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A Book About Ray - Rain Taxi

2025-05-06T16:03:51.000Z

Ellen Levy
The MIT Press ($54.95)

By far the most complete framing of coyote trickster artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995) to date, Ellen Levy’s A Book About Ray engages with the work of the artist on his own terms, or at least as approximate to them as possible. Given the often abrasive opacity of Johnson’s (non-)engagement with curators, critics, and scholars, this can’t have been easy. Levy herself describes her book as “not, or not exactly, a life story. This is an art story.” Some may think they know that story from John W. Walter’s 2002 documentary How to Draw a Bunny, however that film portrayed Johnson mainly as a mail art collagist, adding to the quizzical and cryptic sense of Johnson that had already given him cult-like art celebrity status. Levy’s book reveals more of Johnson’s work and investigates the overall drive behind it.

A Book About Ray progresses in roughly chronological order, though it also freely cycles forward and backward in time via artistic statements on recurring motifs and themes found in Johnson’s work. After early years of artistic output in Detroit, Johnson attended the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s, and there he flourished—especially as a favored talent in Bauhaus artist Josef Albers’s classes, dutifully attentive to “the clear, wise, and constructive ideas” behind “the relational nature of color” Albers championed. That aptitude led to a November 1947 cover of the magazine Interiors by Johnson consisting of three rows of colored upright rectangular boxes full of polka-dots of varying size and color along with one row of rectangular boxes with parallel stripes of various colors running across them. His painting Calm Center (1951), a grid of squares each containing a plethora of colored lines that offer “variations on the square,” is also very much in the Albers vein, save that the square at center is solid black.

Also at Black Mountain, Johnson established friendships with fellow student artists such as Ruth Asawa, who he heard speak of “the Taoism philosophy of nothing ness [sic] being everything-ness”; Johnson realized, “I feel that way.” It was at the college as well that he took up with a teacher, beginning the longest romantic relationship of his life with the married sculptor Richard Lippold (it ended in 1974). Leaving the school, Johnson followed Lippold to New York City; in the summer of 1951, they took up residency downtown “in the shadow of the Williamsburg bridge,” occupying individual studio spaces alongside Morton Feldman and John Cage (each of whom had also spent time at Black Mountain). Thus, from a young age Johnson was very much in the thick of the burgeoning New York City art scene, where he would remain even at a distance after moving out to the North Shore of Long Island in 1969.

In addition to the cover of Interiors, Johnson designed now-iconic book covers for New Directions, including William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain and Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations; the Rimbaud cover utilized a portrait of the poet, which Johnson would continue recycling by using it in several collages. In the New York art scene, Johnson knew Andy Warhol and there are significant associations between Warhol’s work and his own. This is particularly true of his use of portraits: Johnson often drew upon images of iconic cultural figures such as Marilyn Monroe, and in fact, pre-dates Warhol’s use of such images with works from 1956-58 featuring James Dean collaged with the Lucky Strikes cigarettes logo and Elvis covered in red wash and bleeding tears.

Levy reports how “Ray and Andy were known to shop together sometimes for movie stills and magazines.” Johnson, however, did not share in Warhol’s loftier ambitions. His portraits of these stars “got progressively grungier” and always remained small; “made to be held in hand by their recipients,” they “speak volubly of the artist’s hand” in their making, as opposed to Warhol’s industrial, oversized mass screen prints. And as weird as Warhol’s reputation holds him to be, Johnson was even further afield. Factory participant Billy Name demonstrates this with a telling comparison, saying “Andy was still like a person” whereas “Ray wasn’t a person. He was a collage or a sculpture. A living sculpture, you know. He was Ray Johnson’s creation.” Art for and on art’s terms alone was always Johnson’s sole intention.

At the center of Johnson’s work are mutually unachievable co-existing wishes. As Levy describes, “Ray Johnson wanted to be famous, and he wanted to remain unknown, and he clung to the belief, whose absurdity he relished, that it was possible to be both at once.” Johnson enjoyed the dilemma of always choosing to have things every and any way he desired, regardless of the lasting impact upon himself, his work, or anything else. Nothing mattered less to him than what many others valued most—critical acknowledgement, financial success, and media attention. Not that he didn’t pay attention to such matters; he simply refused to directly pursue or be enticed by them. The introduction of these concerns into any exchange with Johnson regarding his work would immediately sour further discussion. Yet Johnson nevertheless would send unsolicited correspondence to gallery owners and museum curators, and he had shows and would lecture at art schools during residencies. To be seen and not seen. Chameleon. Enigma. Artist shapeshifter. Johnson was all of these.

In his collages, Johnson constantly interchanged his own set of iconic figures and related symbols, creating exchanges of identity and associated possible meanings. As he announces, “One can pretend to be someone one is not. Children’s play. I’ll be you and you be me. Be my valentine.” There is implicit intimacy behind his work, only it is not necessarily personal: instead Ray Johnson was “a person who lived for art to a point where he convinced others, and perhaps at times even convinced himself, that any aspect of his life that could not be assimilated into his art should not be considered part of the Ray Johnson story.”

Johnson was “a creature and creator of networks,” and one of his first was what became known as the New York Correspondence School. Within what became a vast interlocking web, Johnson openly handed over the reins of creation to others, asking the recipients of collages and other materials he mailed them to work on them and then send them on to others he named, putting all involved on the spot. As Levy asserts, “To correspond with Ray Johnson was to assume the role of artist.” The fact that he was continually looking for opportunities to diminish showing his hand in any artistic activity brought tension into his correspondence, however. Artist-performer Jill Johnston states it plainly: “I didn’t correspond with Ray because he scared me. I found him kind of intense.”

Levy tracks each of the several altering forms Johnson’s artworks took shape in. Among the earliest series were the Moticos, which had the appearance of being “paper scraps” yet were “made things, artworks of a kind” that held meaning beyond any literal, physical manifestation. As he stated: “perhaps you are the moticos.” Johnson would send these works (which easily slipped into envelopes) to Correspondence School participants, and as a result, many of them ended up in the hands of art collectors and dealers without his knowledge, let alone any control over sales or financial compensation. Another important work was A Book About Death, “one of his strangest and most enigmatic projects. The ‘book,’ never constituted as such, consists of thirteen unbound prints designed one by one between 1963 and 1965, each mailed out as it emerged to various correspondents.”

