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Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport 2026 - Rain Taxi

2026-03-23T22:32:29.000Z

Rain Taxi's Twin Cities Literary Calendar is once again publishing its pocket-sized Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport—offering readers a fun way to visit bookstores and win discounts and prizes. Our annual Bookstore Passport celebrates both Independent Bookstore Day (this year taking place on April 25, 2026) and our metropolitan area’s bounty of great community-based bookstores!

Illustrated by local artist Kevin Cannon, the Passport is FREE to pick up at any participating store between Wednesday, April 22, 2026 and Sunday, April 26, 2026. During these five days, travel to as many of them as you can, because you can get your Passport stamped at each store you visit during that time span. Each stamped page becomes a future discount coupon for that store, and getting multiple stamps makes you eligible to win great prizes!

We encourage you to share your bookstore journey on social media and to tag us (@raintaxireview) on Instagram, Facebook, or X.

How It Works

Check back soon for details.

Participating Stores

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Prizes

Check back soon for details.

Sixties Surreal - Rain Taxi

2026-03-19T18:34:03.000Z

Edited by Dan Nadel, Laura Phipps, Scott Rothkopf, and Elisabeth Sussman
Whitney Museum of American Art ($50)

by Paul Buhle

Originally a product of France, Surrealism spawned adherents around the globe—including, here in the Midwest, the Chicago Surrealist Group, formed in 1966. Yet just as it grew to transcend geographical borders, surrealism as an art movement with a small “s” expanded beyond its original visual identity. The art in the pages of Sixties Surreal may thus be unfamiliar to many viewers, but as its three editors argue, it demonstrates a different logic of surrealism’s meanings, roles, and influences within the world of American art as it evolved in the postwar U.S.

In the Foreword, Scott Rothkopf suggests that the “generative” influence of surrealism had already helped shape the work of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollack, among others, by 1950—but the trend (if it was a trend) was abandoned in favor of a narrow abstractionism, only to be rediscovered in the middle 1960s. By that time a “radical escape hatch” for artistic young outsiders, surrealism notably included gay and lesbian artists (at least in the U.S.); new influences from the art world itself further widened the aperture as versions of surrealism advanced via Pop Art and minimalism.

When art critic and political radical Lucy Lippard entered the picture, she foregrounded the centrality of a “sexual charge” in the newly emerging art, without the polemical “narcissism” of the classic European surrealists. That is to say, rather than being confined to those artists accepted in official circles—essentially those blessed by founder Andre Breton—the surrealist influence now manifested itself amidst the social and cultural turbulence of the times. Rothkopf concludes that this was “the most fulsome animating impulse of American art in the 1960s and the most perspicacious mirror of its era.”

A few pages later, in an Introduction titled “Feelings are Things: a Sixties Surreal,” the three editors provocatively and usefully ask, “What if Surrealism, not Cubism, had emerged as the dominant force to shape the course of postwar art in America,” (xiii) which translates remarkably as “What if it were subject matter, not form, that had been primary to artists in those crucial Atomic years in the United States?” (xiii) What a thought! They go on to suggest how Surrealism, attacked in art criticism by Clement Greenberg and other purists, might have had a different trajectory in the art world.

There is something missing here, of course. Greenberg and his erstwhile allies at the once-radical Partisan Review had set themselves upon the Cold War (the PR itself would take on a new sponsor, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose bills were paid by the Central Intelligence Agency). On the other hand, as the Soviet Union became a principal sponsor of liberation projects in the Global South, Communist aesthetics remained relentlessly realist—with remarkable exceptions to come, notably Cuban revolutionary art—even if artists long associated with the Popular Front, like Charles White, continued to take their own paths.

In short, improbability argues against the thesis. But so what? Throughout Sixties Surreal, we see artists experimenting, playing with “processes that included found-object assemblage, dismantling and reimagining bodies, and picturing altered consciousness through surreal forms.” Still, the argument comes to a rather stark conclusion: As the “Sixties” of both reality and lore came to an end, aesthetic diversity among artists across the country gave way to a formalism in Manhattan, the center of the booming art market. Everything else, everywhere else, became “regional,” with obvious and gloomy implications.

The 1958-1972 framework of Sixties Surreal further explains the scope, with a sudden, unexpected art rebellion mirroring the wider social and cultural unrest. Lucy Lippard noted in 1966 that for most people, the surreal suggested “anything odd, suspicious, impolite, unfamiliar, threatening, obscene or just plain unfamiliar.” Not that the term “Surrealism” would be uncontested even among its most prominent and best-organized devotees. An extraordinary 1968 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, “Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage,” included more than 300 art objects; it also inspired the rage of the aforementioned Chicago Surrealist Group, which considered art that was experimental but not particularly political (and thus undangerous) unrevolutionary.

Outside New York, the “Hairy Who” exhibits of 1966-’69 actually made a huge splash, not only on the fine art scene but on several future underground comic artists. This group of Chicago artists, however, seemed to pass by the Chicago Surrealist Group entirely, proving that different worlds did not communicate with each other even in the same city. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, whose lecturers prompted students from the late 1950s onward to think about surrealism, had been pointing toward something larger—perhaps that elusive synthesis of radical art and politics—but the connection was somehow never made. Perhaps the rebellious moods of the 1960s ran out of time.

Never mind: There is a lot to find in Sixties Surreal. Artists like Claus Oldenburg and Louise Bourgeois will be familiar to readers, but how about Jay DeFeo? A proto-feminist artist working in San Francisco in the late 1950s, DeFeo is best remembered for The Rose, a painting so large that it could not be removed from her apartment by any normal means (she died of the toxic substances in the paint), but she also collaborated with artist Wallace Berman to create images depicting her body, semi-nude, as part of a dialogue with her artwork. This was the kind of art that unsettled critics of the time—what Lippard called the “abstractly sensuous object.” DeFeo’s work spoke for many but seemed to leave no successors. Or would Judy Chicago offer the realization, within and beyond the art world, of a radical political vision? Kenneth Anger? Yayoi Kusama? Robert Crumb?

All these and nearly 100 other artists are featured in Sixties Surreal. If it is an exhibition catalog that illustrates a giant disconnect amidst its winding historical paths, it is also, and more importantly, one that will bring any interested reader pleasure, provocation, and insight.

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

Art Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

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How to Submit: An Interview with Dennis James Sweeney - Rain Taxi

2026-02-26T20:00:02.000Z

by Elise McHugh

Every acquisition editor can tell you stories of the ones that got away—those projects that excited us and that we had a great conversation with the author (or the author and their agent) about, but that ultimately ended up with a different publisher. Dennis James Sweeney’s How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses (New World Library, $18.95) was one of those manuscripts for me, so when I spotted the finished book at a local bookstore I snatched it up. The book is positive and supportive while also realistic about the challenges of getting published. Sweeney packs How to Submit with practical advice bolstered by both personal examples and profiles of authors working in different genres.

Sweeney, a lecturer at Amherst College, is the author of four chapbooks, including Ghost/Home: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Haunted (Ricochet Editions, 2020). Their first book, In the Antarctic Circle (Autumn House Press 2021), won the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize and they were featured as part of Poets & Writer’s Debut Poets of 2021. Their second book, the essay collection You’re the Woods Too (Essay Press, 2023), was the Editor’s Selection for the Essay Press/University of Washington Bothell MFA Book Contest and went on to be a Small Press Distribution bestseller. And their third book, The Rolodex Happenings (Stillhouse Press, 2024), won the Stillhouse Press Novella Prize.

If a new book wasn’t enough to keep them busy, Sweeney and their partner just welcomed their second child into the world. In the midst of sleepless nights and busy days on multiple fronts, Sweeney took time out to sit down and speak with me about their newest book.

Elise McHugh: Can you talk about how you got the initial idea for How to Submit?

Dennis James Sweeney: How to Submit began way back in the old days of the internet (about ten years ago), when the literary website Entropy was just beginning. Janice Lee, the editor of the site, began a “Where to Submit” list that she asked me to run. It became a surprisingly popular resource, and it helped me understand how communal it can be to submit writing (if you’re a writer) and publish writing (if you’re a publisher), especially in the small press and literary magazine worlds. After Entropy closed, I went on to teach a “How to Submit” class at GrubStreet in Boston, and it showed me the importance of having conversations about submitting—not just logistical information distributed by an “expert.” I wrote How to Submit as a node, a middle point, in that conversation.

EM: Why do you think it’s important for writers to find community, and how might someone begin that search for themselves?

DJS: Community is a wonderfully vague though magnetic word: We are always searching for it, and it’s hard to know when we find it. In my experience, finding community begins with a feeling. When I read a book and I recognize it somehow—when I feel belonging in its pages—that is writing community. I also feel it when I meet a fellow reader or writer, and we just know each other even though we’ve never met before. I feel it during the publication process, too, when an editor digs into the nitty gritty of my word choice and we both show our deep care for the minute problems of language.

That’s what community is to me: a shared orientation toward a particular form of magic. Beginning the search for that is as simple as finding what you care about and then finding other people who care about it too. More practically, I think it often means contributing your energy, once you’ve identified others who are invested in that same thing. Giving your labor to a publication, sharing work in public spaces, and showing up for fellow writers bring the community into more determinate, physical being.

EM: Throughout How to Submit, you remind the reader to keep in mind their reasons for wanting to be published. In fact, having readers reflect and write about their reasons for submitting is the first writing prompt in the book. Why do you feel this is so important?

DJS: The biggest obstacle to having a positive experience seeking publication, I think, is getting caught up in the “I must achieve maximum prestige and maximum book sales!” whirlwind. Asking why you want to publish is an essential antidote to that mindset. Do you want to connect with people? Share a story that needs to be shared? Just enjoy your creative practice? Each of these will entail different approaches to submissions, and they’ll often depart from more conventional, measurable markers of success. Success is when you feel fulfilled, and we’ve got to swim upstream a bit to remember that.

EM: What do you find attractive about the small press community and the work it is producing?

DJS: Small presses usually operate by a logic kindred to the one I describe above; they ask not how much can we sell, but how can we prioritize the writing and the people involved in it? Two friends hand-stitching chapbooks in their basement actually have a lot in common with a mid-size non-profit publisher, at least in terms of their overall ethic: They want to create alternative economies for readers, ones apart from the capitalist mindset that often drives productivity. For me, these alternative economies result in writing that’s weirder, more fun, more risk-taking, and more representative of marginalized experiences than writing produced by systems based on profit.

EM: Early in the book, you discuss how Margaret Atwell of Feminist Press responded to publishing executives of Penguin Random House calling small presses “farm teams” for the large commercial houses. In your opinion, what is the ideal relationship between small press publishers and literary magazines and the large houses and their imprints?

DJS: My take on these different publishing communities is that we should do away with that hierarchical mindset, where publishing with the Big Five is considered “better” than publishing with a small press. There are economic realities involved, I get that—the Big Five houses generally have more money and resources. But increasingly, those resources still aren’t enough to make a meaningful dent in writers’ living expenses. So we can begin to think of different publishing circumstances as horizontally related instead: They are simply focused toward different audiences.

