetitious, the poem’s technologic think-speak and snatches of social banalities reflect a kind of human communication on autofill. But Schweig isn’t dependent on technology to power her ironic look at our blunted senses and civic malaise; “Waves,” for example, is another kind of treatise on the behavior of American privilege, alienation, and neurotic self-examination. In it, Schweig describes an ethically grotesque Caribbean vacation:

Here we are, in Barbados, at Waves Hotel and Spa.
We are three, now, with an infant son.
Every other guest is British, burnt pink and smoking.

The literal is all that’s left.
Our son cries, and for a few long seconds
I do nothing, keep writing.

Everyone has a penchant for cruelty, given opportunity.
Between feeds, I order a “mango breeze colada.”
By the highway men selling coconuts wield machetes.

The poem’s refrain, “The literal is all that’s left,” drives home the way our algorithmic culture has destroyed the mythic and the romantic, the analog and the figurative. As we enter the dawn of the AI era and its potential dehumanizing effects, The Ocean in the Next Room sounds the age-old warning about solipsism in the language of our times.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Poetry Reviews

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

The post The Ocean in the Next Room appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Rain Taxi 30th Anniversary Exhibit and Opening Night Party - Rain Taxi

2025-07-17T16:12:46.000Z

Please join us to celebrate 30 years of Rain Taxi with an exhibit of all things Rain Taxi—issues, cover art, chapbooks, broadsides, ephemera, and more!

Open Book
1011 Washington Avenue, Minneapolis
October 1 through November 15
Exhibit Opening Party: Tuesday, October 7, 6:00 – 9:00 pm
Free and open to the public!

Back in March 2020, Rain Taxi set up an exhibit to celebrate our 25th anniversary, but the pandemic had other ideas. The show shut down before it even opened, so we're trying again this fall.

Please check back for more information about our Opening Night party on Tuesday, October 7—we promise it will be fun! Please RSVP for this free event below:

Rain Taxi 30th Anniversary Opening Night Party

Join us on Tuesday, October 7 for a fun-filled evening of celebrating Rain Taxi's 30th year of championing aesthetically adventurous literature!

Contact Details

Name(Required)

First Last

Email(Required)

Enter Email Confirm Email

Number of tickets needed

Any special requests or messages for the folks at Rain Taxi?

Robert Bly letter among the fun ephemera from 2020.

The post Rain Taxi 30th Anniversary Exhibit <br>and Opening Night Party appeared first on Rain Taxi.

One Dreams of Place: An Interview with Esther Lin - Rain Taxi

2025-07-16T16:27:13.000Z

by Tiffany Troy

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for twenty-one years. Her debut collection Cold Thief Place (Alice James Books, $24.95) is the winner of the 2023 Alice James Award. She is also author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, and her poem “French Sentence” was selected for the 2024 Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has been selected for numerous prizes, anthologies, and fellowships; most recently, she was an artist-resident at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester and Cité internationale, Paris. With Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and Janine Joseph, she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.

Cold Thief Place begins in the dark of night, where the threat of deportation is existential for a child-speaker who is both beguiled by and terrified of the Prophet. Through tales historical and fantastical (from sources as variegated as the Chinese Revolution on one side of the speaker’s family and migration from Taiwan first to Brazil and then to the United States on the other), and drawing insight from texts ranging from Madame Bovary to “a book about dragons,” Lin shows her readers how humanity isn’t defined by what documents a person carries or the status they signify. Instead, in the chiaroscuro of the three-train transfer to the Met Cloisters, we find “a more perfect whole / enclosing // gardens laid by scholars of tapestry / and stained glass and the poetry of flowers // and inside one of these / a tree.” Cold Thief Place teaches us that place isn’t what we own but an emotional sphere that we dream to obtain.

Tiffany Troy: The opening poem, which is also the title poem, begins by comparing knowledge of imminent deportation to a kind of religious damnation (“he said my soul as well / as my body could suffer”). There is unknowing and mystery—the fragment “Offering me what I love best” lacks a subject—before the final movement towards the bureaucratic precision of a name and date of birth. How does this poem set up the rest of the collection?

Esther Lin: “Cold Thief Place” showcases the book’s central themes of fear and instability—both bodily, in the fear of deportation, and metaphysical, in fear of the Christian hell. But I should clarify that the metaphysical fear was not metaphorical; it felt real. Now that I’ve had some time away from the book, I see that the characters of the speaker and her family (not uncoincidentally, me and my family) lived in multiple rings of fire, some of their own making. No one demanded that my mother convert to a fundamentalist evangelical Christian, which increased the danger I felt as an undocumented child far more than it created any sense of community. I think “Cold Thief Place” speaks to that vulnerability a child experiences, when no adult seems entirely reliable.

TT: Poems like “The Ghost Wife” or “Attachment Theory” challenge the child’s belief in her own worthlessness (or worthiness by lineage) and the age-old wisdom that before marriage “you are simply / one without a story” in the richness of hell, which is conflated with a sense of statelessness. Place, then, becomes an emotional state, reflecting hunger, non-belonging, and silencing. Can you speak to the organizational principle in the overall structure of the collection, particularly how time functions in developing the family at the heart of the collection?

EL: I wish my answer would reveal the beautiful orchestration I devoted to this book, how I composed a symphony in three movements. But my decisions were practical. Because the same characters appear throughout the book, I wanted to introduce them as a novelist or playwright would their characters. The poem “The Ghost Wife” was handy in presenting the father, the sister, and the death of the mother, so it came early in the collection. I wanted to bring in the husband early to draw parallels between the speaker’s and mother’s lives, since they both use marriage to claim nationhood—one in the U.S. and the other in Brazil.

I’m a restless reader, so even when I dwell happily in a poem, a part of me is already looking for a shift of some kind: a new dimension that heralds what else the poet can show me. After a handful of poems, I want to disrupt what that handful has established—a short lyric poem if the previous were lengthy; a different tone; another perspective. This way, the reading experience feels alive and dynamic, I hope.

The one intentional bit of orchestration was to not break the book in sections. There are so many elements to my complicated life, moving in tandem, that to separate poems by a restful white page seemed disingenuous. The white page is a place of pleasant nothing. Place is very difficult for an undocumented immigrant. One dreams of place as a solid, immutable thing, although it’s simply not true. Place is emotional. And when the place called home doesn’t feel like home, or the place that feels like home is not acknowledged as home, one lives with a fundamental disconnect.