Later came the bunnies—“his signature icon a crudely drawn rabbit-head”—issued with a seven-step set of drawing instructions under the heading “New York Correspondance School”; Levy notes that the “simplicity of its rendering suggests that the icon is rooted in the Duchampian ethic that held that everyone and anyone could be, in fact already is, an artist.” Near the end of Johnson’s life arrived the Move Stars, a series of images forming an “assemblage, laid out on the ground, of graphic images of bunnies and other icons,” each panel-like piece being “32 inches high. And vary from 7 ½ to 8 inches wide,” which Johnson arranged at various suburban locales around his local Long Island home, photographing them with dispensable one-click cameras. These were not seen by many until long after Johnson’s death, when “in 2019, Joel Smith, curator of photography at the Morgan Library, searched them out and went through them all and calculated that the artist had run through 137 cameras, from which he had printed over five thousand images.”

There’s not the space here to cover every aspect of Johnson’s work that Levy brings to light. Her book includes ample color images, scattered as if collaged at times across the pages, and care has been taken to have the book resemble an art object itself, an experimental risk which pays off. Levy’s eye-opening A Book About Ray mirrors Johnson’s elusive disappearances even as it highlights what made this unique artist the phenomenon he was.

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Hailing Rain Taxi for years of service - Rain Taxi

2025-05-06T15:28:35.000Z

City Pages | Wednesday, September 17, 2008 by Ed Huyck

It's a common story in the arts. Young, fresh, and brash group hits the scene, be it a band or a theater company, a visual arts group or a magazine. The group burns white hot for a time—six months, a year, maybe even a few years—before the fire burns out, the collective splits apart, and a new venture, hopefully, takes its place.

So you may consider it a minor miracle that Rain Taxi—the iconoclastic literary arts magazine dedicated to uncovering the best the world of print has to offer, no matter how obscure—published its 50th issue this summer.

"It's not typical for a literary venture like this to last," says Eric Lorberer, who has written for the magazine since its inception and has served as the journal's editor for many years. "It is largely dependent on people who have the energy to fight the system for a while. But there eventually is a danger for burnout, or not developing the level of funding you need."

Every quarter, about 18,000 copies of Rain Taxi are distributed nationwide, putting it in the middle of the market—large for a literary magazine of its type, but a far cry from the major players, like the New Yorker or Harper's.

Then again, considering its esoteric bent, its modest circulation shouldn't be surprising. Rain Taxi is a place to learn about Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish or to read an interview with music and cultural critic David Hajdu—you won't find reviews of Dan Brown's latest opus or this week's celebrity tell-all.

"There is a community for this writing, even though it's in a lot of little small pockets. If you aggregate them," Lorberer says, "you get a sense of the vitality of what is going on. If you look at it in dribs and drabs it may not seem impressive."

These are dicey times for serious literary writers, publishers, and reviewers. Many newspapers have drastically cut back their book review sections. And between increased media consolidation and the shrinking of independent booksellers, it seems as though non-mainstream works have been shut out of the discussion.

"I think the death of a lot of indie booksellers is hurting the culture," Lorberer says. "There is less choice and access. Writers and publishers who have something serious to say and have the tenacity to persevere will eventually persevere. We are trying to be a part of the voice for that and a mechanism for those endeavors to stay healthy."

Rain Taxi exists to explore these cracks in the facade. Since the beginning, the journal has championed little-known works.

"Generally there is a dearth of criticism for non-mainstream books. We are about shining a spotlight on non-mainstream publishing—work that has a smaller audience but has a real literary need," he says.

Still, Lorberer sees some promising avenues worth exploring in the book world. "Chapbook publishing is the underappreciated sibling in the community. These are small books [often 16 to 20 pages] that are printed in small runs. There's been a real explosion of them in the last few years."

Meanwhile, graphic novels and other comics continue their fight to get out of the superhero "funny book" ghetto. "We're seeing creators in this medium really pushing their boundaries, in the same way that poetry or visual art did in the early part of the 20th century."

Visitors to Rain Taxi's annual Twin Cities Book Festival this year on October 11 will get a chance to hear about the growth of that medium with Jaime Hernandez, who has worked on the leading edge for nearly three decades, either as the co-founder and contributor to the comic magazine Love and Rockets or in a bevy of limited series in the past three decades. "He's really been a part of the aesthetic maturity of the medium," Lorberer says.

The daylong event has a number of other attractions as well, including public radio commentator and writer Alan Cheuse and novelists Valerie Martin, Ana Clavel, Jess Winfield, and Bragi Olafsson, whom eccentric pop music fans with long memories may remember from his days with the Sugarcubes, but who has crafted a second career as an award-winning fiction writer. The event also includes the local launch of a book of selected poems by Olav H. Hauge, featuring Robert Bly and Robert Hedin; panel discussions; and an expo hall packed with books new and used.

Lorberer has no doubt that the Twin Cities is a perfect home for the festival and for a journal like Rain Taxi. The area has a strong writing and publishing community (and, Lorberer notes, a fine mainstream critical community), which help foster the environment.

"The greatness of the Twin Cities is the mixture we have. There are obviously large presses and organizations here, but there are also tiny and grassroots things happening," Lorberer says. "The book festival is a way to gather that ecosystem in one room for a day."

The eighth annual Twin Cities Book Festival runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, October 11, at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, 1501 Hennepin Ave. The event is free. For more information, visit www.raintaxi.com.

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There's This Book You've Never Heard of - Rain Taxi

2025-05-06T15:22:39.000Z

but if you had heard of it, you'd really enjoy reading it, which is why this unusual book review, Rain Taxi, continues to exist against what truly are the longest of odds

by Keith Harris

Watch your head.

To reach the office, you've got to duck. Yes, that means you, no matter how accustomed your fingertips may be to flailing uselessly at the topmost kitchen shelves or however familiar your unbowed head may be to slipping unscathed through the lowest doorways. The ceiling in this place dips low enough that even a five-and-a-half-footer like me can't enter upright. If you're given to romanticizing the mighty efforts of those who toil for their art--and what respectably employed bachelor or bachelorette of the arts, in his or her most self-hating moments, doesn't indulge such fantasies of gainful poverty?--you might be entranced by the cramped possibilities.