EM: The publishing landscape is vast and keeps shifting. It can seem overwhelming for someone just starting out. What are your recommendations for a writer who feels they are ready to start this journey?

DJS: I try to remind my students, when I teach the live version of “How to Submit,” that they don’t have to do everything at once. Subscribe to a single new literary magazine each year. Expand your reading habits to one small press you’ve never read from before. Submit a piece of writing to a single venue that resonates with you—especially one that isn’t big and intimidating. This flourishing ecosystem is made up of little interactions; it’s not some big community that’s located “out there.” Every moment of connection that is meaningful to you is exactly the thing you’re looking for.

EM: Why do you feel writing book reviews is beneficial for the review writer, and how would you suggest a person get started? In what ways do reviews remain important for authors and their publishers, and what do you see as the future of book reviews as traditional venues for them continue to shrink?

DJS: Writing reviews is such a great way to get involved with literary community. Magazines and literary websites always want to publish reviews, authors always want to receive reviews, and it’s just fun to read new books that haven’t gotten the attention they deserve. I remember what a joy it was to start getting books sent to me in the mail by publishers after I wrote my first few reviews. People complain, sometimes, about how book reviews have gone from a format for critique to a cog in the hype machine, and there’s truth to that. But it’s different for books that might only ever receive a single review: That one review might make a meaningful difference in the book’s ability to get into people’s hands. Like literature itself, book reviews and the venues for them will change—especially as social media becomes the de facto venue for sharing thoughts on literary writing—but the need for people to say what they think with care, enthusiasm, and nuance will never go away.

EM: Everyone wants their book to connect with the people they believe will find it most enjoyable and useful. Who are those audiences for you? What role would you like to see How to Submit play in the lives of individuals, classrooms, and the small press community itself?

DJS: I see my book as a middle point in the conversation—I didn’t start it, and I won’t be the last word on it either. My first hope is that How to Submit will help writers enter that conversation, allowing them to become part of the literary community more actively and confidently than they might be able to without having access to this information. Second, I hope that its use both in and out of classrooms can make a subtle corrective to the prevailing logic of submitting your writing, which, without a bit of supervision from the deepest part of ourselves, can veer toward commodification and cycles of ambition without satisfaction. Even though this book presents itself as mostly logistical, I’d also love for others in the small press community to see it as the love letter it is, a paean to a context that has been so welcoming to me and transformative to how I practice writing.

EM: Putting together a book about the multifaceted publishing world is complicated. How did you go about researching the material in this book?

DJS: So much of the research that led to this book came from my own submission process, which I was very focused on for years, plus my development of the “How to Submit” course. That meant the hardest part of the research was the “Case Studies” chapter, where I interviewed three fellow writers in depth about their experiences seeking publication: Lisbeth White, Jackson Bliss, and Zoe Tuck. Talking to them was lovely, and it is always an act of vulnerability to open yourself to others and see how their story affects your work. In keeping with the connective spirit of the book, it turned out this was the most rewarding part of writing it: getting to have conversations with writers I admired about what submitting means to them.

EM: You developed and tested the material that became How to Submit in a class you taught by the same name at GrubStreet in Boston. What advice can you give to teachers of both traditional and nontraditional creative writing classes who want to either a) develop a full course on how to identify potential publishers and submit to them or b) find ways to address some of this material in their classes even if they can’t devote a full course to the subject?

DJS: Start with the personal. What has submitting been like for you as a writer? What are your personal strategies? What do you struggle with? It’s tempting to share information about publishing in a top-down way, in order to give students some level of certainty in this always-shifting landscape. But I think it’s much more productive to inhabit the tensions together, whether that means each writer regularly sharing their evolving practices during a full course on getting published or making time for a heartfelt conversation about writers’ anxieties regarding publication as part of a one-time addendum to a writing class.

EM: What have the book’s reception and feedback been like so far?

DJS: It’s been delightful to talk about How to Submit with people who see the Big Five, agented publishing model as the model, which makes my book the “alternative.” I’ve seen the literary magazine and small press world as the center for so long that it is sometimes hard to describe what I do in terms that make sense to people who aren’t already part of this. That said, when I ask people questions about what they really want out of publishing, they almost never focus on making it big. At the end of the day, our priorities are all pretty kindred. That’s why the conversations I have been having about the book ultimately feel so energizing—especially this one, since speaking with you (as an editor at a mid-sized university press) and directing it toward the Rain Taxi audience feels like such a home to me.

EM: What are you working on now, and what do you hope might be your next long-term project?

DJS: I needed a break after writing How to Submit, which I did quickly because I sold it on proposal. For me, that break looks like being as creative and weird as possible about my writing style, as opposed to the prescriptive mode of How to Submit. In process are a memoir-in-essays about coming to terms with my Inflammatory Bowel Disease, a poetry book called “Biolamp” that continues to surprise me, and a novella about an imagined Antarctic. Plus whatever energizes me to write in the gaps, because that’s what I need right now (and maybe we all do): energy.

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

Interview

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

The post How to Submit: An Interview with Dennis James Sweeney appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Library of Artistic Print on Demand - Rain Taxi

2026-02-19T22:31:26.000Z

Post-Digital Publishing in Times of Platform Capitalism

Edited by Annette Gilbert and Andreas Bülhoff
Spector Books ($60)

by Richard Kostelanetz

As a publishing technology new to the 21^st Century, Print on Demand (POD) enables a smaller book publisher (or a self-publishing author/artist) to print one bound copy at a time for a reasonable cost, in contrast to the traditional “print run” that requires larger quantities of copies to get lower production costs per book. Although I still publish nonfiction with traditional publishers, I started favoring POD some fifteen years ago to self-publish my highly experimental literature, work that wouldn’t otherwise get into even small-press print. As an author then in my seventies (and now in my eighties), I wanted to put into the public arena every text I think belongs there, and POD allowed me to realize that.

Now this brick of a book, roughly the size of an old telephone directory and with tiny print on large pages to boot, offers a plethora of highly imaginative moves that artists, writers, and publishers around the world are doing with POD. Although clumsily subtitled, the book does take a wide view as to how this technology intersects with the currently collapsing “post-digital” marketplace. As the publisher explains: “Today an entire subculture is exploring print on demand in search of new economies and publics, while also critically negotiating our digital present. The Library of Artistic Print on Demand maps this experimental field for the first time.”

The “mapping” metaphor gestures to both the internationalism of the essays and the terrain of ideas covered in the essays. Here are just a few examples of some of the holdings of this unique library:

• Michael Mandiberg, a CUNY media professor, has audaciously made PDFs (files prepared for printing) of the entire contents of Wikipedia, which he makes available as files for customers to print on demand (even if few actually do). I suppose this qualifies as an early masterpiece of a new genre, one I would call “Unprinted POD Literature.”
• Working in the tradition of the book arts and “Artists’ Books,” the theoretically inclined Italian artists Silvio Lorfosso and Giulia Ciliberto offer Blank on Demand (2011), in two volumes no less, with detailed specifications for all the sizes and formats available on the popular POD company Lulu. The absurdity of sending blank pages through a POD process is indeed a fitting indictment of “platform capitalism.”
• Eric Doeringer, a U.S. artist whose work acknowledges (some might say “copies”) modern masters, has taken a set of Sol LeWitt book-making instructions (initially used by LeWitt for a single edition of his 1974 The Location of Lines) and has realized them differently for eight different formats available on POD. Doeringer expands on a canonical modernist work in a fruitful direction: while LeWitt’s “content” is always the same, the look of each Doeringer edition is appreciably different.

Dozens of other remarkable book projects get at least a single page in this catalog. Each presentation includes précis, footnotes, keywords, printer, “platform,” “materialities,” and other relevant attributes—a crediting departure that I venture will become more popular.

The avatar of Library of Artistic Print on Demand is Annette Gilbert, a Berlin-based professor of literature who researches experimental forms of writing, artists’ books, and conceptual art; she is also the author of Literature’s Elsewheres: On the Necessity of Radical Literary Practices (MIT Press, 2022). Her co-editor Andreas Bülhoff, we are told, “works both artistically and academically at the intersection of text and technology.” The pair began the library as an academic project funded by the German Research Foundation, and the collection is now housed at the Bavarian State Library in Munich—and in the pages of this worthy book, which constitutes a publishing avant-garde insufficiently covered in my own otherwise compendious Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (Routledge), the third edition of which came out in 2018. With this review I begin to make amends.

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

Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

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Rain Taxi at AWP Baltimore - Rain Taxi

2026-02-17T23:53:47.000Z

March 5 - 7, 2026
Baltimore Convention Center
Baltimore, Maryland

Visit us at Table T649 in the AWP Bookfair!

As usual, Rain Taxi will be taking part in the annual AWP Conference & Bookfair, which this year takes place in Baltimore. Stop by our table to say hi, and see how we're celebrating 30 years of Rain Taxi with great deals on chapbooks and more. Plus become a member or renew your membership and receive a special gift!

Book Reviews & Literary Community:
Why Criticism Continues to Matter

Room 311, Level 300, Baltimore Convention Center
9:00 am to 10:15 am
Session code: T106

Rain Taxi editor Eric Lorberer will take part in a panel about book reviews. Fellow presenters include Alyse Bensel, Robin Becker, and Kathleen Rooney.
Click here to learn more.

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2026 Rain Taxi Readings and Events - Rain Taxi

2026-02-13T17:43:57.000Z

Translating the World: Ed Bok Lee, Robert Hedin, and Kaija Straumanis

Tuesday, February 10, 2026, Magers & Quinn Booksellers; co-sponsored by Rain Taxi

Photo by Kelly Everding; pictured from left to right are Ed Bok Lee, Robert Hedin, Eric Lorberer, and Kaija Straumanis

Amidst continued winter chills and challenges in the Twin Cities, a standing-room only crowd gathered at Magers & Quinn Booksellers for an evening of literary translation, with three acclaimed translators presenting recently published works: Ed Bok Lee (Hail, Che! by Korean poet Pak Jeong-dae); Robert Hedin (The Mountains of Kong by Norwegian poet Dag T. Straumsvag); and Kaija Straumanis (The River by Latvian novelist Laura Vinogradova). The evening was moderated by Rain Taxi Review of Books editor Eric Lorberer, and began with a poem read by Ayub Iman, an undergraduate at Metro State University.

Click here to view the video recording of this event on our YouTube channel.

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The Old Man by the Sea - Rain Taxi

2026-02-05T20:16:46.000Z

Domenico Starnone
Translated by Oonagh Stransky
Europa Editions ($17)

by Rick Henry

The writing life of Domenico Starnone, grand master of the Italian literary scene, is filled with novels, screenplays, awards, film adaptations, and translations of his works into a growing number of languages. In the autumn of 2025, The Old Man by the Sea joined a half-dozen other Starnone titles available in English, and it makes as fine an introduction to his work as any. The premise of this short novel is simple: Eighty-two-year-old writer Nicola has come to a small sea-side town for the summer and rented a house on the beach to write. From time to time, readers are privy to what and how he is writing and revising, and even to what he simply crosses out for the crime of being badly written.