TT: In thinking about my favorite writers from a place, I found that really what I’m drawn to is writers writing from a particular sensibility, one drawn from their struggles being from nowhere, whether that’s an ethnic enclave or not. In Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang, for instance, you’ll find this concentrated dose of energy in a mantou or in the Chinatown sweatshop. How do you feel this desire to concurrently escape and belong finds its place in your work, and how do you root your readers (or your characters) in place?

EL: The most significant geographical place for me is not my birth country, Brazil, or China, which my parents defected from. It’s the New York City borough of Queens. My feelings remain complicated about the sanctuary Queens has been for many undocumented New Yorkers because it’s also where my most difficult memories reside. In my second book, I probably write more about place as an entity—Queens and parts of France. Leaving the U.S. on my own for the first time gave me the fresh perspective I desperately needed. In Cold Thief Place, Queens is perhaps less visible because it is so up close, but my speaker is still very much bound to it, like a ghost.

Place is tricky. I’m not sure I’ve cracked the code on it.

TT: The speaker in Cold Thief Place turns to various texts, such as science fiction novels and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, as a counterpart to her mother’s almost austere but simultaneously expressive form of evangelical devotion. How does fiction operate in the protagonist’s mind, and how do you as the poet complicate the world where the archvillain is grander but also so much bigger than the speaker?

EL: I love this question because I love the novel. A year after my mother died, I read Madame Bovary, and I experienced for the first time some empathy for her in the character of Emma. Emma was trapped in her marriage, station, and little town, and she struggled wildly for more than was her due. Empathy! Such a difficult imaginative leap between a daughter and mother. It allowed me to write “Up the Mountains Down the Fields” and “Wuping, 1969,” wherein my mother was the heroine of her own story. I felt closer to her, yet perversely, the closer I felt, the more unknowable she grew. Having written these poems of her youth, I was at greater ease writing poems in which she appears as a force of pure violence, striking children and destroying books. I hope Cold Thief Place provides a complicated portrait, one that neither demonizes nor absolves.

TT: What you said recalls these lines from “Attachment Theory”:

How to
hurt a person in the way
they allow. Every person allows
for it, sooner or later. My mother
was my first.

How does the paradox of closeness and unknowability pan out in the collection as you reimagine other family members in their historical contexts and/or as they approach old age?

EL: It seems to me that one of the tragedies of our existence is that our life spans are long enough—if you’re lucky—to see the tail end of your grandparents’ lives and for them to see you as a baby. It is truly rare for someone to get to know their grandparents as people. As for parents, I wish I could see mine now that I understand them better emotionally. That the people closest to you, like your parents, are unlikely to be in more than half your life. What can I do besides acknowledge that paradox? Yes, we need time away from our parents to understand them better within the historical moment they came of age. I suppose this is why I write the poems; I can talk to them in some way.

TT: I’d like to talk about how your poems work on a micro level, on the level of craft. It seems to me you really work the syntax of your sentences carefully to create particular modes of thought: paranoia, shame, fear, ambivalence, and attachment, to name a few. Break it down for us: How might you encourage other poets to use syntax in this way?

EL: Regarding syntax in poetry, I suppose I would encourage syntactically complex sentences on drafting, and then as one begins wrapping those sentences around lines—I’m thinking of how one wraps a large room in wallpaper—to simplify, simplify that syntax. Poetry enjoys but does not demand pyrotechnic sentence structures, because the line break adds nuance, emotion, direction, and music to each phrase. Probably the longest sentence in Cold Thief Place is from “Winter”:

In order to see my first
pear tree
I took three trains
to a cloister shipped stone by stone
from Spain to Washington Heights,
then reconstructed to a more perfect whole
enclosing
gardens laid by scholars of tapestry
and stained glass and the poetry of flowers,
and inside one of these
a tree.

This sentence’s task was simple—to compel the reader to forget about the pear tree after the first couplet until it returns in the final line. It’s by no means a complicated sentence, but with white space, I think it achieves this small goal. The sentence travels away from the natural world to list human-made objects: trains, industry, scholarship, stained glass, and the meanings we imbue on the natural world via language. Similarly, the regularity of the (mostly) couplets encourages a sense of order, an embroidering of beauty.

Repetition, on the other hand, can heighten all those dark things you name—paranoia, shame, fear—and I try to use it toward that end. I closed “Done Right,” for example, with the lines “A note has been made. / A note has been made.” I think the repetition there increases the paranoia of a surprise visitation from Homeland Security. It also alludes to the repetitiveness of the immigration process in the U.S., a bureaucratic Gordian knot that requires many forms bearing the same questions over and over, which must be received by various agencies at precisely the right times. Repetition is one of my favorite devices.

TT: There are registers of language and forms of language, and then there are the differences between or among languages. How does the presence of languages inform your collection?

EL: I don’t think about their presence much; languages besides English should be a given in any poetry, and not just poetry by immigrants. Ezra Pound, Amiri Baraka, Paisley Rekdal. Why not? A non-English verse that suddenly springs up in the field of an English poem adds texture and vitality, and Chinese characters do a lovely job of resonating against all these Roman letters. I’m worried someone will accuse me of using Chinese as decoration in my poetry, but I speak with the might of the one language that may eclipse American English soon. In any case, one Chinese character in a sea of English—as it appears in one of my poems—is a pretty good image of my own language skills.

TT: The code-switching felt authentic to me, having grown up in an ethnic enclave as you did, especially as conversational Chinese often differs from reading Chinese characters. I wanted to turn next what you told me once, which was that best poems hurt—and your poems really touched me in articulating what is typically brushed beneath the carpet as the “norm.” How did your vision for Cold Thief Place begin to take root, and what was the writing process like for you? Do you have any tips for aspiring writers who are approaching their family stories in lyric form?

EL: I struggled with the fact that there is so much event in the book: my mother’s life during the Cultural Revolution, my father’s journey to the West, their deaths, my being undocumented, my marriage . . . It seems like a soap opera. But if I could live it, then surely I could harness the energy around these events to make a shapely book, right? Forgive this platitude: as I wrote, I listened. I noticed that the more direct and plainspoken my language, the stronger the poem. I learned not to rest on metaphor or surrealism; they seemed to evoke too much the comfort of beauty, and the poems were stronger if they comforted no one. Ultimately an aesthetic of severity and starkness guided me through to the end of the book.