Yeah, well, daydream on your own time, 'cause it's just an office. When you get up the stairs the ceiling raises back up to full human height, and there's nothing mystical about the two computers that sit on two desks at right angles to each another, where words are processed and text boxes filled and images cut and pasted. Nothing unusual at all, except maybe the sheer number of books surrounding them. Like the small yellow South Minneapolis house of which this is an attic appendage, the office is compact but neat, overfull but not claustrophobic. There are books here as in the rest of the house, books that loiter obediently on their shelves rather than sloppily spilling over to consume their environment, books so plentiful that you wouldn't have time to read a fraction of them even if you weren't preoccupied with publishing a quarterly book review. And that's what Rain Taxi is. And this is where Rain Taxi comes from.

Four times a year, Rain Taxi compiles 50-odd pages of reviews: reviews of books that seem to range from the merely uncommercial to the downright obscure, reviews of books whose audiences vary from the merely specialized to the all-but-imaginary. But there are readers who want to find out about the poetry of Charles Borkhuis and the collected letters of Marcel Duchamp, and they want to do it in one sitting. There are readers who lust for a journal that highlights an interview with the surreal "storytelling poet" James Tate and a reconsideration of the "16th-century subversions" of Rabelais, as the cover of the most recent Rain Taxi advertises. There are readers who pick up the newsprint quarterly at St. Mark's in Manhattan or City Lights in San Francisco, just as locals do at the Ruminator in St. Paul. There are even readers who subscribe from Czechoslovakia and Korea. And there are enough of them--just enough perhaps--that Rain Taxi, lifted by a gentle dribble of ad sales that feeds into a sporadic trickle of grant funding, has remained afloat for five years now.

When I say Rain Taxi, I mean Eric Lorberer and Kelly Everding. They didn't start the magazine; Randall Health and Carolyn Kuebler midwifed the first issue, and nurtured Rain Taxi in its infancy. Unpaid interns drift regularly across the masthead. Fifty or so writers contribute their reviews each issue--that's contribute, not "sell," since said scribblers, whether they're still a quarter shy of escaping the U or taking time off from their eighth novel, go as unpaid as the interns. But despite the efforts of these volunteers, it's Lorberer and Everding who make sure the journal exists and who'd be out of a job if it didn't.

"Of course, there's the aesthetic issue--the pleasure of holding actual paper--but there's also the social issue, we want to reach readers from different segments of society, who might not have access to the Internet."

That's Eric Lorberer speaking about why Rain Taxi courts the added expense of remaining a print journal rather than merely existing online. This is his attic.

When Lorberer says Rain Taxi exists "to provide an alternative outlet for book reviewing," one might hear the flat, pointed prose of the grant proposal. When he continues, "Like the book industry in general, book reviewing was increasingly in the clutches of corporate powers and that didn't allow a lot of space for different voices to be heard, and also for certain kinds of books to be reviewed," you might hear the earnest, marginalized tone of the crusader. And you'd be right in both cases. Lorberer is a strange mix of the insistently pragmatic and the unyieldingly idealistic.

Lorberer is a curly-haired fellow in his late 30s who speaks in the even tone of the committed and who proselytizes without attempting to argue. The implicit assumption being: If his own evident commitment doesn't sway you, you must tarry beyond the reach of salvation. "Our mission is to reach as many people as possible and turn them on to books they wouldn't otherwise be aware of," he continues. All you've got to do is reach them.

"Eric is one of the true believers," says Josie Rawson, who lives across the alley and sits on Rain Taxi's board of directors. (Rawson is also a former associate editor at City Pages.) "He took a vow of poetry. He's got a vision of literature making the world safe for people."

It's safe to assume that Kelly Everding shares Lorberer's zeal, since she's his business partner as well as his domestic partner of some 14 years. She's quieter about the mission, though.

A recent afternoon visit finds Everding, a woman with long straight hair and pointed features, sitting in the attic finishing a flyer for the Twin Cities Book Festival. This one-day affair, to be held at Open Book in downtown Minneapolis on Saturday, October 27, is the first of its kind since the small, unsatisfying book fairs held in Calhoun Square in the mid-Nineties. For eight hours, the various rooms and crannies of the Open Book will be filled with panel discussions, readings, book sales, and book-arts demonstrations, capped that evening by a keynote reading by poet Robert Creeley.

As with so many book-related events, Rain Taxi has taken an active interest in the festival--Lorberer has been working closely with event organizers Jana Robbins and Tim Schwartz. In fact, the mag's sponsorship of the event marks its five-year anniversary, a testament to how far Rain Taxi has come since its inception.

In early 1996, a small, not dissimilar attic apartment not far away began to shrink. Two hundred copies of a fledgling journal called Rain Taxi showed up in the Harriet Avenue living room that Randall Heath and Carolyn Kuebler shared. Soon, the journal spread through the halls. Four times a year, their guests arrived. With each print run, the number of magazines doubled, and the space in which the couple lived dwindled.

"We'd line them up along the hallway," Kuebler remembers. "Soon it was impossible to move."

The initial idea had been to create a small press, though that notion quickly changed. Heath was working at Half Price Books, one of those morgues for the publishing industry where countless new books no one will ever read meet their lonely, remaindered deaths.

"We realized as we were fishing around that there are so many damn books out there already, it seemed kind of pointless," says Heath." Why contribute to this great mass of books that already existed? Why not try and review some of these books, and try to build a readership?"

Eric Lorberer showed up for the first issue with a review of a collection of Denis Johnson poetry that no one else wanted to publish. He was sucked into the Rain Taxi organization quickly afterward. To qualify as a nonprofit organization, Rain Taxi needed a board of directors, which meant they needed a third partner. When an early collaborator broke away, Lorberer was enlisted.

All the clichés of home publishing in the digital age helped spawn Rain Taxi. Suddenly, the ubiquity of PCs and easy layout software meant anyone with more spare time than inhibition could reel out limitless broadsheets about his or her obsessions. The Internet meant you could publish distant writers you might never have spoken to, even by phone. The crew survived on the adrenaline of a new project.

Heath fondly remembers the spontaneity of those early excitable years. "We scheduled an interview with [avant-garde novelist] Rikki Ducornet, so we jumped in my truck and drove to Denver," he recalls. "We had dinner with her, interviewed her. Here was this excuse to interact with someone whose work you admire."