Starnone invites multiple comparisons with Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novella The Old Man and the Sea—beyond using a very similar title, he shares Hemingway’s attention to women and the feminine, as well as to a sea “beast”—yet there are notable contrasts as well. Hemingway’s Santiago is a fisherman; after more than eighty days without catching anything, Santiago hooks a marlin larger than his boat, and mayhem ensues when sharks attack the marlin. Starnone’s old man has a quieter existential struggle: sitting by the sea, watching people on the beach, he writes, always with an overlying filter of his own life and its vagaries of memory; the only thing that ensues is Nicola’s sense of futility.

Fortunately, there’s a playful quality to this futility; as Nicola says late in the novel, “Writing about what really happens is pointless; actually, precisely because these notes are so clear, they risk disrupting things.” Starnone invites us to read the book as a series of disruptions informed by the eternal tension (and slippages) between reality and fiction. As for the ending, Nicola admits that he is “leaning” toward a happy one, and acknowledges that in fiction, he could make it so. In real life, of course, that boundary is in constant flux, like edges of all kinds—including the beach, that primordial border between sea and land, calm and tempest, mayhem and futility. Skimming along it are metal detectors and makers of literature alike, searching for something precious below the surface.

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

Fiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

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Dr. Werthless - Rain Taxi

2026-01-29T20:52:43.000Z

Harold Schechter and Eric Powell
Dark Horse Books ($29.99)

by Hank Kennedy

“He ruined comics”—or at least that’s the story countless books, articles, and documentaries have told about the damage Dr. Fredric Wertham did to the art form. Parent-Teacher Associations, members of the clergy, and even J. Edgar Hoover had all voiced their opposition to comics as well, but by claiming that comics caused juvenile deliquency—a claim the German-American psychiatrist made through articles in Ladies’ Home Journal and Saturday Review, his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, and testimony before Congress later that year—Wertham became the face of the anti-comics campaign in the United States.

Dr. Werthless, a graphic biography written by Harold Shechter and illustrated by Eric Powell, tells a more nuanced story than the one most comics fans are used to hearing—in fact, only the last quarter of the book is dedicated to crusade against the medium. Wertham had a long career before he turned his attentions to comics, so readers who know him only as a moral scold will learn much about his involvement in notorious murder trials, the Civil Rights Movement, and even the study of comics fandom.

Powell’s Eisner-Award winning comic series The Goon contains a healthy amount of black comedy, but there’s little comedy of any kind to be found in this book. Constantly frustrated at the perceived slowness with which his career advanced, Wertham was as undiplomatic as he was intelligent, so other physicians found him vain and difficult to work with.

There are also no laughs in sight when Albert Fish, a notorious rapist, child molester, and serial murderer who killed at least three children, enters the story. Shechter is a renowned true crime writer (he wrote a book on the Fish case, among many others), and he avoids the genre’s most egregious pitfalls here, taking care not to glamorize the killer nor blame his victims for their own deaths. Wertham testified for the defense in Fish’s murder trial, stating that Fish was insane and needed to be studied in a mental hospital—to no avail. Due to the brutality of his crimes, the jury found Fish guilty and sentenced him to death by the electric chair.

Powell’s EC Comics-influenced style aids him in recreating the comics that so offended Wertham. His work evokes EC greats Jack Davis and “Ghastly” Graham Ingels, which serves him well when he reproduces covers and interior art from the period. And he is clever with his storytelling—for example, he conveys the tale of Wertham’s first book Dark Legend: A Study in Murder, which appeared in 1941, in Golden Age style, complete with Ben-Day dots. (Though not every similarity to the Golden Age is positive: When the book relates the role EC Comics publisher William Gaines played, the layouts begin to resemble EC’s famously text-heavy ones, forcing Powell to cram his drawings into the small amount of space left over.)

While Schechter and Powell give due space to Wertham’s history beyond his attack on comics—he opened and ran a low-cost clinic in Harlem to treat Black children, for example—they unfortunately omit what doesn’t fit their thematic glue. In one chapter, they dramatize a letter to Wertham from a gay barber who asks for help with his “condition”; the doctor responds sympathetically, leading readers to think Wertham to be tolerant, even ahead of his time, in his treatment of gay people. The truth is altogether different: Seduction of the Innocent reveals that Wertham viewed homosexuality as a social contagion children must be protected from; he somewhat famously opined that Batman and Robin were “the wish dream of two homosexuals living together” and Wonder Woman was “the lesbian counterpart of Batman” whose “strength” made her “unwomanly.” Shechter and Powell excise this context, but given the large amount of research they did (there’s an extensive bibliography in the back of the book), it seems unlikely that they weren’t aware of Wertham’s true stance.

Wertham’s sin, to the authors of Dr. Werthless, is to have believed in the possibility of improving human behavior. They place Wertham in a category of those who “deny that we are natural-born killers” and instead think “murderers are the products of harmful social influences they are exposed to as children. They believe if young people could only be shielded from violence in media, juvenile crime would cease to exist.” But doesn’t this draw the contrast too starkly? Are our only choices to censor violence in media or to believe in a historically determined, unchanging, inherently violent human nature?

Shechter and Powell would hardly be alone in this pessimistic and arguably conservative view of humanity. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins wrote of “the selfish gene”; to zoologist Desmond Morris, humanity is nothing more than a “naked ape.” Yet this is not as settled as the above would have it. Canadian anthropologist Richard Lee, a winner of the Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award, has written that primitive humans were marked by a “generalized reciprocity in the division of food” and “relatively egalitarian political relations.” Clearly, human nature, such as it is, is fluid.

Wertham’s greatest fault was not to believe in improving the human condition—rather, it was that he wasted so much of his life on the blind alley of censorship. It was this that so diminished his professional legacy, turning a respected doctor with good intentions into the “Dr. Werthless” comics fans mock today.

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Graphic Novel & Comics Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

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Pink Lady - Rain Taxi

2026-01-22T20:02:05.000Z

Denise Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press ($20)

by George Longenecker

Sentimental without being saccharine, Denise Duhamel’s Pink Lady takes us through her mother’s decline and death at a nursing home in Rhode Island. While the book is a poetic memoir of sorts, Duhamel uses her mastery of craft to draw in the outer world of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election.

The book starts with “Prodigal Prayer,” in which the poet travels from Florida to be with her mother who is slowly declining in the same nursing home where she once worked as a nurse: “I drive her twenty-year-old Toyota to see her / in the Catholic nursing home where the priest reminds us / ‘this too shall pass.’” In “Last Picnic,” Duhamel and her sister take their mother out to a meal: “My mother’s chowder flipped in the wind and landed on her lap. / I wiped her up with a bunch of napkins. / My sister rescued the rolling bag of clam cakes.” “What My Mother Left Behind, What She Discarded,” a list poem of letting go, will surely be relatable to anyone who’s helped an aging parent clean out their home: “she’d given away the frying pans too heavy to lift / . . . / my dad’s bicentennial quarters (he collected one from every state) / . . . / the Encyclopedia Britannica . . .” Details like these are specific and touching.

As Pink Lady continues, Duhamel is able to weave in themes from the wider world. In “Wackadoodle,” the poet recalls when her mother had still been able to travel:

She visited me in Florida the day after
Trump won in 2016. When I’d sent her a ticket,
I thought we’d both be celebrating
the first woman president. I was baffled, sure
that the planes of the world would stop flying,
their wings too heavy with grief.

“Communique: Emails from Mount St. Rita’s” tersely describes what so many who had loved ones in hospitals or nursing homes went through during the Covid lockdowns, and “Purse” offers a sensual metaphor:

I emptied her white purse—
tissue pack and reading glasses, coupons
and address book. I once lived in a purse
inside her, my first pink home, the umbilical cord
a knotted strap. When I grew up, I took care
of my own purse, its pristine lining never stretched
or stuffed with a fetus.

Of course, any narrative arc about death can only lead one way, as related in “Baby Mouse, July 11, 2021:” “I’d gotten up early as I’d heard / clanking. My sister found a baby / mouse in her sink . . . What did the mouse / mean, if anything?” Duhamel and her family arrive at the nursing home to find “My mom was under / a white sheet, her eyes closed . . . We whispered as though my mom / could still hear. We were quiet / as three little mice.”

Despite Pink Lady’s deep current of grief, the collection ultimately opens possibilities for renewal after the death of a parent, as in “Poem in Which I Banish Sorrow”:

I have my mother in my pocket—her face
on the prayer card we had printed for her wake.
I ate oatmeal with maple syrup for breakfast
so how can the front page news hurt me?

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Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

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Portalmania - Rain Taxi

2026-01-20T17:53:40.000Z

Debbie Urbanski
Simon & Schuster ($18.99)

by Alissa Hattman

In her essay collection Men in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt writes that “storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” While political theory or cultural criticism might seek to define, answer, or name, storytelling invites us to experience the world through implication, to wrestle with ambiguity or contradiction in an effort to activate meaning that might otherwise be hard to pin down. Arendt’s use of the word “error” underscores that sometimes the rush to define can be counterproductive, even dangerous.

Debbie Urbanki’s short story collection Portalmania is a case in point, as it is less interested in defining the world on the other side of a given portal and more in the portal’s potential to puncture the fabric of societal assumptions and norms. These nine stories traverse the territory of fantasy, science fiction, and the absurd, but like the portals themselves, the book seems to occupy the liminal space of the in-between. Experimental in both genre and form, Portalmania invites us to hold nuanced and sometimes contradictory versions of truth, with topics ranging from parenting and neurodiversity to partnership and sexuality, not to mention notions of storytelling itself.

In the first story, the existence of portals helps a girl imagine alternative ways to think about home. The girl’s obsession with finding her own portal continues into adulthood, even as her mother insists that “this place could feel like home if you tried harder.” The mother sees the portals as flights of escapism, while her daughter views their potential as self-actualizing: “It isn’t abandonment at all. . . . It’s about believing in the possibility of other worlds and finding the world where you belong.” Even as portals start to overwhelm the ailing mother, she cannot see beyond her narrow definition of home.

Allowing and accepting the imagined worlds of others isn’t without its complications. “LK-32-C” is a story about a boy named Luke, his mother Beth, and Luke’s invented exoplanet. As Luke slips further into the imagined world, the family (which also includes a father and daughter) become more concerned. Beth tries everything to help Luke—a change of diet, a calming space in the house, ear protection when his sister is noisy—but nothing works. After a series of violent incidents at school and at home, a psychiatrist recommends a therapeutic boarding school for Luke. Beth attempts to connect with Luke by asking him questions about LK-32-C, but even that becomes fraught: “His drawings made me think, My son has something worthwhile inside of him. He has an entire world inside of him. I wanted to look at the drawings instead of him. I wanted him to stay away from me.”

The three-part story tackles complicated questions about parenting and the dangers of alienation via the imagination. Urbanski’s formal choices add depth and dignity to the characters: The first part is written in third person where we see the whole family together, while the second and third parts are from the perspectives of mother and son, allowing them to voice their own accounts. The effect is that both characters have agency in the story, while also highlighting their separation. As Beth grapples with being a “good parent,” we get to hear what Luke wants:

Why do people think everyone requires a mother? You did what I wanted you to do, which was to let me go. In the evening, I lie on my back and stare up at the point in the sky where I think you are. The silence around me is like a parent finally giving me what I need. The silence puts its arms around me.