TT: In a similar vein, what was the research process like in piecing together the lives of your parents? How did you compress or select the highlights from events and harness their energy?

EL: Most of the stories in Cold Thief Place were what my father shared with me. He was a twinkle-eyed storyteller who specialized in monologues that swept from the T’ang Dynasty to the American occupation of Afghanistan, connecting them by folklore of the Silk Road. You needed some stamina to listen to all two hours of it, but it was marvelous. He gave me so many poems. “For My Father the West Begins in Africa” is an almost direct lift of a conversation I had the foresight to record. All the poems I wrote about my mother’s experience in the Cultural Revolution were what he shared with me—my mother rarely talked about her past. Besides my father, I am lucky that my mother’s niece is close with me and my siblings, and that she was willing to give me some dirt!

I like to think of these poems as a continuation of that oral history—my father’s stories, my cousin’s stories—with the energy of confidence, of sharing of secrets. Very helpful for a lyric poem, which demands an editorial point of view.

TT: Who are some poets who inspired you in the writing of Cold Thief Place? How do you pay it forward as a co-founder of Undocupoets, which recently helped spearhead Here to Stay (Harper Perennial, 2024), an anthology of current and former undocumented poets?

EL: I just wrote an essay about how sitting in a workshop with another undocumented poet liberated me to write openly about my status. A lot of the poems in the book arose from the happy coincidence that Eavan Boland invited Javier Zamora and me into the Stegner Fellowship in overlapping years. I don’t think she knew I was undocumented, so it was a pure coincidence! I had just met Janine Joseph and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, too, so my world seemed suddenly more generous, more peopled, less lonely. My art transformed.

I hope that the anthology does the same for other undocumented writers—that we can act as a lightning rod for the attention that they are perhaps nervous about. So that they know there is community waiting for them.

TT: What are you working on now?

EL: I’m trying my hand at ambivalent love poems. Because I’m ambivalent, I don’t know if any of them are worthwhile. I am impatient with love poems—the evocations of rapture, betrayal, and sorrow don’t move me much. Lately what I want is the sort of perversity that Plath, Bidart, and Henri Cole are masters of. I suffer; I hate; I want to humiliate—why not remind my reader what a thrill those emotions are?

TT: We the readers stand ready to be enthralled by your next collection. Do you have any closing thoughts to share with readers?

EL: Lately I’ve been thinking about how New Criticism may have quashed the love of poetry in high school English classes—when I was a student and probably for generations before. When I talk to non-poetry readers about poetry, they reflect on how they despised seeking symbolism or hallmarks of formal unity in the poems they were assigned. A poem presented a scavenger hunt so esoteric that readers walked away feeling stupid, rather than enlivened or curious. How devastating. Perhaps creative writing’s last few decades of popularity have come about due to students trying to find their way back into poetry—if not to write it professionally, then to take pleasure in it.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Interview

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

The post One Dreams of Place: An Interview with Esther Lin appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Major Arcana - Rain Taxi

2025-07-09T15:38:03.000Z

John Pistelli
Belt Publishing ($24.95)

by Andy Hartzell

It starts with a bang: A gunshot to the head, on a university campus, in Middle America, live-streamed. This action sets up Major Arcana as a story about “today,” the kind that would come with the tagline “ripped from the tabloids” if tabloids were still a thing. But as author John Pistelli plunges into the novel’s root question—why would an intelligent and seemingly happy college boy take his own life in such a public fashion?—its tendrils spread to encompass more characters, more mysteries, and more decades, until the story becomes a sort of secret history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. “Today” is gradually revealed to be weirder than we thought it was.

The various plot trajectories revolve around a common center of gravity called Overman 3000, “Overman” being a thinly-veiled analog of Superman. It’s an artifact of the ’90s, when DC Comics editors boldly greenlit “transgressive” reboots of beloved golden-age franchises and magazine editors breathlessly declared comics not just for kids anymore. The fictional comic is written by Simon Magnus, an anarchic visionary with occult leanings who, while not quite a thinly-veiled analog of Alan Moore, borrows from that writer’s stock of colorful attributes.

Overman 3000 takes the familiar tropes of the Man of Steel myth—alien origin, secret identity, girl reporter love interest, bald billionaire nemesis—and pushes them to their limit and beyond, to the literal end of time. Its grand climax, which pits the superhero as the avatar of pure spirit against a villain transmogrified into the personification of meatspace, is a kind of latter-day gnostic scripture, a lurid orgy of cosmic destruction and rebirth. This story-within-a-story both reflects and influences the slightly-less melodramatic character arcs of the “real” characters in the novel.

In its mixture of literary ambition and old-fashioned showmanship, Major Arcana is a throwback to the efflorescence of popular literary fiction in the mid-late 20th century. It bears some superficial similarities to one of the hallmark works of that period, Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy. That saga also starts with the seemingly inexplicable suicide of a Golden Boy, then spirals outward to follow a cast of eccentric characters, whose various destinies diverge wildly before converging again at the finale. Like Pistelli, Davies was a student of hermetic lore; both works are studded with esoteric references. But Davies’s work now reads like a relic from a lost world, a storybook world; a single history connects his novels back to those of Dickens and Hugo. Pistelli is writing after the end of history, and he knows it.

Life in the digital age is fragmented, discontinuous. How do you tell a coherent story in an incoherent age? It’s no wonder that many new novels forego the epic in favor of the miniature: the precision portrait of a particular subgroup, or the shifting lens of the author’s own subjective awareness. But Pistelli is out to prove that it’s still possible to paint on a big canvas. Major Arcana’s nine major characters represent a diverse set of identities, encompassing three generations and an unspecified number of genders. They share in common the experience of growing up after all the rules and expectations about growing up have been discarded. These are characters who must construct themselves out of the materials at hand: books, chance encounters, and various bits of cultural detritus. The personalities that emerge are complex, unstable, and a bit artificial, heightened-for-effect.

This operatic quality comes through especially in the book’s climactic sequences. Here, Pistelli piles on the sturm-und-drang without restraint—lightning even crackles on the horizon as characters launch into their aria-like monologues and fates are sealed. Though it begins in the neighborhood of realism, the novel ultimately lands somewhere in the realm of fantasy, though the segue is so subtle that one might not realize it until well after-the-fact, if at all.