But beyond giddy moments like that there was a world of work to do. They had to edit. They had to write. They had to design. And when they dropped an issue off at the printer, their labors had in some ways just begun.

"Around Christmas time, we had 150 boxes, at least, to take to UPS," remembers Kuebler. "They wouldn't pick them up, so we had to rent a U-Haul. We drove them to the UPS countertop, and of course there was a huge line already. The manager was so mean to us: We'd already taped up the boxes, but she whipped out a tape gun and told us we were going to pay for extra tape."

This form of cooperative labor fueled every aspect of Rain Taxi's existence. It was a necessity for tackling distribution. And when it came to the much-loathed task of selling ads, each crew member would take turns hassling publishers as long as she could stomach the job, then pass the phone along to the next person. But in the more subjective realm of editorial tasks, such collaboration seemed downright perverse if not completely counterproductive.

"We would group-edit reviews," recalls Heath. "We would sit down together with a piece--we did this for almost two years, a year and a half at least. It was an ideal we strived for. It was about not establishing a hierarchy."

It was also a good way to waste valuable hours dickering over a slight change in authorial tone. For anyone who doesn't spend much time wrangling over words, it's difficult to imagine how impossible that ideal might be. Consider such democracy extended to the sidelines of a football game. Or, better yet, imagine the infield convening on the mound to debate the relative merits of each upcoming pitch.

"I don't have the same aesthetic as Eric," Heath says simply. "For me it was more of a question of audience, a tone that would cross more boundaries. I wanted to be the ignorant guy. I didn't want references that I didn't know. It all comes back to my original vision--a tool for readers to discover new books."

Gradually, Heath and Kuebler both withdrew from the editorial aspects of the journal they'd founded. Heath grew more interested in the design aspects of the magazine, Kuebler in reviewing.

As Lorberer puts it, "We all learned what we liked and what we didn't like about that job. I guess I liked enough of it to continue."

Neither of the original editors left over "creative differences," both are quick to add. Heath still creates the magazine's often abstract and gothic covers, and Kuebler remains a regular contributor. Instead, the balance of power gradually shifted from one set of hands to another. In 2000, Heath and Kuebler moved to New York City together, to further careers in editing and publishing. They still work in publishing: The intensity of working on an underfunded start-up for several years hasn't driven them away from the book world. (Though, for what it's worth, they are no longer a couple.)

Having lived through its start-up years and become slightly less underfunded, Rain Taxi has actually grown since the transfer of power. In addition to sponsoring a host of literary events, Lorberer and Everding now ship out some 15,000 copies of each issue, both to subscribers and for free distribution at bookstores in 45 states. Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, and West Virginia have yet to be infiltrated.

The phrase "literary community" should probably only be employed when the time comes each year to hoodwink generous foundations and their venerable administrators. Yet it is in developing a public presence for the local literary avant-garde that Rain Taxi has thrived in recent seasons. Josie Rawson has warm memories of Rain Taxi's first reading in 1998, given by the Chinese-born poet Arthur Sze. "He gave a reading that was transfixing," she says. "Here was a man who presented his own material in so compelling a way, all you can do was sit there sort of stunned."

More concretely, however, Rawson remembers what happened afterward, when Sze and his listeners converged upon her home. "There were a bunch of writers hanging out in a way that you'd imagine other writers in another time and another place did. We sat on my back porch, talking about poetry and writing for hours, like it mattered. It's the sort of thing I didn't realize was so rare until it actually happened."

Such an idyllic recollection offers a glimpse into the utopian literary community Rain Taxi imagines. Rain Taxi doesn't just stage readings. It brings writers to town--Victor Hernández Cruz, Claudia Keelan, Franz Wright, Clayton Eshleman--sets them up to speak in galleries, and ushers them into a local body of book people (the literary community, if you will).

Lorberer and Everding had initially found such an environment as graduate students at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, which is where they first met. Then they migrated to Baltimore, where they had a near miss in attempting to open a bookstore. The next stop was Minneapolis. "We threw a dart, basically," says Lorberer. "We'd heard it was a good place to live. But at the time I had no idea there was as substantial a literary community as there actually is."

Oddly enough, a big chunk of that community was composed of people Lorberer and Everding already knew quite well. "There must have been a half dozen people who went to the U Mass grad program who wound up in the Twin Cities," says Bill Waltz. Waltz, who publishes the local poetry zine Conduit was one of those transplants. "There was sort of this mass exodus," he adds with an inadvertent geographical pun.

And key to that collaborative spirit, it would seem, is the muting of individual voices for the sake of the project. "We're trying to give pride of place to the work, and to place personalities second," is how Lorberer describes the reviewing tone he nurtures. "I was talking to the editor of a journal, who should probably remain nameless in light of the story, and they were talking about their Web page. That journal's most accessed page, the guy told me, is the one where they have the pictures of their interns." Rain Taxi has no pictures of its interns online. In fact, it currently has no interns.

And so, it was a surprise to find a page full of negative letters responding to a review by David Foster Wallace in the summer 2001 issue of Rain Taxi. "Elegantly pointless, me-obsessed, academically-challenged, falsely objective, asshole-scratching, hickified piece of writing" is what Robert Bly called Wallace's essay. None of the responses to Wallace's review of The Best of the Prose Poem: An International Journal (White Pines Press) was packed with quite so much hyphenated vitriol as Bly's. The response from anthologist Peter Johnson himself, for instance, was appropriately bemused. Then again, one Morton Marcus declared, "Wallace's review was shameful, not only for him writing it, but for you printing it." Not coincidentally, Marcus is a prose poet himself.

To be fair, the piece in question invited some measure of controversy. Wallace's three-page spread was quite a coup for Lorberer and company, as this top-hole author was paid as much as all the other reviewers (which I will remind you is nothing). In a typical trumping of form, the author of the exquisitely and exhaustingly footnoted Infinite Jest broke down the anthology into numerical components. The result was a rather impassioned piece masquerading as a dry encyclopedic rendering, one you're certainly entitled not to be dazzled by, particularly if you've already consumed your annual quota of DFW metacriticism and minutiae. But it did address the work in question, even if it also went out of its way to tweak the phallic connotations of editor Peter Johnson's name. Unlike most reviews in Rain Taxi, this was a verbal performance, in which the critic assumed as much importance as the text.