Portalmania is intimately concerned with storytelling itself—who speaks and who is silent, who forces their definition or narrative onto others, who believes the story (or doesn’t), and how to tell a story in a way that people will listen. In “How to Kiss a Hojaki,” for example, Michael is experiencing his silent wife changing into someone he doesn’t recognize. He feels threatened by this and aggressively rejects his wife’s transformation, in some cases physically rewriting the boundaries she has set:

By the end of the summer, his wife had struck their monthly night of intercourse from the calendar. She had also stopped talking. I am changing into something else! Something that cannot have sex, she wrote. “I’m your husband!” he insisted, rewriting their sex night onto the calendar. She crossed if off with a thick black marker. He wrote it on again.

As the two struggle with their marriage, the political backdrop reminiscent of the 2016 election grows tense, which only amplifies the division within the household. Michael’s inability to understand his wife, as well as the changing world, makes him confused and enraged:

“My wife is turning into something that is not human,” he had told Dr. Sabrina at their previous session. Women did not use to believe they were turning into something else. If they turned into something else, it used to be not okay. The boundaries of what was human and acceptable used to be very clear. Michael liked how things used to be. There used to be a time when, if you were born human, it was difficult—impossible?—to leave your humanness behind. “Define human,” Dr. Sabrina had challenged him, raising her eyebrows like this was a complex argument, one that would really stump Michael. “Define wife,” he had shot back. “Define husband. Define spouse. Define conjugal obligations. Define making love. Define the legal definition of a marriage.”

This terror of illegibility is so threatening to Michael’s sense of self that he is willing to commit violence to preserve his definition of marriage. While the therapist in “How to Kiss a Hojaki” asks Michael for his definitions, the therapist in “Hysteria” suggests that Rebecca use tamer words to describe her experience of marital rape: “I wonder, can we try substituting certain words here, as an experiment?” she suggests. “He says he loves you when he’s having sex with you—when he’s making love to you—when you are having intercourse with each other. When he is exercising his conjugal rights, if we wish to be old-fashioned about it. The language you choose is important here.” In suggesting gentler words, the therapist’s revision minimizes and distorts Rebecca’s reality.

In “The Dirty Golden Yellow House,” Urbanski makes explicit the backflips writers often do to make taboo subjects, such as domestic violence or rape, “palatable” for the general public. Throughout the story, the writer voice interjects: “I realize this is not the most fun paragraph to read but try to stick with me here” and “There are some funny jokes about r—. I am saving them for later.” The writer even offers suggestions for readers who might be surprised or disturbed by such a topic:

I’d like to provide you with some background and statistics on marital r— now. Please skip the next two paragraphs, resuming your reading with the phrase Later that month, if any of the following apply:
• You consider interruptions like these an affront to your personal fictional escapism.
• You think marital r— in a story is stupid because why doesn’t she just get a divorce so we can stop talking about it.
• You are a marital r— expert.

The narrator then provides some statistics and goes into definitions of sexual coercion and consent, finally saying, “the boundaries of where consent ends and r— begins are still under debate and still broadening.” Urbanski’s use of metanarrative in “Dirty Little Yellow House” implicates us, the readers, as storytellers as well; it forces us to pause, to consider our preconceived expectations, and to witness these normalized abuses not just in the story but in our lives.

Throughout Portalmania, we see characters’ conflicting or confused definitions of love or partnership or home, but there are also significant moments in the collection where characters offer self-definition. One of the stories in which a character is being most honest with herself is “Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou (Based on Early Interactions)”:

I live at the intersection of a sex-repulsed asexuality and depression, the depression chronic and usually low grade but occasionally suicidal. Which came first? Did my depression lead to my asexuality? Am I depressed because I am asexual? Did both emerge simultaneously or were they always there? Questions of causation are a distraction from what’s important. I arrived at this intersection, and I stayed. The intersection looks modern enough, glass walled on the outside, all smooth reflective surfaces, but inside it smells dank, like a cellar, and the walls pulse like red alarms. I tried to want to be here.

Self-identifying as asexual or depressed is of course different than defining how someone else (e.g., a wife, mother, or writer) should be. While forced definitions can be oppressive and harmful, self-definition can be liberating. That’s not to say it’s easy to do, but in a very real sense it takes the story back from others’ reductive and harmful projections.

Urbanski’s stories turn the world outside-in, boldly exposing the psychic core of what is unsaid and unseen in all its brilliant, hard-to-define strangeness. While Portalmania centers the silenced, the ignored, the victim, the abject, the disappeared, the lost, and the misunderstood, the collection exists within a larger ethos of courage, care, and self-autonomy.

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Fiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

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TRANSLATORS - Rain Taxi

2026-01-15T20:38:11.000Z

Ed Bok Lee, Robert Hedin, and Kaija Straumanis

In conversation and moderated by Eric Lorberer

Tuesday, February 10, 2026, 7:00pm
Magers & Quinn Booksellers
3038 Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis

Free and open to the public—Register here.

Join us for an evening focused on great literary translation, co-presented with Magers & Quinn Booksellers! Three Minnesota translators with new releases from Korean, Norwegian, and Latvian will read from and discuss their work, moderated by Rain Taxi editor Eric Lorberer.

About the Translators

Ed Bok Lee began writing poetry while in kindergarten in Seoul, South Korea; since then he has published three acclaimed books of poetry. His poems have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese, and his honors include an American Book Award, an Asian American Literary Award, a Minnesota Book Award, and a PEN/Open Book Award. As a translator, Lee received the Modern Korean Literature Translation Grand Prize in Poetry; his translations have ranged from the prose of science fiction writer Anatoli Kim (Kazakstan/Russia) to Smiling in an Old Photograph: Poems by Kim Ki-taek and Hail, Che! by Pak Jeong-dae (South Korea). Lee teaches at Metro State University.

Robert Hedin is the author, translator, and editor of more than two dozen books of poetry. The recipient of many honors and awards for his work, he has taught at the University of Alaska, the University of Minnesota, St. Olaf College, and Wake Forest University. He is co-founder and former director of the Anderson Center at Tower View, a residential artist retreat in Red Wing, Minnesota.

Kaija Straumanis is an award-winning translator from the Latvian, and is the Editorial Director of Coffee House Press. Her translations include works by such authors as Inga Ābele, Jānis Joņevs, and Gundega Repše, among others. She received a 2020 NEA Literature Translation Fellowship for her work on Forest Daughters edited by Sanita Reinsone. Her most recent translation, The River by Laura Vinogradova, was longlisted for the 2026 PEN Translation Prize.

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Europe Without Borders - Rain Taxi

2026-01-15T17:22:06.000Z

A History

Isaac Stanley-Becker
Princeton University Press ($35)

by Poul Houe

First impressions of this book may prove telling. The cover features a color photo of Schengen by the Moselle River—a village not only situated “near the tri-point border” between France, Germany, and Luxembourg, but the site where the 1985 treaty that became Europe’s official goodbye to its centuries-old borders was signed. Still, what makes this photo of a picturesque village divided by a river so pertinent to the text is the duplicity it signals: Because borders continue to play a key role in the continent’s cultural and political makeup, Isaac Stanley-Becker’s Europe without Borders is about an issue with no end in sight.

How intricate a matter the author, an investigative reporter for the Washington Post, seeks to unwrap is pronounced less by the length of the book—273 pages—than by its 107 pages of notes and bibliography. It is a meticulous undertaking, its occasional repetition justified by the persistent ambiguities and contradictions that continue to mark Europe’s grappling with its border issues and the shadows they cast on its very identity.

Money and people are the simplest expression of modern Europe’s dichotomy, but soon the simplicity multiplies and becomes hard to unravel. The Schengen ambition to extend the free market to free border crossing of people as well as goods benefits European nationals only; what about migrants, human rights, transnational freedom? Can a cosmopolitan community be European only? Stanley-Becker writes: “Schengen’s pairing of freedom and exclusion became contested. . . . My aim in exploring that project is to reveal the cruel anomalies of human movement in a world where capital and commodities travel globally with far less restraint and where national citizenship is an enduring precondition for the exercise of fundamental rights.”

From day one, the Treaty of Rome and organizations like Citizens’ Europe centered on “A Market Paradigm and Free Movement,” as Stanley-Becker titles his first chapter. But are these two sides of the same coin or polar opposites? How do the Rome Treaty’s humanist ideals match with its common market agenda? After the 1920s pan-European movements towards a borderless Europe—stalled by Hitler’s “cosmopolitan bastard” hostility—were resurrected after World War II, did they intertwine goods and people, as the Customs Union did, or were “human rights” and the “needs of the economy” balanced differently? In a famous lawyer’s words, “market freedoms . . . have something in common with human rights,” though the latter were not the “classical human rights.” A famous court case, assisted by this lawyer, “upheld uninterrupted commerce as the essence of European union” and compelled the free movement aspiration of Citizens’ Europe to be “enshrined” by “a market paradigm.”

The Treaty of Rome was first and foremost about money, and a “noneconomic defense of free movement [of people] did not exist in Community law.” So, boundaries waited to be crossed at Schengen in “A Treaty Signed on the Moselle River,” the title of the book’s second chapter about the waterway tracing Europe’s transition from “domain of empire” to “warring continent” to “transnational community.” A “new principle of freedom of movement”—beyond market needs and national borders—was now in writing, if only for European nationals.

A more generous form of balance, struck earlier by The Benelux Economic Union, “protected noneconomic rights while promoting cross-border market exchange.” This have-it-both-ways agenda contrasted especially with the French-German plan to harmonize national laws while resisting “supranational authority over external borders.” Schengen’s cosmopolitan and social space for market exchange would finally realize Citizens’ Europe and allow for nationals from all its countries, even those outside Schengen territory. At the same time, freedom had to be balanced with security; no aliens or “illegal immigrants” were to be admitted, and the right to residence was still not to be granted to just any border crosser. “Slowly, Schengen took shape as a system of dualisms” under no supranational authority. On the plus side of its account was still money, on the minus side free movement of people, hard to gauge because of Franco-German conflicts and several inconsistencies, such as Berlin’s “asylum tourism,” in sync with border failings worsened by growing public “sensitivity . . . to non-European immigrants.”

When European diplomats in 1990 made “A Return to the Moselle River” (as Chapter 3 is named), they aimed to emphasize Schengen’s European Union intent, to underscore security’s greater importance than freedom, and to fuse intergovernmental cooperation with national sovereignty. The treaty’s opposition to asylum seekers differed from the Council of Europe’s stance in that “Schengen’s ‘shadow’ darkened the ‘European fortress’”—or, as one treatymaker put it: “We tend to keep human rights for our own nationals.”