Does each character represent a figure in the titular Arcana? It’s easy enough to identify Simon Magnus, the comic book writer, as “The Magician.” This is the arcana of action-without-effort, and Magnus refuses to be pinned down. “The Empress,” which is the arcana of sacred magic, might equate to the young manifestation coach Ash Del Greco. And the elusive Jacob Morrow, whose death kicks off the plot, is surely “The Fool.”

These three characters are in desperate search of transcendence, impatient to shake off all forms of constraint—not just the authority of parents, bosses, and priests, but that of nature: the body, and time itself. Other characters serve as counterweights, making the argument for living and dealing with the world as it is. The most eloquent case for fleshly existence is realized in the character of Diane del Greco, Ash’s mother, a woman of artistic and intellectual talents who consciously embraces the life of a suburban vulgarian and un-lapsed Catholic. Every major character is rendered empathetically, and we get a window into every point of view. But Pistelli’s sympathy seems to lie with the Devils, if only because he gives them the best speeches.

The book’s perspective on gender avoids collapsing into any predictable political take. Its two pivotal characters are both transgender, but what they’re ultimately seeking to trans isn’t merely gender, but materiality. Whether this is good or bad is left for the reader to decide. While it’s possible to read both characters as monsters, it’s equally possible to see them as heroes. Pistelli reserves his satirical judgment for those more minor characters who seek to put the rebel angels into politically conventional boxes; placing the transhumanist enterprise within the centuries-long context of Western expressive individualism, he lets us see them in a cosmic frame, as they see themselves.

The novel is liberally seasoned with allusions to writers of transcendental yearning: Dostoyevsky, Melville, and especially that great-granddaddy of the graphic novel, William Blake. More than two hundred years ago, at a time when Enlightenment rationalism claimed to have settled all the great questions, Blake proclaimed the idea that human nature could never be defined—that human beings would always strain toward the infinite. His prophetic works ultimately helped usher in the Romantic counterrevolution. Major Arcana hints that we might be living through a similar moment: The metanarratives may have all been deconstructed, but metaphysical desire lives on. The kids will pick up the pieces and make something mind-blowing. Might the lockdown generation, algorithmically sorted and managed as it is, even now be gearing up to risk everything for love? Stranger things have happened.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Fiction Reviews

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

The post Major Arcana appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Red Dog Farm - Rain Taxi

2025-07-08T15:26:19.000Z

Nathaniel Ian Miller
Little, Brown and Company ($28)

by Sara Maurer

Perhaps no author looms larger in Icelandic literature than Halldór Laxness, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955. In writing a book set on a far-flung Icelandic farm—as is Laxness’s 1934 novel Independent People, widely considered his masterpiece—Nathaniel Ian Miller faces the challenge of situating Red Dog Farm in the context of Iceland’s foremost literary figure’s foremost book. He approaches this task in the same way one of his characters, Víðir, comes “out from under his father’s heavy shadow”—by defining himself in opposition to him.

While the narrator of Red Dog Farm is a young man named Orri, it’s through his father, Víðir, that Miller engages the specter of Laxness. At first, Víðir and the hero of Independent People, Bjartur of Summerhouses, seem of a piece: They’re decidedly cantankerous, both farmers, poets, husbands, and fathers. Defiance and stubbornness seem to guide each man’s every move (Bjartur’s first line of dialogue in Independent People is a solitary “No”). Ostensibly, Laxness’s protagonist is driven by a desire for financial independence—a home, land, and livestock owned outright—yet as his story unfolds, he seems less driven by this ideal than by brutality. He refuses to improve his home or adequately feed and clothe his family, and he seems to value his sheep above human life.

Víðir, too, lives in opposition to the people around him, rejecting his neighbors’ old ways of doing things. He rides a motorcycle instead of a horse, raises beef cows instead of sheep, and has an Australian kelpie instead of an Icelandic sheepdog. Unlike the relentlessly independent Bjartur, though, Víðir relies completely on his wife’s college professor salary and his physician mother-in-law’s generosity. Where Bjartur treats his wife and children little better than livestock, Víðir coddles Orri, demands nothing of him. He loves his wife and “would’ve claimed all her time if he could justify it.” Shortly after she leaves him, Víðir reveals to Orri that he has been writing poetry: “I guess you’d call it free verse? Prose poems? I’m not sure.” You can almost hear Bjartur, who found comfort in “the old measures of the 18th century ballads and had always despised the writing of hymns in newfangled lyrics,” scoffing.

Toward the ends of their books, Bjartur and Víðir find themselves quite alone. As a result of his unrelenting pursuit of self-sufficiency, both of Bjartur’s wives are dead and most of his children have died or fled; only his son Gvendur remains. Víðir’s wife, similarly fed up with his reticence and discontent, has accepted a new position at a university in Reykjavik; Orri remains on the farm but is planning to move to Reykjavik as well. Each faces the question that farmers have faced since humans began farming: What will happen to the farm? It will come as no surprise that the sons choose opposite paths: One takes over his father’s farm while the other leaves both farming and father behind.

Rather than shying away from comparisons to Laxness’s classic, Miller leans into them: “To hell with Bjartur!” Víðir says at one point. Víðir’s rejection of the old ways reveals him as a new symbol for Icelandic masculinity. In casting off Bjartur’s heavy shadow, Miller challenges long-held cultural ideals of independence, perseverance, and stoicism, and offers readers a 21st-century hero—one who relinquishes power and embraces flexibility and tenderness.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Fiction Reviews

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

The post Red Dog Farm appeared first on Rain Taxi.

A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet - Rain Taxi

2025-07-03T16:15:21.000Z

Laura Isabela Amsel
Brick Road Poetry Press ($17.95)

by Danielle Hanson

Situated in the natural lushness of the American South and discussing a range of family dynamics, Laura Isabela Amsel’s A Brief History of Sting and Sweet delivers on both the sting and the sweet.

The core subject matter of these poems is family tumult—a cold and abusive father, cancer, raising children, the dissolution of marriage—yet there’s no hint of melodrama; instead, Amsel’s vulnerability encourages connection. Take “First Born,” a poem about becoming a mother:

Looped cord cut free, bagged, he began—
his brown eyes jaundiced moon-yellow. He’d stutter at five,
refuse to wear shoes half his life. Dressed in anything
tight, he’d cry. Sock-seams overloaded his senses. He roams now,
looking for loose, running from confines—Bulgaria, Thailand.
He wears Tevas in winter to give his toes room.