Perhaps the vehemence of the response suggests just what an exception this piece was to Rain Taxi's typical fare. The journal does indeed publish negative reviews, but it does so sparingly, and none are outright diatribes. The journal is not argumentative in tone. As Lorberer explains, "The reason that the majority of the reviews are positive is that the process of selection itself is an aspect of reviewing--we're trying to select the best of the best. My hope is that the reviews are substantive, and that they're not just cheering the writer on."

Rawson agrees. "There are so few avenues in the reviewing press for praise for books from small presses, independent presses, it's hardly worth wasting space on books nobody should be reading anyway."

Yet not everyone believes that treating lesser-known works with kid gloves does the literary scene any favors. In a trenchant (and characteristically bombastic) broadside on his Web site www.cosmoetica.com, local gadfly and poet Dan Schneider argues that Rain Taxi's "puff pieces" ultimately add up to nothing more than a "magalog." "These 'supposed' journals," Schneider writes, "have become--in effect--mere book catalogs. They give title, author, publisher, price, a rosy review, and sometimes even ordering/contact information."

Many of the contributors to Rain Taxi are either published or prospective poets or writers of fiction, and this may inform the occasional gingerly handling of others' work. The right of a particular book to exist--or the value in its existence--is rarely questioned. A Rain Taxi review doesn't argue.

A journal reflects the tone of its editor, and like Lorberer himself, these reviews are sure in their presentation of the facts--not smug, but so assured they feel no need to protest. Which raises the question of whether it is possible to have a dialogue when both sides agree. After all, when we imagine Rawson's evocation of "writers in another time and another place," staying awake long into the night, we imagine them arguing. Surely a literary community could be created from vigorous dissent, no?

Don't ask me. I'm not about to risk my livelihood on that assumption. Eric Lorberer, however, relies on his ethos for groceries and the mortgage. And it's a belief he's been laboring to disseminate just about anywhere people discuss contemporary literature. Which is why Lorberer doesn't have to make an argument for his editorial position. Until Lorberer gives up or the money runs out, his vision will continue shipping four times a year.

City Pages Volume 22, Issue 1090 October 24, 2001

The post There's This Book You've Never Heard of appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Ecstatic Mundane: An Interview with Elaine Equi - Rain Taxi

2025-05-01T18:45:43.000Z

by Jim Feast

A mainstay of the New York literary scene since the late 1980s, Elaine Equi is known as a writer of aphoristic wit, philosophical depth, and visual precision. Her many books include Voice-Over (1999), which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems (2007), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize; and Sentences and Rain (2015), all published by Coffee House Press. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, and in many editions of The Best American Poetry, for which she served as guest editor in 2023. In 2024, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Equi has always been fascinated by how the consumer products we live among form ties with the self. In The Intangibles (Coffee House Press, 2019), for example, discussing her mother’s scent bottles in “Perfume Dioramas,” she links family memories to these store-bought items, deepening both. In Equi’s latest book, Out of the Blank (Coffee House Press, $18), her fascination continues, but here the products are more often connected to fantasies—as in “Maple,” where observation of a bottle of syrup leads to a vivid daydream of vampires. Few other writers have so gleefully and trenchantly examined the commodification of everyday life.

Jim Feast: In poetry, the notion that we should appreciate the simple things in life has become something of a cliché, but you take this theme in new directions, working at times straightforwardly and at others ironically. In “I Saw Delight,” for example, you describe walking after a rain shower with extraordinary precision: “The shadows were dark and luxurious / beneath silver trestles of light.” My sense is that you put great pressure on words to capture the everyday, using terms that are suitable yet never expected. Does that sound true?

Elaine Equi: I’m happy you started with this poem, because it’s an unusual one. It’s true I often do write about mundane things and everyday life, but I think of this particular piece as being the record of a real vision—a true moment of illumination. It came about as the result of my drinking a cocktail made from several different gem elixirs designed to increase the flow of light into your body and energy field. Gem elixirs are small bottles of water or alcohol in which different stones or flowers have been steeped in order to charge them with their essence. You can buy them online or in some health food stores. I’m not an expert by any means, but the idea of them appeals to my imagination. Their effects on me are usually subtle, but on this occasion, they were quite dramatic—almost psychedelic. When I stepped outside my front door, I swear I could see light traveling. As I say in the poem,

I saw a woman carrying the trophy of a gold balloon,
letting it bounce lightly above her head—
her thoughts golden.
Someone else was walking a diamond dog.
Each of its hairs was polished to perfection.
From every object, prisms of paths opened.

I was ecstatic. Of course, when I tried the experiment again, it wasn’t the same—not even close. The title “I Saw Delight” is a one-line poem by Robert Creeley called “Homage to Hank Williams,” a play on Williams’s famous spiritual song “I Saw the Light.”

JF: Another way you handle the quotidian is to mention one of life’s small pleasures and then use it as a springboard into magnificent whimsy. An example is “Maple,” which begins with a deft description of “its high-pitched sweetness,” but then segues into a lurid territory where in a dream vision you are swigging syrup, saying, “I am drinking the blood of the forest.” Can you talk about creating these flights of fancy?

EE: I’m often influenced by writers of short prose works that have a dark, fantastic, or satiric side. Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen is tattooed on my heart. I’ve taught and read it many times. I’m also thinking here of Kafka’s short stories and aphorisms, and Robert Walser’s quirky sketches. From all the above, I’ve studied the art of making absurd statements with a straight face and matter of fact tone. In the poem you mention, I found it funny to treat maple syrup as a dangerous substance. I was exaggerating but not all that much; I do find maple hard to resist. Plus, I like the idea of using its sweetness to mask a hidden wild or aggressive nature.

JF: Both these strategies of dealing with the everyday could be considered labors that bring poetry closer to the real. Alain Badiou says that to reach the real, “there is an art of rarefaction, an art of obtaining the subtlest and most durable results, not through an aggressive posture with regard to inherited forms, but through arrangements that place these forms at the edge of the void, in a network of cuts and disappearances.”[i] Could you talk about your approach to the real?