Chapter 4 deals with “A Problem of Sovereignty” or with cosmopolitanism versus nationalism. Might Schengen “become a laboratory for the breach of democratic principles and human rights,” as some parliamentarians worried? An illiberal, anti-foreigner’s “Fortress Europe,” or, in other words, “a violation of free movement and human rights.” Many nationalists saw Schengen as a mere cloak for “the global market’s penetration into domains of national autonomy and individual freedom” and claimed that its “pairing of free movement with security would cause unfreedom.” Charles de Gaulle’s prime minster warned his boss that this “European integration represented the ‘end of France.’” Conversely, the Constitutional Council assured nations that European “supranationalism would not preempt nationalism” and affirmed “the pairing of freedom with security.” Nonetheless, “realization of a Europe without internal borders has proved to be a lot more complex and complicated than its promoters had imagined,” and the time after the first treaty was signed only “made evident the ambiguities of all that Schengen had come to symbolize,” which one German politician interpreted as a “step into the European surveillance state.”

Schengen was not only “A Place of Risk,” as Stanley-Becker calls Chapter 5, but “a place of risk in a double sense.” Schengen land had become a site where police and computer surveillance were now replacing “the border barrier” with high-tech distinctions between insiders and outsiders, nationals and foreigners, asylum seekers and undesirables, to mention just one “racial marker.” The benefits of free movement came at a price, and Stanley-Becker dwells on the gap between supranational border-policing and true internationalism. Schengen had become “a place of risk” and its free movements questionable.

The book’s sixth and last chapter is devoted to the consequences as experienced by undocumented migrants, spelled out in the title “A Sans-papiers Claim to Free Movement as a Human Right.” These are people whom nativists saw emerging from the “shadows of illegality to seek recognition,” mobilized as a “countermovement to the animus against non-Europeans aroused by the opening of borders.” Further muddling Schengen’s history, their movement was marked by the impact of the oil crisis on guest workers, by French xenophobia, and by racist European immigration laws. Yet, “making and crossing borders has always been one of the ways in which societies are built,” as a spokesperson for the paperless put it, and so these people refuse “to return to the shadows” or to cave in to the new liberals’ adoption of colonialism. While capital may circulate freely, nationals of poor countries may not.

In Stanley-Becker’s “Epilogue” it all adds up to a verdict on Schengen’s role in Europe’s transformation into a common market and a site of human(istic) integration. The downside was a lack of model for transitioning into this “reunified Europe” within “the setting of globalization.” Open borders within Schengen turned into boundaries of exclusion surrounding the territory as “internal European freedom meant fortifying . . . external borders.” With the mass migration in 2015—about 13,000 into Germany every day—internal border control, which had been meant to disappear, only increased and deepened Schengen’s internal division. It was a backlash to free movement, and soon the borderless status was further compromised—first by Brexit, then by Covid—until internal borders literally got resurrected and controlled, if only indirectly and as an exception. Schengen “isn’t dead but broken” was the sense within the European Council, to which Stanley-Becker rightfully adds that there “was never a Europe without borders . . . Nor was it meant to be otherwise by the treatymakers.”

Rarely has the complexity of Europe’s recent border issues, and its mix of national and transnational inclinations, been as carefully documented as in Stanley-Becker’s book, from its front cover to its countless notes. Its source material contains dilemmas of such phenomenological importance that one would want to see them discussed beyond continental boundaries. They are food for rethinking borders (as John. C. Welchman called his 1996 anthology), and the outcome may well exceed the borders of both Europe and Europe without Borders.

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Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

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Abundant Life - Rain Taxi

2026-01-13T17:10:43.000Z

New and Selected Poems

Hank Lazer
Chax Press ($34)

by Jefferson Hansen

A profound playfulness characterizes Hank Lazer’s Abundant Life: New and Selected Poems. Ranging from formal experiments to handwritten “shape” poems, the pieces here move from one revelation to another, but they are all grounded in everyday life and firmly rooted in Lazer’s improvisatory writing practices.

Lazer’s explorations of form are often delivered in “serial heuristics,” which the author describes in his Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008 (Omnidawn, 2008) as “the developing of a particular procedure or form or set of rules for a series of poems which become . . . how I will live in poetry for that period.” The earliest collections from which Abundant Life selects contain such experiments. Days (Lavender Ink, 2002), for example, features ten-line poems that are dense with word play and seeming non-sequiturs. There is an off-beat, rhythmically knotty quality to these poems:

i sing the body
eclectic uh defective
icing the bawdy
directive rodin to young
rilke “toujours travailler”
all words & no fray
makes yack a dull
“stable & precarious”
Rose on licorice er
icarus’ wings

Lazer here plays with Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” along with an instruction the sculptor Rodin gave to the poet Rilke—“work all the days”—which Lazer then uses as a springboard to riff on the saying “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” rhyming “fray” for “play” and changing “work” to “words” and “Jack” to “yack.” He also suggests the hesitancy of improvisation with the quasi-words “uh” and “er” and bounces between allusions (there’s Icarus, of course, but also John Dewey and Gertrude Stein toward the end) in an offbeat, herky-jerky rhythm that mimics how thinking can come fitfully.

Abundant Life switches gears with one of Lazer’s most important poems, “Deathwatch for My Father,” from Elegies and Vacations (Salt Publishing, 2004). This is a long, diary poem with dated sections that pertain to Lazer’s experience on that day as his father was dying of leukemia. He begins by asking:

why am i
writing in the face of
your dying

Several pages later, after recounting his father’s gallows humor and their talk of golf, Lazer seems to have an answer, culled in part from poet George Oppen:

he would i know
encourage me (& perhaps has
in writing this poem) to
test poetry in the face
of the worst events

This is perhaps the most self-referential reflection in the poem, which insists on the dailiness of facing the anguish of a dying loved one. Lazer describes fighting tears as he goes golfing alone to honor his and his father’s love of the sport. Even amidst anguish, however, Lazer finds room for playfulness; in a kind of mid-line acrostic, he spells his father’s name:

not one prinCipally given to words
but works Hard these
lAst days
to wRite a series of thank you notes
the one to warren worries him a Lot
hE can’t get it right
with the noSe

Lazer turns to religion as a subject matter around 2005. Never devotional or dogmatic, he is interested in profound religious experience, not the institutions and their sometimes-numbing rituals. He describes himself as a Jewish Buddhist agnostic; in his recently published (and self-deprecatingly titled) What Were You Thinking: Essays 2006–2024 (Lavender Ink, 2025) he asserts that religious experience is “analogous to the reading experience of innovative poetry—an enigmatic encounter that requires patience, open-mindedness (in Zen terminology, the beginner’s mind), and the development of an ability (negative capability?) to live in uncertainty and with an ethical humility that suggests the incompleteness of our understandings.” For him, religious practice and innovative poetry both offer contemplative opportunities to keep the world fresh, open, and complicated.

In the 2010s Lazer developed a new form of writing: shape poems. This work is handwritten in cursive, with lines that roam freely about; sometimes the writing is even upside down, forcing the reader to rotate the page. These poems also include short quotations from philosophers Martin Heidegger, Emmanual Levinas, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the last of this series of books, Slowly Becoming Awake (Dos Madres Press, 2019), integrates quotations from the 13th-century Zen Buddhist monk Eihei Dogen (e.g., “Do not treasure or belittle what is far away, but be intimate with it. Do not treasure or belittle what is near, but be intimate with it”). As with his other books that use quotation, Lazer chooses passages that are free from jargon and have meaning for readers unfamiliar with the thinker, and Slowly Becoming Awake uses about five different colors of ink, adding to its visual playfulness.

After his spate of shape poems, Lazer perhaps cheekily titled his next collection Poems That Look Just Like Poems (Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2019). Sure enough, these are left-justified typewritten poems with short lines. The first of them, “As If,” reads:

i begin
each day
(which is already
a false statement)
attending to my
study & the yard
the bird feeders
the weather
certain that this
simplified world
exceeds my under
standing of it

With its immediate parenthetical disclaimer, “As If” gets at the rich complexity Lazer senses in “this / simplified world.” Immediacy is a value for Lazer; he tells us in What Were You Thinking that he rarely revises his poems, preferring them to be “of the moment,” and this momentariness consistently honors the specificity of the writing act as it occurred amid moods, attentional foci, obsessions, and sensible facts. For Lazer, everything is always different than it was. In its generalizing tendencies, language can give the lie to this abundance, but poetry can run counter to this tendency, reminding the writer and the reader of how specific, and precious, an individual moment is.

Lazer has continued his lean into life’s abundance in the current decade. In Covid 19 Sutras (Lavender Ink, 2020), he uses a variety of forms—centered four-line stanzas, serially indented four-line stanzas, long-lined free verse—to capture the grinding fear and dread during the pandemic, as in a poem about his elderly mother’s hospitalization:

   i think
you are
on your way
& it pains me
      that i
  that no one
  can be
with you

In Pieces (BlazeVox, 2022), which lifts its title from a Robert Creeley book, Lazer pays homage to a “brown dog / actively sniffing / everywhere” and to a beloved uncle, a Biblical scholar who talked to God on his porch in the mornings, concluding that “anything seen / in an enlightened manner / becomes revelatory.” One could hardly put it more economically than that, but Lazer fleshes out his spiritual aesthetics in What Were You Thinking when he writes,

at the heart of spiritual experience is gratitude for consciousness, and some means of reflecting upon both that gratitude and the nature and possibilities of consciousness . . . If spiritual experience is in some way centered in the fact and experiencing of consciousness, no wonder then the intimacy of spiritual experience and language. And thus no wonder the intimacy and inter-dependency of spiritual experience and poetry.

For Lazer, poetry is akin to spiritual experience because both cause us to appreciate the countless particulars around us. Life is always more than we think it is, and Lazer’s entire poetic career has been reminding us of this plenty. An Abundant Life indeed.

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Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

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Chronicle of Drifting - Rain Taxi

2026-01-08T18:25:55.000Z

Yuki Tanaka
Copper Canyon Press ($17)

by John Bradley

Although Surrealism is among the most important artistic movements of the past hundred years, the adjective “surreal” has largely lost its connection to the unconscious and the marvelous. Merriam-Webster, for example, defines “surreal” as “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream,” which is adequate, if lackluster. To witness the power of the surreal to startle and delight, readers should open Yuki Tanaka’s debut poetry collection Chronicle of Drifting, which demonstrates that Surrealism is very much alive.

The title poem consists of sixteen prose poems, all quietly surreal. Here’s the eighth, typical of the series:

A stray cat in an alley in Yotsuya. I had no food but I made a gesture of food inviting the cat but she didn’t come. The locksmith there was wonderful, taught me how to fix my apartment key, which had been bent when it got too close to a kerosene stove at the train station. He reheated it with a burner, until the key glowed in front of us, and he used pliers to unbend it, like setting a broken tail straight. The cat in my head cried in pain, but I patted her to be quiet. Went home with a bag of strawberries, lettuce, oysters, but my head was full of dry things. Someone walking outside. Voice of a sweet-potato seller with a shy trumpet. I can’t make music, not being a piano. But as a child, I kicked sand into the ferns, making the sound of light rain.

There’s a dream-like narrative here, as in the other prose poems in this series, with surprising turns, from a cat to a locksmith to “someone walking outside”; at times associative patterns can be seen, as in the closing lines that move from “shy trumpet” to “not being a piano” to kicking up “the sound of light rain.” The delightful ease and sense of whimsy Tanaka conjures reinforce the playful transformations of self that “Chronicle of Drifting” so expansively relates.