As much as family, however, the poems also writhe with nature—snakes, salamanders, butterflies, frogs, squirrels, and plants crowd the scene and frequently suggest truths about human life. “Naming Moons” explores a sweet family tradition about full moons, while “Father” details the killing and pinning of butterflies and “Owls” portrays nature as an escape: “One leads the other follows / and I forget to breathe.” Elsewhere, the scar left from a mastectomy is referred to as “tender stem,” while salamanders are “sacred” because their scarcity. In later poems, the speaker finds solace in spring:

Don’t make me beg you, April.
God knows my knees ache
enough already. See me groveling
in March mud, raving,
staving spade holes
with cold fingers, jabbing
zinnia seeds in each.

In addition to using strong imagery, Amsel excels in her playfulness with language. “Listening for Something as a Girl, 1970” is filled with short i sounds and rhymes that speed up the poem and carry the reader away:

My vigilance is visceral;
there is no freeze in me.
I am all ear-swivel
and twitch, amygdala
and head hitch, tail
switch and quick shit,
adrenaline and flinch.

A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet brings us the lovely, the terrifying, and the sad experiences of family life, but in making them all connected to the natural world, it tones down the highs and modifies the lows into something more manageable. We are all part of this world, it seems to suggest—and it’s going to be okay.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Poetry Reviews

The post A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Letters to Gisèle - Rain Taxi

2025-07-02T16:30:47.000Z

1951–1970

Paul Celan
Translated by Jason Kavett
NYRB Poets ($28)

by Patrick James Dunagan

The work of poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) was inherently a site of conflict between his Jewish identity, his East European heritage, and his ill-fated predicament of composing poems in the German tongue post-Holocaust, which saw his parents murdered during Nazi internment and his own detention in labor camps. There was never a chance of his recovering from the profound psychological and spiritual damage endured during his youth. While this has long been recognized, Letters to Gisèle presents an opportunity for anglophone readers to glimpse Celan’s personal tribulations within the context of his poetic calling as they played out in his relation to his wife, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, and their son, Eric.

Their correspondence is full of affectionate exchanges, especially early on, where in one instance Celan refers to Gisèle as “my darling little branch.” Celan, however, was always haunted by his past, even as he regularly traveled to Germany from Paris and enjoyed a welcome reception when he gave public readings of his work. As translator Jason Kavett notes in an introduction, “a dark thread that runs throughout the correspondence originates in the false charge first leveled in 1953 by Claire Goll, the widow of the poet Yvan Goll, that Celan had plagiarized her husband’s work—a charge that gained some traction in Germany and that was a personal catastrophe for Celan, who saw it as part of a larger anti-Semitic campaign.” This “false charge” challenging the authenticity of his work plagued Celan for the rest of his life.

Poetry for Celan was a serious matter, involving confrontation with harsh realities [(“What to say, what to say? (Poetry, an affair of abysses.)”]. In the final years leading up to his suicide, he was repeatedly hospitalized for violent acts during delusional psychotic breaks when he feared for his own security or that of Eric. On separate occasions in such states, he attacked Gisèle, stabbed himself in the chest (puncturing his lung), and while vacationing alone went after a fellow guest where he was staying. Throughout these months-long periods of institutionalization, Celan never ceased working on poetry (“two poems yesterday and one today—in all I have written fourteen since I have been here”). His self-understanding hung upon poetic activity as a necessity of existence: “As I see my state of being, I need books, a place to work, a bit of human contact, the deepening and enlarging of my work as a translator of poetry.”

Celan idealized Gisèle, writing to her, “You are courageously the wife of a poet. I thank You for being that, so valiantly.” For her part, she willingly filled that role, continuing to support and encourage him during his hospitalizations: “you will see, your strength will come back, and your memory and concentration and inner calm, through work too you will live again.” Initially she committed herself to enduring his fate, stating, “Everything that happens to you, understand, affects me in the deepest part of myself and your wounds, your drama, your fate, I live through them too.” But she finally began to falter under the strain. When she announced, “I am leaving tomorrow evening, before my nerves go completely,” a footnote informs us that Celan underlined the statement, adding in the margin “Thursday!”

While Celan only wanted to ease Gisèle’s troubles (“I would like to contribute, calmly, to your calm”), his condition left him incapable of taking the necessary steps. When Gisèle found an apartment where he could live alone so they could have time apart, he resisted. Still, she continued to attempt to steer him in a positive direction, urging him “to also see the things that are not bad, they exist.” Celan was, in fact, capable of such observations himself, which can be seen in a letter to Eric from July 29, 1969: “I have come back from a long walk in Paris: wind, not too much, a light, fine rain—we could have walked together, I thought about that.” And later the next month: “Facing the snow, / a thought for / you.” Yet, behind such observations was the realization that nothing would keep the poet from his fate; Celan drowned himself in the Seine less than a year later.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Mixed Genre Reviews

The post Letters to Gisèle appeared first on Rain Taxi.

The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket - Rain Taxi

2025-07-01T16:24:30.000Z

Kinsale Drake
University of Georgia Press ($19.95)

by Danielle Shandiin Emerson

Kinsale Drake’s debut poetry collection, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, composes a yucca-lined symphony of the lived and thriving groundwork of the Southwest, drawing on memory, music, and Diné poetics in the process. Each poem spreads honey-warm tendrils that inspire; with the feel of bare feet against damp dirt, we experience the breath of each stanza.

This collection could be summed up in one word: song. A memory song, an August song, a healing song, a southwest song, a mother song, a girlhood song, and so on. As Drake writes in “spangled,” “rip the sky // rush of birds spooked / from deep in our throats— // our song:”—and from there the poems demonstrate how music spreads across generations, how bodies become instruments and orchestras, and how memories of being loved and loving can be re-lived through music, can “overturn the sweet peas in the garden / . . . / the familiar orchestra / of scratched up CDs.”

The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket also paints portraits of family lineages. Some memories we ourselves might not remember, but we still feel them deeply because our loved ones have passed them on to us, for better or for worse. From the collection, we’re reminded that remembering is familial and comforting, that “the people who have known / this land / see the slickrock / still emerging.” Indigenous existence is still emerging and ongoing, as conveyed in “after Sacred Water”: “So we tell our stories Go to the water / Tend this land / & remember.”