EE: That’s an interesting quote by Badiou. I don’t think I come close to “the edge of the void” in my poems. I do try to use very precise and vivid language, and often focus intensely on a simple subject, maybe to create a sense of the hyper-real. One of the things I like about photography is how it shows you a very different aspect of what you think you’re seeing. I’m also a fan of the sur-real, a reality that encompasses dreams, the irrational, the unconscious. Is there just one “real” with different levels? I’m not sure, but I think that as a writer, whether you’re committed to absolute realism or pure fantasy, the real is something you can’t avoid. You can use language to explore and engage with it, but I don’t know that you can ever come close to actually describing or representing it, even in purely mathematical terms. It’s bigger than that. When I write, I feel, or perhaps imagine, that I can sense the real as a kind of gravity or pull. It’s the page beneath the page.

JF: Your ability to discern effervescent qualities of ordinary reality is often used to examine slight objects to which most people would offer little attention. In your previous collection The Intangibles (Coffee House Press, 2019), poems such as “Monogrammed Aspirin” and “Still Life with Radish” did this too. Can you discuss your communion with things?

EE: Objects have always been one of my favorite subjects. When I first began writing, I was an avid reader of the French poet Francis Ponge. He wrote almost exclusively about objects. He had a book called Things and another one called More Things, and another called Soap, which was all about soap. As a tribute to him, I named one of my early chapbooks Friendship with Things. I also had a full-length collection inspired by his work, called The Cloud of Knowable Things (Coffee House Press, 2003).

Not surprisingly, I was also a fan of William Carlos Williams—and of all the Objectivist poets. They gave me a way to think of the poem itself as an object—“a small machine made of words”—and to see words themselves as objects.

We’re now so used to digital and virtual realities that real things seem a bit dated. As I say in the poem you mention from my previous book, “These days, all objects are antiques.” In my new book, I was pleased to find a way to write about mental states as if they were objects—I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner. In the poem “Emotions: A Boxed Set,” for example, I write about the heebie-jeebies as “the kind of tail-in-socket anxiety / that plugs directly into the body— / manifesting in myriad symptoms of dis-ease.”

JF: When you were going to school and growing up as a poet, Chicago had a bustling and distinctive poetry/arts scene. How did that milieu influence your work?

EE: I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather have studied poetry than Columbia College in Chicago—it was a fun, loose, and creative place in the ’70s. It had an excellent film and photography department, and in creative writing, they had just hired an exciting poet, Paul Hoover, to replace Bill Knott. Paul and his then wife, Maxine Chernoff, edited a very cool magazine called Oink! They knew everybody and were really plugged into contemporary poetics from the New York School, the Beats, Black Mountain, fresh takes on surrealism, and beyond. I was in heaven. Every semester I’d sign up for an independent study with Paul just so I could hang out with him and Maxine in their Rogers Park apartment, peruse their bookshelves, and discuss goings on in the poetry world.

Shortly after graduating, I met up with another young poet, Jerome Sala, known for reciting his work to growing numbers of enthusiastic fans in a punk bar called La Mere Viper. By then, I had published my first chapbook, Federal Woman. We each had a glimmer of reputation and the desire to do something out of the ordinary (maybe a tad more flamboyant) with our writing, so we started reading together, mostly in bars and art galleries. It didn’t hurt that we were wildly attracted to each other, too. We had good chemistry off stage and on. Our events were more like parties; sometimes they involved bands, and people you wouldn’t necessarily think would enjoy poetry would show up. You could call us performance poets—we did perform our poems, but we were also performing the idea of poet-ness, often in a satiric way, inventing our identities as we went along. Everything we did had a DIY quality. We’d spend hours combing thrift stores for just the right retro fashions. What I remember most is that the arts were not so separate then—there was much more overlapping between different scenes. Partly it was the times, but it was also something Jerome and I cultivated by exploring the idea of a poetry that could be entertaining and appeal to non-poets.

JF: Earlier you mentioned trying “elixirs designed to increase the flow of light into your body.” This ties in with the poem “My Mother And I Send Each Other Circles,” where we learn that when your speaker talks on the phone with mother, “We telepathically juggle globes of color.” Both seem like nurturing forms of practice, but I wonder if you are working from a particular spiritual framework—or if, like a bricoleur, you are putting together different customs that seem to work together.

EE: I credit my maternal grandmother and my mother—Out of the Blank is dedicated to both—for giving me a deep appreciation of magic, the metaphysical, and the occult. But it was never connected to a particular tradition, and it certainly wasn’t formal. The spirit of our investigations was more like an imaginative game. My grandmother had a lot of superstitions. She also told good ghost stories and was really into Greek and Roman mythology. My mom and I liked to read horoscopes and tarot. We used to drink tea and do our cards as a ritual after I got home from school.

When I moved to New York, we’d talk on the phone a lot, and we came up with the idea of sending each other circles of different colored light before hanging up. It was mostly done as a fun way to liven up our conversations. What I especially like about this poem is how it captures, almost word for word, exactly what we’d say. Another poem later in the book, “My Mother Dreams of Dying,” is entirely in her voice. I didn’t add anything to this amazing dream she had told me about, also over the phone.

JF: You usually have a number of short poems in your books, and Out of the Blank is no exception; maybe there are even more in it than usual. What is it about them that appeals to you?

EE: Formally, I’ve always been drawn to compression and tend to write shorter poems with short-ish lines. Like one of my all-time favorite writers, Lorine Niedecker, says in “Poet’s work”: “I learned / to sit at desk / and condense // No layoff / from this / condensery.” I remember, when I first came upon her work, feeling a sense of joyful recognition, almost as if we were related. I identified with her—here was a Midwestern woman poet who came from a more working-class background and who valued brevity. Her poems are so lucid—simple yet subtle and nuanced.

Other writers who have dazzled me with their ability to do more with fewer words would have to include Robert Creeley, Charles Reznikoff (there’s a poem for him in the book called “C.R.”), Joe Brainard, Tom Clark (there’s a poem for him in the book called “T as in Taut”), Aram Saroyan, and Ian Hamilton Finlay, to name just a few.

To return again to photography, another passion of mine, I think of short poems as being able to zoom in like a telephoto lens and create a close-up of a few words. If they were buried in a longer line, you might not notice the tension or vibration between them as much. Take, for example, my poem “Goblet”; it lets you taste or swirl the shifting sounds as if you were sipping a glass of wine:

my grape      my globe      my gape
my glazed     my glare      my grimace
my glint        my grant      my giant
my goose      my gravy      my grail

I don’t always write such compact things, but even in pieces with more syntax, I try to boil down my ideas to make them more concentrated, as in this next poem:

The Marrow
Of a poem.
Meat of meaning
that travels with Bashō
the narrow road—
network of veins
leading to leaf-lip.
Magnetic pull
of green-blooded words.