Although this is Tanaka’s first book, he has also translated, with poet Mary Jo Bang, a selection of poems by the Japanese Surrealist Shuzo Takiguichi (1903-1979); in their introduction to A Kiss for the Absolute (Princeton University Press, 2024), Bang and Tanaka say of Takiguchi that his “I” is “a constructed poetic entity—an impish shape-shifter who dashes quickly through a world overflowing with associative imagery.” The same could be said of Tanaka’s own work. In the opening of “Like One Who Has Mingled Freely with the World,” the speaker is imitating a bird: “Surrounded by children, I leap up / with a huge silk scarf around my shoulders // to look like a crane.” But in the very next line, everything changes: “They laugh and laugh / and push me into a rabbit skin and watch.” Just like that, our narrator is now a rabbit “with long ears” who hopes “they’ll let me in”—and it’s only the third stanza of a nine-stanza poem! The speaker then tells us of an earlier mingling, when a “girl in a wedding kimono / . . . screamed when I popped up from the rice paddy // like a big frog.” Near the end of the poem, the speaker holds an umbrella “up against the clear sky,” sounding rather human, at least temporarily.

While Tanaka’s roots can be traced to classic Surrealism, the worlds he creates are unlike any other. In “Prognosis at Midnight,” the speaker reads about a “grandmother” who “fell down the stairs and broke her hip.” This triggers a fantasy where the speaker has his chauffer take him to this woman to “comfort her”:

                                         I’d say, I read about you, I’m terribly sorry,
            this is my cockatoo, he’s twelve and loves carrots.
            We’d share her hospital dinner and be happy.
            Other sick people gather around us, admiring my cockatoo,
            who looks proud in his cage, unfurling his light-pink wings,
            like stage curtains, and I’m his assistant.

The fantasy continues, no longer feeling like a daydream but like an actual narrative, albeit a fantastical one. Here, as in most of the collection, there’s a casual ease, an effortlessness to the poem’s movement. The only poems that feel strained are in the section “Discourse on Vanishing”; a note in the back of the book explains that these are erasures of Tanaka’s doctoral dissertation. No wonder they feel enervated.

This is a minor issue, however, in a wondrous debut book. Only in Chronicle of Drifting could a reader hear “Tonight, after rain / I’d like you to fly through these irises, // your blue mustache, blue cheeks / infected with sky.”

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Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

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Flight into Fiction: An Interview with John Tottenham - Rain Taxi

2026-01-07T19:49:59.000Z

by Zack Kopp

Originally from England, John Tottenham has made Los Angeles his home for over two decades. A sharp critic of both writing and visual art, he has published reviews and essays in numerous publications, including a long-standing column in the art magazine Artillery. Tottenham gives his acerbic instincts free reign in his creative work as well; merely to read the titles of his four books of poetry to date—The Inertia Variations (Kerosene Bomb Publishing, 2004), Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment (Penny-Ante Editions, 2012), The Hate Poems (Amok Books, 2018), and Fresh Failure (Hat & Beard Press, 2023)—gives one a sense as to why he was dubbed a “magnanimous misanthrope” by the Huffington Post.

Tottenham has now published his first novel, Service (Semiotext(e)/Native Agents, $17.85), and if the title of the book seems a bit restrained, rest assured that there’s plenty of invective in these pages. A deadpan satire about life as an underpaid, jaded bookstore clerk, the book follows hapless narrator Sean Hangland as he rails against an illiterate society; Tottenham’s prose strikes a tone of deliberate unconventionality that manages to come off as self-deprecating and arrogant at the same time.

Zack Kopp: Before we get into Service, I have to note that you began as a poet. Which of your books of poetry do you recommend most highly, and why?

John Tottenham: My first book of poetry, The Inertia Variations, consists of 125 eight-line poems on subjects such as work avoidance, indolence, and failure. It was the fruit of many fruitless years and was subsequently adapted into a film and recording of the same name by Matt Johnson, the singer-songwriter behind the band The The. The Hate Poems is the most popular volume I’ve published, although that’s possibly owing to the photograph of a cute cat on the cover. The most recent and probably final collection, Fresh Failure, came out last year. Any of those will do.

ZK: I remember seeing The Hate Poems in bookstores when it came out. Who conceived of the cover?

JT: The cat cover was entirely my idea, as has been the case with the jacket designs of all my books. I don’t know how to use Photoshop, so I stand there and direct people who have mastered it and give them the credit—until now. I rifled through thousands of cat postcard images online and elsewhere to come up with that particular one. I used to be a keen deltiologist.

ZK: How did you come to work with Matt Johnson, and how did you feel about the translation of your writing to another medium?

JT: Matt was introduced to The Inertia Variations by a mutual friend while experiencing a long creative drought. He took it upon himself to interpret the work, producing a full-length CD and using my verses as a sort of soundtrack that was woven throughout an auto-documentary chronicling his own years of inertia. The film is mostly of interest to hardcore fans of The The, who want to know what Johnson was up to during the decade when he wasn’t producing any new work.

ZK: Turning to Service, how long did it take to write the novel?

JT: The novel itself was actually completed five years ago, although I’ve tinkered around with it since then.

ZK: Your main character works in a bookstore, as you yourself have done. In the age of auto-fiction, what makes Service more than autobiographical?

JT: Some people might recognize the novel’s setting and assume it’s entirely autobiographical, but since I don’t have much of an imagination I used a recognizable reality as the basis for a flight into fiction. Ninety-five percent of it is invented.

ZK: You’re one in a long line of writers about modern life in Los Angeles. Who among your predecessors, if anyone, has been most influential on your development as a writer?

JT: I read John Fante’s Ask the Dust at a young age and it was responsible for some of my formative impressions of L.A. It was recommended to me by Charles Bukowski, whom I corresponded with for a while. Although Bukowski was popular in France and Germany, his books were only available as imports in England at the time, and it was a novelty for him to hear from an English reader, especially a teenager.

ZK: Trying to make a living as a writer usually involves a lot of freelance work, and that usually involves reviewing the work of others. What’s your best, worst, or most significant memory related to your involvement with Artillery?

JT: What comes to mind is that it was painful to do editorial work. The main problem with a lot of aspiring art writers—and this also applies to literary criticism—is that they desperately want to be taken seriously, so they try to make things sound more complicated than they actually are. By spouting theoretical jargon and art-damaged nonsense, they strive to be difficult, but they lack the chops to pull it off with any conviction and wind up sounding like idiots. Editing that stuff was excruciating; I often felt it was giving me brain damage. Critical theory can be a lot of fun, but that’s all it is, fun—precisely what it’s supposed to not be. It’s an elitist game played by the affluent and the overeducated. Nobody’s going to go there for wisdom, guidance, or solace; at the end of a day’s work, nobody’s going to want to come home and read theory. It’s only for people who want to feel smart about art they don’t understand. In the end, the tedium is the message: aesthetic rigor mortis.

ZK: Who’s your favorite contemporary author, and why?

JT: My favorite living author is probably the English prose stylist and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair. I like the way that he constructs sentences. But regrettably, I haven’t been reading much lately. I enjoyed Hans F. Wagner’s latest poetry collection, The Vegas Layer (which was published by a small press out of Colorado, Lithic Press, earlier this year). I picked it up in the same week that I finally bought a copy of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger and found that Wagner’s collection delivered what I had been disappointed not to find in the Dorn book: a richly impressionistic evocation of the mysterious Western landscape.

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Interview

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On Bumblebees - Rain Taxi

2025-12-22T21:06:28.000Z

and Other Books by Deborah Meadows

by Kit Robinson

The poet Deborah Meadows has made a career of collaging materials from a wide array of specialized disciplines to create conceptual works with lively, surprisingly personable surfaces. Her work demonstrates what happens when you put together words from disparate vocabularies to achieve a kind of de-specialization suggestive of the fact that postmodern life is, itself, a lesson in hybridity. Her latest book, Bumblebees, is a case in point.

For her earlier book Lecture Notes: A Duration Poem in Twelve Parts (BlazeVOX, 2018), Meadows attended a series of lectures in Humanities and Social Sciences at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Topics included game theory, neuroscience, history of financial capitalism, history of slave trade, comparative judicial politics, planetary science, evolutionary biology, and philosophy of science. In Lecture Notes, Meadows presented her rough notes as poetry.

In a like manner, Bumblebees hybridizes such linguistic domains as suggested by “Mongolian sandstorm,” “disturbed bones, quarried first causes, harp recordings,” “tangerine miniaturization plots,” “pet rocks,” and “mineral pigment flaked by time.”

Many of Meadows’s works are text-based, composed by extracting or commenting on fragments from an existing text arranged to form new combinations and sequences. For example, sections from her long serial poem “The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick” were published across multiple books, including Representing Absence (Green Integer, 2004), Thin Gloves (Green Integer, 2006), The 60’s and 70’s (Tinfish Press, 2003), and Itinerant Men (Krupskaya, 2004). This work comprises meditations on Melville’s stupendous novel by embedding key words within a commentary that assumes some of the same high rhetoric Melville deploys. Consider this passage from Chapter 26 of Moby-Dick:

“I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.

From these sentences, Meadows spins a fractal verse in Itinerant Men:

the ordinary irrational struggle
(fear of the whale Starbuck
            requires, never hunting after sun-
down) menace you from the centre
and circumference of flesh
            not as fearful as the dignity of divine
or spiritual terror
            not as tragic as the undoing of goodness
in our Starbuck.

Meadows thus plies a scavenger’s art, picking up gems of knowledge hither and yon. In another telling example, the acknowledgments in her Saccade Patterns (BlazeVOX, 2011) include Wikipedia entries, artwork by sculptor Robert Morris, and books ranging from Engines of Logic: Mathematics and the Origin of the Computer to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism. But how exactly such sources are absorbed and deployed in Meadows’s poetry often remains a mystery. Suffice to say there is a great deal going on in the background, and these deep strata give the work a shape and tone that conveys an urgent quest for knowledge backed by a stringent skepticism of received ideas.

In her preface to Translation – the bass accompaniment: Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2013), Meadows partially explains her method:

The bass guitar creates patterns that make music into a visceral experience – they are what infect the body. The poems … are in dialog with other authors, and here, experimental poetry engages logician Quine, encyclopedic novelist Melville, philosophers Irigaray and Deleuze, theologian and synthetic philosopher Aquinas, poets Dragomoshchenko, Hejinian, Raworth, Baudelaire, and Celan, Soviet cinematographer Vertov, video artist Bill Viola, and others.

And Meadows doesn’t simply mean that the poetry draws on works by such figures—she often puts texts in dialog with each other. In the book’s selections from involutia (Shearsman Books, 2007), for example, Meadows revisits the Blue Cliff Record, a 12th-century compendium of 100 koans and a foundational text of Soto Zen Buddhism, from the differing perspectives of French philosophers Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze. The resulting lyrics form an imaginary conversation that yoke classical wisdom to postmodern thought:

Irigaray:
Without dwelling on anything, four gates.
Go on through, standing erect like
the free birds we are.
A flow, a percolation
a favored edge.
Deleuze:
myriad forms & dimensions
the little cup afloat
raises a wave.