Throughout the collection, the traditional archival experience is challenged and changed by one that centers the lived and living. “Wax Cylinder” examines the recordings of Diné elders singing. Locked in museum archives, their voices are so far from Dinétah (our homelands); in a way, these poems bring them home, even if just for a moment. It’s this love that makes our connection to further generations unbreakable and all the more beautiful.

A love letter to the southwest, Diné culture, and the inherent lyricism that storytelling bears, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket asks readers to reflect on their relationship to landscapes and histories that may not be a part of the dominant narrative. Drake extols the matrilineal, from girlhood to our masaní’s (grandmother’s) wisdom; while we heal from intergenerational trauma, we’re also shown intergenerational joy. We’re shown striking depictions of love and community, especially as it’s formed over vast rural landscapes, and how it’s thrived for generations. Contrary to colonial narratives, Native communities are places of laughter, crying, living, breathing, smiling, trusting, singing, humming, and being: “How else to know / you enter a land of monuments, not / a wasteland, loved by radio waves,” the poet offers in “Put on that KTNN.”

As the collection reaches its end, readers are embraced with active hope and healing. In “BLACKLIST ME,” Drake writes: “all the NDNs / dusting themselves off / and laughing at the smolder, / and the little wheel spin and spin / the little wheel spin.” Indeed, the world and we, as Native peoples—as Diné—will keep spinning and spinning, existing and living, in an old beauty.

Nizhóní, it is beautiful.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Poetry Reviews

The post The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Volume 30, Number 1, Spring 2025 (#117) - Rain Taxi

2025-06-27T18:31:49.000Z

To purchase issue #117 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Rachel Robbins: There’s No There There | interviewed by April Gibson
Kevin Prufer: The Mystery of Metaphor | interviewed by Justin Courter
Ron Whitehead: Wild Nature | interviewed by Zack Kopp
Patrick James Dunagan and Joe Safdie in Conversation: The Poet As Other

FEATURES

An Ode to Odes: Poetry at Eighty | by James P. Lenfestey
The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan

PLUS: Cover art by Ziba Rajabi

NONFICTION

The Joan Didion Collection | Joan Didion | by Chris Barsanti
We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine | Alissa Wilkinson | by Chris Barsanti
Conversations with Michael McClure | David Stephen Calonne, ed. | by Christopher Luna
The Freaks Came Out To Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture | Tricia Romano | by Neal Lipschutz
Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood | Anna Farro Henderson | by Elizabeth J. Bailey
Splice of Life: A Memoir in 13 Film Genres | Charles Jensen | by Joshua Wetjen
Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: On Reading and Writing Poetry Forensically | Paisley Rekdal | by Jessica Gigot
The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It | Corey Brettschneider | by Jacob M. Appel

FICTION

POETRY

COMICS

Tell Me A Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund | Caitlin McGurk | by Paul Buhle

To purchase issue #117 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

The post Volume 30, Number 1, Spring 2025 (#117) appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Wave of Blood - Rain Taxi

2025-06-26T15:47:02.000Z

Ariana Reines
Divided Publishing ($16)

by Robert Eric Shoemaker

Ariana Reines’s intention for her journal-like book, Wave of Blood, was to document the period between the Libra and Aries eclipses of October 2023 and April 2024, a time during which she toured Europe for her loudly acclaimed previous title, A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019). She wanted to recollect and reckon with our current era of sociopolitical grief and struggle, as well as to wrestle with the “mind of war” that overtakes us all. As she explains, “I gave myself very little time to write this book. I gave myself only enough time to come up to the very edge of the violence and shame I have known within myself.”

Reines as narrator is thus split, writing “sentences [that] hardly understood themselves.” There’s a palpable mistrust of the self and a feeling of shared guilt for existence: “It is not that I don’t see the evil of the settler-colonial project. It’s that I have no reason to trust ‘us.’” The war in Palestine is central to this book, and Reines criticizes institutions’ self-preserving repression of anti-war movements, asking: “can one be ‘against’ war while sober about the procedures of statecraft and realpolitik, without merely proclaiming oneself a pacifist, as if one lived in a vacuum, or a religious zealot, or a coddled intellectual skilled in the weaponization of extreme language while living a life of bourgeois comfort?”

The horror of war, too, is a result of the mechanistic approach we take at our peril, the “apocalypse of machines they’ve been selling us.” Human and animal life is treated as inferior to the machine: “Our technocrats are obsessed with the idea we will be subjugated by superior machines. They have slave minds.” Production, not life, is the end goal of capitalism while everything around the narrator says, “I am in pain . . . / Don’t leave me alone.” Reines’s critique and the reality she describes are harsh, but her answer is warm; she suggests we can look for wisdom and medicine, plead for punishment, redemption, and release.

Formally and stylistically innovative, Wave of Blood moves between prose and poetry with a captivating hybridity, mostly using a candid direct address that feels distinct from the voice in A Sand Book. This book is addressed to a trusted reader, a member of the Invisible College (the mystically inclined study society Reines began during the COVID-19 pandemic). The Invisible College itself is also an addressee, and we are becoming or are already a part of it. This approach allows the reader to feel like a confidant or an initiate of a sacred order. This book would see an unknowable and awesome divine in defense of the human heart.

At one point late in the book, Reines describes a dream she’d had of sex with no release, pain held inside and unexpressed and growing. She also dreams her refusal to fight the pain and suffering in the world, her complicity with it. This deeply felt journal of impossible internal pain certainly captures how the world’s suffering can be unbearable. But Wave of Blood exists on behalf of and as a plea for humanity. “Your poetry is required here,” Reines implores. Meanwhile, her poetry is both a heart and a healer.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Mixed Genre Reviews

The post Wave of Blood appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Strangers in the Land - Rain Taxi

2025-06-25T16:07:37.000Z

Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America

Michael Luo
Doubleday ($35)

by Sarah Moorhouse

In October 2016, an “Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China” appeared on the front page of The New York Times. Its author was Michael Luo, an American-born journalist of Chinese descent. In this letter, he expressed his amazement when, as his family was waiting outside a Korean restaurant in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a passer-by, frustrated at having her way obstructed, screamed at them, “Go back to your fucking country.” Luo’s seven-year-old daughter was confused. “Why did she say ‘Go back to China?’,” she asked her parents. “We’re not from China.”

In Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, Luo attempts to answer his daughter’s question. He offers a history of anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S. that chronicles the persistence of the disorientating demand “to go back to where we came from.” The book, which Luo presents as “the biography of a people,” focuses on the stories of individuals. It’s a compelling approach, and one which was evidently not without its challenges: Luo acknowledges that archival evidence detailing the specific stories of Chinese arrivals is limited. By combing primary sources and drawing on existing historical studies, however, Luo accomplishes an impressive feat. Arranged chronologically, his stories reveal how successive generations of Chinese immigrants sought belonging in America despite programs of systematic exclusion.

From Gold Rush-era San Francisco of the 1850s to the present-day streets of New York, Luo argues, Chinese immigrants have been made to feel like “strangers in the land.” He explains at the outset that one of the founding principles of America was the intention to celebrate the “multiplicity of difference,” yet hostility towards the Chinese has often been directed precisely at their difference—the language, mannerisms, customs and dress that mark their distinct heritage. A recurring detail in the book is the queue (the braid required to be worn by male subjects of China’s Qing dynasty), and how many arrivals cut it off to approximate a more American appearance. It rarely helped. In 1889, defending the upholding of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Justice Stephen Field described the Chinese as “impossible to assimilate with our people.”

The most interesting chapters of Strangers in the Land home in on a particular group of Chinese immigrants and then explore, through the stories of individuals, the friction that developed between them and native citizens. A chapter entitled “Lewd and Immoral Purposes” reveals the challenges faced by Chinese women arriving in the mid to late nineteenth-century. Until this time, the vast majority of Chinese arrivals to the U.S. were men seeking employment as laborers on the railroads and in Californian Gold Rush towns. Many of these men had wives and family in China to whom they intended to return after making their fortune. As Chinese communities became more established, however, women started to arrive.

Chinese women were met, Luo tells us, with “near-universal opprobrium,” and for one reason in particular: The bachelor demographic of Chinese quarters made prostitution a lucrative enterprise. Ah Toy, a woman from Canton who arrived in America at twenty years old, was an early adopter of the profession in San Francisco’s Chinese quarter; setting up shop in “a shanty in an alley off Clay Street,” she offered men “a chance to ‘gaze on her countenance’” in return for an ounce of gold dust. She began employing other female arrivals and opened brothels in at least two locations. Trouble began to brew as rival tongs (the secret societies that vied for influence in the Chinese immigrant community) sought to seize control of the burgeoning sex trade. City officials, meanwhile, delighted in finding a pretext to indict the Chinese community as “an alien, heathen people,” then collaborated with Protestant missionaries to push for an outright ban on the arrival of women from Asia. They all but succeeded: In 1870, a state law was passed that forbade Asian women from entering without proof of “correct habits and good character.”

Luo’s book makes clear that legislation which systematically excludes Chinese immigrants has been a recurring event. It reached its apex in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, a U.S. federal law that prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers for a period of ten years and denied naturalization rights to Chinese residents. This was the first time that the United States barred a people from immigrating based on their race. Luo makes the reader feel afresh just how shocking this is by highlighting the zeal with which white Americans sought to oust Chinese people from their communities. Homes were burned, shops looted, men violently attacked. If the Exclusion Act did not exactly sanction such activity, it emerged from a similar underlying attitude.

Strangers in the Land is an important book, not least because it resonates uncomfortably with current headlines. The deportation of immigrants to penal colonies in El Salvador is just one instance of the alarming persistence of hostility and even violence as a strategy for reckoning with “difference.” As Luo puts it, his book is “not just the story of the Chinese in America; it’s the story of any number of immigrant groups who have been treated as strangers. It’s the story of our diverse democracy. It’s the story of us.” Belonging, Luo shows us, is a fragile thing, and it depends on respect and dignity. He dedicates his book to his daughters, hoping that they may find the belonging that continues to elude him. We’re left lamenting, however, how far there is still to go.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Nonfiction Reviews

The post Strangers in the Land appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Crumb - Rain Taxi

2025-06-24T15:56:34.000Z

A Cartoonist's Life

Dan Nadel
Scribner ($35)

by Paul Buhle

Editor’s Note: Read Paul Buhle’s review of Existential Comics: Selected Stories 1979-2004 by R. Crumb, selected and with an introduction by Dan Nadel, in the Summer 2025 print issue of Rain Taxi.

So much time has passed since the brief golden age of underground comix that younger readers can be forgiven for not recognizing the word “comix” as an emblem of the late 1960s. Likewise they may not know much about the most significant American artist of the movement, Robert Crumb, who is more readily identified in France (where he has lived since 1991) than in the U.S. During the 1990s, the release of the documentary film Crumb stirred interest but also renewed old grievances. In 2009, Crumb’s masterful long form The Book of Genesis appeared, looking to many veteran fans of the cartoonist as an apotheosis (and indeed, given that the artist is now in his eighties, it is likely his final major work).

When comic historian Dan Nadel asked Crumb about writing a biography, Crumb not only agreed but made available an extensive archive, one that helps illuminate how a life journey so full of adventure can add up to something greater. The richness of detail and personal insights, including reverse-image self-insights of a near-confessional nature, in Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life offer a deeper and more nuanced view than even the artist’s most devoted fans could have guessed.

Many of us who have met Crumb, corresponded with him, or wrote about his work—my own first review of Crumb appeared in 1968—somehow lost sight of his uniqueness by the 1980s. We probably never understood a few key basics of his intentions, both artistic and personal: his dedication to music, for instance, and his anti-career ferocity in that world. Crumb learned to play several stringed instruments, and the Cheap Suit Serenaders that he formed played in California and beyond for more than a decade. He adamantly refused what other band members clearly wanted, which was to make the big time—he was escaping the big time, actually, in the way he knew best.

Crumb’s lifetime effort to deepen and improve his art offers another insight into how he is a more-than-modern artist. Imagine him in his adopted village in Southern France, abandoning larger reputation-securing works for individual pieces that would sell at a good price to collectors—very much in the mode of artists centuries ago. In that same village, he pitched into rebuilding historic houses for newly arrived friends to live in, and cleared paths to the nearby mountain so that they more resembled the same paths used by shepherds for centuries. Meanwhile he sketched away, finding for himself new details in the many ways to create.