Actually, there is no short answer to why I find short poems endlessly fascinating. I just do.

[i] Badiou, Alain, The Century (Polity Press, 2007); English translation by Alberto Toscano.

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Interview

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Edge of the Void: An Interview with Elaine Equi - Rain Taxi

2025-05-01T16:07:45.000Z

by Jim Feast

I saw a woman carrying the trophy of a gold balloon,
letting it bounce lightly above her head—
her thoughts golden.
Someone else was walking a diamond dog.
Each of its hairs was polished to perfection.
From every object, prisms of paths opened.

JF: When you were going to school and growing up as a poet, Chicago had a bustling and distinctive poetry/arts scene. How did that milieu influence your work?

JF: You usually have a number of short poems in your books, and Out of the Blank is no exception; maybe there are even more in it than usual. What is it about them that appeals to you?

my grape      my globe      my gape
my glazed     my glare      my grimace
my glint        my grant      my giant
my goose      my gravy      my grail

I don’t always write such compact things, but even in pieces with more syntax, I try to boil down my ideas to make them more concentrated, as in this next poem:

The Marrow
Of a poem.
Meat of meaning
that travels with Bashō
the narrow road—
network of veins
leading to leaf-lip.
Magnetic pull
of green-blooded words.

Actually, there is no short answer to why I find short poems endlessly fascinating. I just do.

[i] Badiou, Alain, The Century (Polity Press, 2007); English translation by Alberto Toscano.

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Henry Martin: An Active Ear - Rain Taxi

2025-04-30T15:54:37.000Z

Selected Writings, Conversations, and Correspondences

Edited by Emanuele Guidi and Egidio Marzona, with text by Lisa Andreani, Jordan Carter, Luca Cerizza, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Emanuele Guidi, Henry Martin, and Elisabetta Rattalino
Spector Books ($45)

by Richard Kostelanetz

The remarkable African American art critic, curator, and translator Henry Martin, who died at the age of eighty in 2022, finally gets to be the subject of focus in Henry Martin: An Active Ear. Martin, a native of Philadelphia, was an expatriate author; after attending New York University in the mid-1960s, he traveled to Italy and stayed there, marrying visual artist Berty Skuber and settling with her in the mountainous South Tyrol, where other Americans were scarce.

Martin made his living by contributing articles to magazines and translating Italian texts into English. He was a literary man who came late to art writing; the greatest influence on his prose was another Henry, surnamed James, from whom Martin learned the art of composing extended sentences in long paragraphs. The primary source of his enthusiasm for visual art was Marcel Duchamp, whom he discovered as a teenager in 1950s Philadelphia:

Marcel Duchamp first entered my life when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, surely before I was sixteen when I was old enough to drive. He connects directly to the old red bus at the stop on the corner of the road where my family lived, then a transfer to the green municipal bus somewhere inside the city, and finally the trolly through Fairmount Park to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is a great fake Parthenon atop a great fake Acropolis that stares from a distance towards the center of the city and the statue of William Penn on the summit of City Hall.

Fortunately, one of Martin’s first jobs in Italy was helping the Milanese art historian Arturo Schwarz prepare The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (Abrams, 1969). This immersion explains, perhaps, why the most profound essays in An Active Ear discuss aspects of Duchamp, who became Martin’s principal teacher in modernist aesthetics as well as a touchstone he returned to for decades; with the Italian painter Gianfranco Baruchello (1924-2023), Martin wrote Why Duchamp (McPherson & Co., 1985).

Nearly all the other people whose work is discussed in An Active Ear descend from Duchamp; about pre-20th-century visual art, of which Italy has so much that is excellent, Martin says little. He favors post-Duchamp artists such as Ray Johnson (1927-1995) and George Brecht (1926-2008), not only in discrete essays but in extended probing interviews. Often does Martin reveal that he knows his subjects personally, not to boast but to give his commentary an intimate authority. Only one of his many subjects is African American: Fluxus artist and musician Benjamin Patterson (1934-2016), who likewise resided for a time in Europe.

Emanuele Guidi has constructed An Active Ear to be an alternative kind of biography; in addition to Martin’s essays and conversations, Guidi includes correspondence between Martin and his favorite subjects as well as occasional informal photographs. Of the last, my favorites appear as endpapers, with Martin holding a white bird (perhaps a dove) on his outstretched hand on the front spread and raising his middle finger beside two white guys on the back spread.

What further makes this book a de facto biography are five appreciations written by people who aren’t artists and a remarkably elegant foreword by John-Daniel Martin, Berty and Henry’s son. The only ungainly thing about the book is its format: the sans serif type and small margins make the reading experience challenging.

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Absent Here - Rain Taxi

2025-04-29T15:24:33.000Z

Bret Shepard
University of Pittsburgh Press ($18)

by Jeff Alessandrelli

Bret Shepard’s second collection, Absent Here, could be called a “project” book, in that all its poems are centered on one topic—in this case Alaska, which here seems less a state than a state of mind. Tundra, darkness, Arctic, body, language, absence: certain words that repeat in the text feel less written than lived (and indeed, as the author bio on the back cover tells us, “Bret Shepard is from the North Slope of Alaska”). Lines from the serial poem “Here but Elsewhere” are emblematic:

The absence is enormous in the Arctic.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Some deaths create other ways to die.

Some losses you only understand once

your body and mind come back together
wherever it is beyond what we name.

Shepard’s approach in Absent Here is both reflexive and discursive. Early in the book, “On Ice” asserts:

Faces retain what the world gives back to us. We see it
in the mirror. Because it is already done, the mirror reflects

small ways we reduce. Like ice rolled over mistakes,
we grieve what we touch, the selves we try to change too late.