Another poem, titled “Midnight in Our Motivated,” showcases Meadows’s penchant for metonymic signification, wherein a part stands in for an otherwise unassimilable whole:

Hadn’t you hoped for a change adding fire,
telling-knots addressed to mind by hand, but the music
acquired measure runs its blood circuit, what’s there
after midnight in our motivated glacial moraine. None.

Here the poem’s title is produced by carving out a fragment of text irrespective of its syntactic position within the poem, a gesture that highlights the modularity of language and touts a healthy skepticism concerning the truth value of generalizing statements. Such linguistic flexibility unsurprisingly gives rise to much playfulness and wit in Meadows’s heady verse:

gen: many one and one and one
            depend from
            penned from
rendered pretty
so pretty, we’re blind
            but now eye sea
general forms
in particular
                        stances,
that’s got his own

Here multivalent signification gets a workout with punning references to lyrics from “West Side Story,” “Amazing Grace,” and “God Bless the Child.” Elsewhere, Meadows links semantic domains via sound values, where the aural qualities of words set off echoes that shift their senses:

… speckled show when man doesn’t
show up to sign the lease, off-leash
                        area, three words good-for-you
not for me, green matter grouped apart, fermented
            to another life: gone, boulder on my chest,
                        grieve a friend, gone

In a sense, Meadows’s work is a poet’s solution to the problem of the fractured episteme of the postmodern world: Since each field of knowledge is reflective of the specialized language used to describe it, a holistic picture is hard to come by. Meadows attacks this problem by grafting terms from disparate fields into lines that are feminine, marvelous, and tough—that is, she blends the quest for knowledge with casual expressions of the everyday.

To illustrate the power of poetry to span worldviews, Meadows at times turns epigrammatic, as in the following lines from the prose poem “Another Interview”:

Let’s be precise, no analog, no wooden sanctified tradition.
……………………………………………………………………
Mostly, poetry is against having results.
During the last quarter of a century, poetry in this country differs in who has the bad taste to mention capitalism or not.
Half the people worry about where the poetry of our country is going; the other half worry about the status of their dialog with reality.
I agree: to write is to inscribe the world.
………………………………………………
All our good current writers are reticent to be a party or school.
…………………………………………………………………………
I’m not interested in knowledge about knowledge, or art about art – they are all a trap.

To enjoy Meadows’s poetry, it is not necessary to study all her sources; the surface qualities of her verse are sufficient for an alluring and entertaining reading experience. Yet for the curious reader, the poet’s sources may open doors to further horizons of awareness. Research-based poetries can serve as directories to knowledge in a wide variety of arts and sciences. Along with Meadows’s Bumblebees, Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun (Belladonna Collaborative, 2018), and Tyrone Williams’s Az iZ (Omnidawn, 2018) are examples of contemporary research-based poetics that reward the reader simultaneously at both depth and surface levels.

In Bumblebees, Meadows constructs her poems by linking phrases drawn from diverse semantic domains and separated by commas to form long, twisting sentences that leap across stanzas of variegated measure. Written from and into the chilling winds of the Anthropocene, Bumblebees is a cry in the darkness that bravely assesses the damage caused by so-called civilization while affirming humanity’s talent for riding the sine waves of perception, articulation, and harmony:

We made terrible mistakes, got off the train at the wrong stop, miscalculated how much our earth could take.
Maintenance of vision is marking our minds as we convene a forest of signs and get on.

Meadows has long created a kaleidoscopic display on the screen of the brain, and Bumblebees does so with a vivid urgency. Whether with this volume or with any other in her fine oeuvre, it is time for readers to grapple with the poetry of Deborah Meadows.

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Will Eisner: A Comics Biography - Rain Taxi

2025-12-19T19:44:28.000Z

Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur
NBM ($29.99)

by Paul Buhle

It is perhaps not so surprising to learn that the real story of a hugely popular 20th-century comic art form has slipped into a seemingly distant past, even as a densely theoretical, university-based comics scholarship emerges. Even now, the medium’s foremost artists are mostly viewed as visual entertainers; their real-life stories, from their studios to their private lives, gather little of the attention given to artists by the museum world.

Will Eisner is surely a case in point. Creator of “The Spirit,” Eisner reset the visual standard with his cinematic innovations and snappy plot lines. An innovator who ran his own studio, he founded a unique comic-within-the-newspaper that reached millions of news-hungry readers of the 1940s—among them young Jules Feiffer and Wally Wood, employees of Eisner’s studio and future comic stars in their own right. Eisner was a businessman and an artist; he had no real successors in the press or the comic book industry.

As rendered by the writer-artist team of Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur, Will Eisner: A Comics Biography seeks to wrap this story around the life of a fanatically hard-working youngster who evolves with the times. Much of the wider context of comics, as both an art and a business, has been squeezed down in the telling, but we see here at close range the real misery of the comic artist, fighting poverty sans respect or sentimentalization of the historic suffering-artist kind. The book closes with an older Eisner making a startling comics comeback, evidently shifting from a dog-eat-dog individualism toward a better understanding of the world.

To return to the beginnings: Eisner’s immigrant father, a sometime set-designer in pre-World War II Europe, is shown to experience all the frustrations of life in the impoverished Bronx and Brooklyn of the 1920s and ’30s. Hounded by unemployment and ethnic prejudice, the family moves repeatedly. By 1927, ten-year-old Will is already thinking about comics as a way to make a living and escape the household where the patriarch is a demoralizing failure.

Newspaper comics, created for semi-literate urban audiences of the 1890s and full of humorous one-liners, had become a family-oriented genre by the 1920s. Pulp magazines, with lurid fiction leaning toward pornography, offered a different angle on popular culture, and from this seemingly unlikely quarter, the comic book publishing world emerged. From the first glimpses of Superman, created by two Cleveland counterparts to Eisner, boys across the country raced to the newsstands with dimes for vicarious fulfillment. Meanwhile, Eisner’s acquaintance and rival Bob Kane was in the process of inventing a less-supernatural, visually darker hero: Batman.

Some of the most agonized pages of Will Eisner reflect the artist’s desperate effort to make a living at the lowest level of comics, pulling all-nighters to write and draw strips himself to fulfill pulp production quotas. In the process, we are shown the creation/production process, and reminded that still-young Will invented “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle”—she has never quite left popular culture—as a result. He is already managing a team of creators at the age of twenty-three when he comes up with The Spirit.

Obviously handsome, dashing, and a modern hero, The Spirit wears an eye-covering mask; he has a secret identity. But the important thing is the comic page-and-panel world that he moves through. Arguably, Eisner’s creation changed what is often called the “visual vocabulary” of comics by shifting the perspective of the viewer from page to page, relying heavily upon suspense, slapstick humor, and an occasional serving of cheesecake in the long and shapely legs of dames who turn out, often enough, to be spies or criminal accomplices. In ways that neither comic books nor comic strips could manage, Eisner’s micro-comic, inserted into Saturday newspapers, told a coherent and entertaining story to an audience more grown-up than the newsstand buyers, and The Spirit was a hit.

Eisner was drafted when the war came, and during his service, he created educational comics within the Army, unknowingly preparing for his post-Spirit days. Meanwhile, the insert continued; by 1945, he had learned to turn over more and more of the weekly grind to his staff. Beyond comics, noir films filled movie screens between 1946 and 1950; Eisner, a patriot and mostly humorous anti-Russian Cold Warrior, would not have guessed how many of the best noir films were written by Communists or near-Communists who saw postwar America through a glass darkly. His darkness was not theirs, exactly: He did not blame the rich and powerful, nor did the Spirit go after racists and anti-Semites, as some leading films dared to do. Eisner’s female characters, good or (more interestingly) bad, lacked any real volition, and the Spirit’s Black assistant was a throwback to racial stereotypes shifting for the better during wartime. But the darkness that artists of all kinds felt after the war years actually improved Eisner’s art, as it made him take more chances with narratives even as he drew a phase of his life to a close.

In 1950, Eisner, then a prosperous suburban homeowner and happily married businessman, launched a company that promised educational, instructive comics. The Army was immediately his best, though by no means his only, client. He closed out The Spirit officially in 1952 and seemed to have abandoned popular entertainment, the telling of fictional stories through comic art.

Only in the last few pages of the book do we learn that underground comix publisher Denis Kitchen persuaded Eisner to return to the medium decades later, first through reprints, then a brief Spirit revival, and then onward to new graphic novels. During the 1980s and ’90s, Eisner turned out almost two dozen books, from graphic art instruction to novelistic narratives of many kinds. In 1988, the Eisner Award, blessed annually at the San Diego Comic-Con, made clear his lasting fame. (I am happy to have shared one of these awards for The Art of Harvey Kurtzman [Abrams, 2009], Eisner’s younger friend of the 1950s and later.)

Writer Stephen Weiner and artist Dan Mazur have inevitably skipped over large chunks of comics history for a compelling bildungsroman of economic, family, and personal drama. Businessmen made a lot of money, but artists experienced extreme exploitation. Among his personal or moral weaknesses, Eisner did not—apparently could not—see the need for unions of comics workers, from efforts in the 1930s to a heroic if failed struggle during the early 1950s. In later years—as he was seeking to make amends on racial matters—he even began to see the wrongs of the Vietnam War, though he never quite grappled with the Israeli/Jewish dilemma of being at the wrong end of a particular suffering humanity. Eisner was always the consummate artist—and in that regard, this book captures his best self.

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Graphic Novel & Comics Reviews

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Volume 30, Number 4, Winter 2025 (#120) - Rain Taxi

2025-12-15T22:31:20.000Z

Volume 30, Number 4, Winter 2025 (#120)

To purchase issue #120 using Paypal, click here.
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INTERVIEWS

Patrick Lawler: Swallowed by a Hyperobject | Interviewed by John Bradley
Andrew Grace: If only, heaven notwithstanding, there was an Ohio Ohio enough | Interviewed by Tiffany Troy

FEATURES

Letter from the Editor | by Eric Lorberer
More than a Magazine: Rain Taxi Highlights
Trauma and Its Possessions | by Jehanne Dubrow
Fifty Years On: Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory | by Mike Dillon
Habits of Mind: A Short Essay on the Work of Tim Nolan | by Bubba Henson
The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan

PLUS: Cover art by Kelly Everding

FICTION REVIEWS

NONFICTION REVIEWS

Meditations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest | Barbara Guest
| by Patrick James Dunagan
Unsavory Thoughts | Thomas Walton | by Greg Bem
Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal | Mohammed El-Kurd
| by Andrew Benzinger
Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail
| Sasha Davis | by Douglas C. MacLeod, Jr.
Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer
| Jack Spicer | by Patrick James Dunagan

POETRY REVIEWS

COMICS REVIEW

10,000 Ink Stains: A Memoir | Jeff Lemire | by David Beard

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Shadow Ticket - Rain Taxi

2025-12-10T17:32:38.000Z

Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Press ($30)

by Ben Sloan

A time machine swiveling us to an assortment of cultural markers from the 1930s—vaudeville, fascism, “chorus cuties trucking across at all angles shaking ostrich-feather fans,” U-boats, antisemitism, Al Capone, “a slowly rotating dance floor,” Hitler—Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel Shadow Ticket is a history-steeped cautionary tale. Starting in Milwaukee then migrating to Eastern Europe, the novel follows the adventures of the savvy yet naive detective Hicks McTaggart after his boss, Boynt Crosstown, explains to him his new “ticket” (assignment): to “shadow” (follow) the lovely Daphne Airmont, who has run off with lounge lizard Hop Wingdale, and convince her to return to her fiancé, G. Rodney Flaunch.