We still have the familiar Crumb, of course, and every good reason to thank Nadel for giving us a close (and at times appropriately unforgiving) view of his world. Crumb’s family, for instance: his doomed brothers and his sister, all of whom he sometimes sought to help decades after they had left home; his father, a military veteran who slapped and insulted the boys, but ended up with a career of sorts, if never satisfactorily reconciled to his former wife and his children; his mother, divorced and daffy in old age, the strange and pathetic figure in the documentary film. In sobering ways, his family is a mirror of R. Crumb and vice-versa, but unlike his brothers in particular, he survives more or less intact. Nadel covers the mostly uncomfortable family territory assiduously and sympathetically.

Perhaps Crumb was not really, as was sometimes assumed, on the verge of suicide when he hopped on a bus from Delaware to Cleveland in the early 1960s, there finding a fast friend in another comics legend-to-be, Harvey Pekar. Perhaps he did not dive hopelessly into a bad marriage but rather stumbled into a relationship that lasted a fairly long time and only ended badly, with Dana Crumb broke as well as morbidly obese. As a good biographer should, Nadel unpeels one layer of contradiction after another. From Cleveland and a promising (if hackish) job drawing “funny” greeting cards, Crumb made his way up the artistic ladder just as the counter-culture era blossomed. LSD had a big effect on his work, especially in his recuperating of vintage vernacular images of American life earlier in the century—the budding artist indeed seemed to intuit the direction he was traveling. His comics, in mature form, still resemble the amateur efforts created with his brothers when they were kids together, crudely published and sold or given away.

Crumb moved to San Francisco in 1967 and remained in Northern California for over two decades; in Nadel’s telling, these years are full of little surprises. Amidst the dope smoking and love-ins, he and Dana deftly blend in by selling comics from a baby buggy; amidst the rush of assertive, sexually liberated women at that place and time, he also proves to be hopelessly adulterous, so much so that “adultery” does not begin to cover the subject. Still smarting from the brushoffs of his gangly puberty years, he both craves the offerings of women and feels resentful toward them; happily and also unhappily, he takes his solace and his revenge in his comic art. With the id uncensored and increasingly unleashed in his work, the world of underground comix becomes so tied up with Crumb that his comics would sell in excess of a half-million copies, ten times that of his most successful counterparts.

Attacked for good reason by up-and-coming women cartoonists creating their own feminist comix—Trina Robbins and Sharon Rudahl in the lead—Crumb lashed back at them repeatedly, sometimes first apologizing and then digging himself in further. Whether or not his desire to “ride” women with large posteriors pseudo-sexually is misogyny or not is debatable (his female defenders claim they find it sex-positive), but it is hardly any version of normality. In the ’70s, Crumb marries fellow artist, Aline Kominsky, who delivers him from much of his personal hell and into the melting pot of Jewish American culture. He does not learn Yiddish (let alone Hebrew) and feels no vibes for Israel (nor does Aline), but together they explore the contradictions of their shared life, often in humorous collaborative works; their union continues until Kominsky-Crumb’s death in 2022.

The strength of Nadel’s biography rests in no small part on an understanding of what Mad Comics and its creator Harvey Kurtzman meant to Crumb. In a 1977 interview, I asked Crumb how Kurtzman had influenced him and he responded that this is simply how art works: a young artist emulates a master although he feels it is impossible (or at least unlikely) to reach the latter’s level of genius. In the early 1950s Kurtzman and Mad Comics, assaulting Joseph McCarthy amidst the Army Hearings, ridiculed a wide spectrum of mass cultural developments as well as the cliches of mainstream comic art; Mad Magazine, the toned-down version that appeared from 1956 onward, was already something different, less intense, more appropriate for younger readers, and far less dangerous. Crumb wanted to become more dangerous, and he did: Snatch Comics, a 1968 anthology of super-pornographic stories edited by Crumb and including his work as well as that of cartooning comrades such as S. Clay Wilson and Victor Moscoso, assaulted almost every propriety, with Crumb going as far as his imagination could take him.

Weirdo, the magazine Crumb launched in the 1980s, helps mark the shift from the underground comix era to the “alternative comics” paradigm that succeeds it; it had no aim at financial success or particular artistic merit. Instead, it offered a lot of what would come to be known as outsider art, including some comics that could hardly be considered comics. His own gag pages recuperated one of the oddest features of old joke magazines, showing photographs of him engaged in a kind of 1940s pop culture ballet with women in leotards—no real violence, no real sex, yet everybody seemed to have a good time.

After the heyday of the San Francisco years, Crumb lived in Winters, California, in the woods away from the college town of Davis; there he and Aline raised a daughter and produced enough art to keep the family budget intact. Crumb’s work with the ecology-minded newspaper Winds of Change seemed to reflect his larger vision, but his splendid hatred of the rich, their luxuries, and their culture had nowhere to go in Reagan’s America. Making the move to France in 1991 was the final step in Crumb’s journey. Although Aline had the stronger impulse to live in a more beautiful and just society than consumerist USA (new housing “developments” had already grown closer to their home in Winters by 1981), it worked out perfectly for him—he finally got away from the fan-boys and fan-girls, successfully escaping as many of us might also have wished to do. It wasn’t a bad endgame for such a wild trajectory, an arc well summarized and honored in Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Nonfiction Reviews

The post Crumb appeared first on Rain Taxi.

2025 Rain Taxi Readings and Events - Rain Taxi

2025-06-23T21:59:24.000Z

Independent Bookstore Passport 2025

April 23 through April 27, 2025

Hundreds of people took part in celebrating and supporting our local independent bookstores by picking up a free Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport and filling them up with stamps! See more info here.

Damion Searls

Sunday, June 8, 2025

Rain Taxi held a literary salon celebrating the publication of The Mariner's Mirror, poems by acclaimed writer and translator Damion Searls! You can purchase this chapbook here.

Vincent Katz

Thursday, June 12, Milkweed Books

Rain Taxi and Milkweed Books welcomed poet Vincent Katz to the Twin Cities! Katz will read from his newest collection, Daffodil and Other Poems, and then was joined in conversation by local poet Dobby Gibson.

The post 2025 Rain Taxi Readings and Events appeared first on Rain Taxi.