Toward the end of the collection, in “Summer Camp,” a bull caribou falls dead, and by being “taken apart” it is simultaneously “also reduced to more.” From any angle, there’s a sadness to Shepard’s Alaska, an overhang of the past’s erasure against the present’s inevitability; the speaker is often looking back at what once was and is no longer. “Territories,” which contains the epigraph “Report paints grim picture about Alaska Native language fluency, but hope remains,” begins with the decree “I’m missing a language for what is lost,” followed by the repetition “Tundra. Tundra. Tundra. Tundra” and the lines “In difficulty, a grammar for the vastness // measured in millions of eye lengths.” In this white and desolate landscape, the speaker considers the weight of poorly made past decisions (“The village voted itself dry / again. What is paradise // but a final tally of choices / given to innocence, sin // given to sunless days”), and what isn’t seen—absence piled upon absence—matters just as much as what is.

“Territories” is also notable for the line “I don’t have a language that isn’t white,” a reference to the region’s tumults of snow that also hints at a racial component to Shepard’s picture of Alaska. The observation is well-deserved—after Hawaii, Alaska has the highest percentage of Indigenous residents among U.S. states—and Shepard is wise to foreground the particular absence of non-whiteness his own whiteness dictates. Still, Absent Here is not a confessional text in any standard conception of the word; its poems are imaginative, far flung, and oftentimes non-linear, and even moments that seem to relate the author’s personal experience exhibit a stark refusal to accept a solid version (or vision) of selfhood. Take the opening section of the collection’s final poem, “Here but Elsewhere”:

Language doesn’t make decisions. It keeps
guessing. When I was given my Inupiaq

name, Jenny Felder talked me into sounds

from the book listing each possible version
nearby. I still hear her. I would speak them

now if my mouth could shape the words.

In his well-known review of Kenneth Lonergan’s Oscar-winning 2016 film Manchester By the Sea, critic A. O. Scott notes that it is “less concerned with nostalgia than with the psychology of loss.” Absent Here is squarely interested in the same thing. Although the book is filled with ideas and images of Alaska that a non-resident might also initially recognize (darkness, isolation, snow, etc.), Absent Here steadfastly troubles any fixed picture of Alaska—as a project, as a state, Alaska (like the self) remains ongoing amidst its vast and immediate absences.

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Fragments of a Paradise - Rain Taxi

2025-04-22T18:56:11.000Z

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

by Alice-Catherine Carls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Patriot - Rain Taxi

2025-04-18T15:53:30.000Z

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

by Grace Utomo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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High Solitude - Rain Taxi

2025-04-16T17:02:21.000Z

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

by Patrick James Dunagan

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

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

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

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

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What Good Is Heaven - Rain Taxi

2025-04-09T18:05:05.000Z

Raye Hendrix
Texas Review Press ($21.95)

by Jennifer Saunders

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

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

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

he asks me to be more like
             winter                     beautiful but hard

he says despite my softness
                                             everything must eat

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

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

I was loved with a Bible
              a belt        I ate Ivory

soap          I was sent out
              to choose the switch

Perhaps even more tremulously, it ends:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Near-Earth Object - Rain Taxi

2025-04-08T16:00:11.000Z

John Shoptaw
Unbound Edition Press ($25)

by Lee Rossi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

of both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2025-04-03T20:58:59.000Z

by Rone Shavers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RS: How would you describe your ideal reader?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RS: Who are your literary influences?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RS: Do you have any final thoughts to share?

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

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

Be the strange you wish to see in the world.

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

Make more than you consume.

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

Keep lighting the good light.

Stand your underground.

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

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

Get lost.

Work outside of and against the state.

Say nay to the naysayers.

Do something every day for someone else.

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

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

Ask for help when you need it.

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

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

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

Eat healthily and heartily.

Exercise and exorcise.

Get a good night’s sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

Speak the unspeakable. Write the unwriteable.

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

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

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

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

Rebel, refuse, repeat.

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Interview

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

The Mariner's Mirror - Rain Taxi

2025-03-31T16:57:48.000Z

poems by Damion Searls

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

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

Purchase in U.S.

International Purchase

About the author

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

The post The Mariner's Mirror appeared first on Rain Taxi.

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

2025-03-18T15:33:23.000Z

To purchase issue #116 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

INTERVIEWS

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

FEATURES

PLUS: Cover art by Alex Kuno

FICTION REVIEWS

NONFICTION REVIEWS

POETRY REVIEWS

ART/COMICS REVIEWS

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To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

The post Volume 29, Number 4, Winter 2024 (#116) appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Ziba Rajabi - Rain Taxi

2025-03-18T15:32:08.000Z

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

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

The post Ziba Rajabi appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport 2025 - Rain Taxi

2025-02-28T18:16:34.566Z

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

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

How It Works

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

How to Enter

Entry details will be available soon — please check back.

Participating Stores

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

A Prague Flâneur - Rain Taxi

2025-02-19T17:26:28.121Z

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

by Allan Graubard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Nonfiction Reviews

The post A Prague Flâneur appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Clean - Rain Taxi

2025-02-18T18:26:28.374Z

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

by Dimitris Passas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiction Reviews

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Autobiography of a Book - Rain Taxi

2025-02-06T20:31:28.770Z

Glenn Ingersoll
AC Books ($24)

by Mike Bove

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mixed Genre Reviews

The post Autobiography of a Book appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Lit - BlogFlock

A Book About Ray - Rain Taxi

Hailing Rain Taxi for years of service - Rain Taxi

There's This Book You've Never Heard of - Rain Taxi

Watch your head.

Ecstatic Mundane: An Interview with Elaine Equi - Rain Taxi

Edge of the Void: An Interview with Elaine Equi - Rain Taxi

Henry Martin: An Active Ear - Rain Taxi

Selected Writings, Conversations, and Correspondences

Absent Here - Rain Taxi

Fragments of a Paradise - Rain Taxi

Patriot - Rain Taxi

High Solitude - Rain Taxi

What Good Is Heaven - Rain Taxi

Near-Earth Object - Rain Taxi

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

The Mariner's Mirror - Rain Taxi

poems by Damion Searls

$10 plus $4 shipping in U.S., $10 international shipping36 pages, perfect boundpublished 2025

About the author

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

INTERVIEWS

FEATURES

FICTION REVIEWS

NONFICTION REVIEWS

POETRY REVIEWS

ART/COMICS REVIEWS

Ziba Rajabi - Rain Taxi

Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport 2025 - Rain Taxi

How It Works

How to Enter

Participating Stores

Sponsors

A Prague Flâneur - Rain Taxi

Clean - Rain Taxi

Autobiography of a Book - Rain Taxi

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