Pnychon’s snappy dialogue, mimicking vaudeville stand-up laugh routines, is thoroughly infused with bitter-pill historical references, resulting in a jarring mix of the funny and the fearsome. Take this conversation Hicks has with his Uncle Lefty:

“. . . we gotta deal not only with the Reds who’ve been troublesome forever, but also with the Hitler movement. . . . blood on the streets of Milwaukee, let’s hope not too much higher than trouser-cuff level, till one party prevails.”
      “‘Prevails.’ And you think the, um . . .” Hicks pulling his hair down briefly over one eye.
      “Der Führer,” gently, “is der future, Hicks. Just the other day the Journal calls him ‘that intelligent young German Fascist.’”
      “They called me Boy Inspiration of the Year once, look where it got me.”
      “You can’t trust the newsreels . . . the Jews who control the movie business only allow footage that will make him look crazy or comical, funny little guy, funny walk, funny mustache, German Charlie Chaplin, how serious could he be?”

Falling for conspiracy theories, not to mention being duped over and over again by misinformation, exemplify our all-too-human tendency to misinterpret or outright ignore what is right in front of us. Pynchon underscores the irony as Hicks hops on a boat to Europe to proceed with his “ticket”:

Tonight the saloon deck is swarming with grinning stewards, uniformed juveniles years corrupted, American sorority girls, exiled royalty, . . . postwar liner travel in full swing. “Icebergs? Enemy torpedoes? Phooey! If that’s the worst that could happen, then it’s happened already, hasn’t it, and anything else is only an amateur act. Long as we’re alive, let’s live.”
“Gaudeamus igitur to that, Jack!”

Blended in with the vaudeville and fright show moments is the occasional sidebar of political commentary. Moving “from trivial to world-historic,” juxtaposing comedy routines with the blood-drenched saga of humanity, and otherwise highlighting the “monster in the Tunnel of Love” are central to Shadow Ticket. The resulting centrifugal residue clearly illustrates what’s happening in the U.S. at this very moment:

“Like it says on the subpoena we haven’t served you yet . . . A federal rap, not to be shrugged off. Potential wrong-doers might keep in mind as yet little-known lockups such as Alcatraz Island, . . . We haven’t even begun to show how dangerous we can be, and the funny thing? Is, is we could be running the country any day now and you’ll all have to swear loyalty to us because by then we’ll be in the next war fighting for our lives, and maybe that’ll be all you’ve got.”

In response to this very real threat, we have used, and continue to use more than ever, pop culture anodyne happy-talk as a tactic to avoid civic responsibility and settle for “a lifetime of infantilized misery” instead. Is there any way out of this? “Maybe I should install a lens in my belly button, so I can see where I’m going with my head up my ass.”

To read Shadow Ticket is to return to the period between the two world wars and consider where, a century later, we might want (or maybe more importantly not want) to go. As Pynchon puts it:

We’re in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree. If anybody’s around to remember. Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark. Until finally we turn to look back the way we came, and there’s that last light bulb, once so bright, now feebly flickering, about to burn out, and it’s well past time to be saying, Florsheims, let’s ambulate.

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Waste Land - Rain Taxi

2025-12-04T18:03:40.000Z

A World in Permanent Crisis

Robert D. Kaplan
Random House ($31)

by Poul Houe

In his 2012 book The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (Random House), noted foreign affairs observer Robert D. Kaplan explored the spatial dimension of the crisis haunting the world, also labeled the “crisis of room.” In his new volume, this worldwide crisis has moved to a time(less) dimension; both “waste land” and “permanent crisis” imply that the times they are a-changin’—but not for the better. Admittedly a “relentlessly pessimistic” observer, Kaplan doesn’t ignore progress and betterments per se but puts them in historical contexts that tend to prove them unsustainable.

The state of modern democracy may be the most troubling case facing this approach. It dominates “Weimar Goes Global,” the first of Waste Land’s three sections, and describes, for better and worse, our current situation with its most typical pretext and sounding board: the way technology reduces distance while alienating closeness, thus intertwining globalization’s two poles. Much of our divided world appears as Weimar “of scale”—an advanced society that easily disintegrates into a Beer Hall Putsch. Weimar was a double-edged sword to be feared constructively. By Kaplan’s standard, conservative stability beats the illusion of progress, since freedom devoid of institutional order may only replace hierarchy with anarchy, unlike true freedom, which depends on order (as Solzhenitsyn put it).

In Kaplan’s view, failing to realize that history is not governed by reason inevitably leads to the falsehood of optimism and to a “borderless world” whose juxtapositions cause further disruptions and crises—presumably a forecast of today’s “terrifying technological and ideological innovations” and their erosion of a moderation based on tradition. These are instances of Kaplan’s “obsessively negative” outlook, which he acknowledges underlies his pessimism.

In addition, he considers today’s polarizing social media less conducive to cool thinking than cold war print culture; and while technology may pacify and feminize life, some leaders will rebel and become even more brutal chieftains. So, is Steven Pinker’s peaceful image of the West a beacon of hope—or one of self-delusion? Though still more peaceful than the rest of the world, the West is slowly dissolving and becoming like the rest; and in many places war “is not a means but an end,” as Kaplan puts it with a quote from Martin van Cleveld. To Paul Theroux’s point that anarchy (in Africa) is more likely than tyranny, Kaplan adds his own deterministic view that America’s cold war victory makes for an irrelevant optimism. Instead, “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease Are Destroying the Social Fabric of the Planet” is the title his editors, with his approval, gave one of his articles.

Predictably, the second section of his Waste Land is about “The Great Powers in Decline”—with an America weakened by technology, deification of the present, and an undermined sense of history. Meanwhile, a war-faring Russia remains “the sick man of Eurasia” and the whole world “one of pitiless power struggles that make a mockery of elite posturing.” Quite simply, this is a “brawling, tumultuous world defined by upheaval,” backed by an antiquated United Nations and “superseded by the very messy reality of globalization itself.” Because “everything intersects with everything else,” such a world is “by definition unstable” and its resulting confrontations the very “totemic reality of globalization.”

As for Russia, Kaplan deems its army “a mob on the move,” and while Putin differs from Hitler, their histories “follow similar patterns.” It’s a waste land, in T.S. Eliot’s sense, or an incompetent aggressor in a mix of war, climate change, and AI. Even more than China, and the U.S., it is a crumbling empire in the globe’s “unified theater of conflict” or “geopolitical bear market.” Kaplan’s doomsday conclusion to his section on declining great powers reads: “Isolationism is the past: full immersion in a chaotic world is the inevitable future.”

To break down what this means at the socio-cultural level of everyday urban life, Waste Land’s third section on “Crowds and Chaos” draws especially upon Jane Jacobs’s classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961), a classic work about different people getting along—before social media changed it all, re-segregating the urban locales and putting the segregated classes in contact with each other, say, in Brooklyn with three-quarters of the population well off and the rest being on food stamps. The digital web became a city of its own and replicated its inhabitants’ countless interactions, “not always for the better” but in a way that presaged how geopolitics will deteriorate as well. Worse even than Stalinism’s exteriorization of everything, by Kaplan’s account today’s tech world will hollow out human souls completely and put the urban elite’s “groupthink” (or “google-think”) in their place. Much in the way Oswald Spengler once predicted world cities’ production of “the mob” would replace “the folk” of the country-sides.

To all that Kaplan adds that ‘folks’ in today’s U.S. are Trumpsters, Confederacy-nostalgic haters of liberal bastions, world media, cosmopolitan cities, and left-wing mobs. Both in Russia 1917 and in the U.S. 2020, liberals were intimidated to support their violent far left, while “cancel culture’s” mode of rectifying opinions became the virtual, non-violent version of Leninism’s mob mentality. Such a combination of digital video tech and Hannah Arendt’s vision of lonely individuals seeking shelter in crowds assailed New York Times editors for not being purely ideological, much in sync with Spengler’s image of “the urban horde” and fear of the media, a wedding of “urbanization and weaponry” that Kaplan finds especially menacing today.

He goes even further than Spengler and accounts for “the world-city and its pathologies … with its access to the Internet” as the site for undermining “the nation-state.” It’s a stylish beginning of the end of civilization, as when modern art with its abstract cities shows disconnection from the land becoming rigid as (Spengler’s) “deep soil ties” disappear. This is how Kaplan with his (and Eliot’s) title signals the alienation of our modern world “of futility and anarchy,” “a pile of fragments,” situated between an eradicated national culture and an insufficient international replacement thereof. With his bent for existentialism, Kaplan’s take on reality is individualistic, unlike the sensations of crowds and mobs, which by his definition are untrue, especially when such groups are formed by self-obsessed tech individuals who have become too anxiety-ridden to be themselves.

As reason yields to the “ideological abstraction and crowd psychology” that governs the modern world beneath its surface, our century’s future will be subject to similar tumultuous and self-destructive forces. According to Elias Canetti, lone and isolated individuals form “the most fearsome crowd” and deem this tyrannic form of equality the best shelter from which to seek “retribution.” Crowds are the bedrock of dark human experiences, and the McCarthy era’s witch-hunt may well be repeated when high tech “encourages intellectual mobs,” much as 1984 and Brave New World predicted. Post-modern tech exploits what already “the Founders of the American Revolution knew, that unrestrained democracy is the proving ground of anarchy.”

Still, Kaplan claims that “it isn’t that the world is getting worse. It’s getting better.” A rare pronouncement on his part, and soon followed up by renewed thumbs-down claims: about AI’s negative impact upon democracy as it worsens crowd mentality; about the modernist breaking of rational rules and “rational man” yielding to “psychological man”; about elites turning more conformist, masses more ignorant, and civilization likely to die as conflict on Earth intensifies, despite an overbearing urban sameness. Most certainly, the tyranny of the crowd is both an indicator and producer of inconsistent chaos everywhere.

Ultimately, totalitarianism and progress prove intertwined, which Kaplan finds evidenced by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich; while the West did free the individual from group dominance, it also enacted a cosmopolitanism that “can itself be anti-democratic” by dispensing with soil, roots, and location. Kaplan ends by recalling the Weimar republic with its great hope but insufficient order: How do we inherit its best side while avoiding its worst? I’m rather reminded of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Shadow,” in which progress casts a shadow that only grows more deadly by being ignored.

There are important lessons to be learned from Kaplan’s Waste Land. That modernity’s upsides are dwarfed by the abundance of gloom that the author rightly accounts for is indeed regrettable, though not always sustainable. His literary approach to several cultural and political pitfalls is mostly refreshing, but sometimes outdated, such as his existentialistic conception, which seems too stereotypical and cliché-oriented to measure up to current insights into this artistic and philosophical idiom. Yet, Waste Land is all in all an important and timely memento.

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