Lit - BlogFlock

On Bumblebees - Rain Taxi

2025-12-22T21:06:28.000Z

and Other Books by Deborah Meadows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feature

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

The post On Bumblebees appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Will Eisner: A Comics Biography - Rain Taxi

2025-12-19T19:44:28.000Z

Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur
NBM ($29.99)

by Paul Buhle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graphic Novel & Comics Reviews

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

The post Will Eisner: A Comics Biography appeared first on Rain Taxi.

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

2025-12-15T22:31:20.000Z

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

To purchase issue #120 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

INTERVIEWS

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

FEATURES

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

PLUS: Cover art by Kelly Everding

FICTION REVIEWS

NONFICTION REVIEWS

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

POETRY REVIEWS

COMICS REVIEW

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

To purchase issue #120 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

The post Volume 30, Number 4, Winter 2025 (#120) appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Shadow Ticket - Rain Taxi

2025-12-10T17:32:38.000Z

Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Press ($30)

by Ben Sloan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiction Reviews

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

The post Shadow Ticket appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Waste Land - Rain Taxi

2025-12-04T18:03:40.000Z

A World in Permanent Crisis

Robert D. Kaplan
Random House ($31)

by Poul Houe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nonfiction Reviews

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

The post Waste Land appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Cavalier Perspective - Rain Taxi

2025-10-21T20:35:53.000Z

Last Essays, 1952-1966

André Breton
Translated by Austin Carder
City Lights Publishers ($18.95)

by Allan Graubard

In 1946, some six years after fleeing Fascist France for New York City, André Breton returned to post-war Paris. He sought not only to resume surrealist activities with old and new comrades, but also to situate Surrealism within the new political climate of the Fourth French Republic (1946-1958) and the new cultural zeitgeist attuned to Existentialism and its allies.

By 1952, this situation had not changed in great detail. Marginalized by the power of the Communist parties that now steered cultural production and sidelined politically by his critiques of Stalinist abuses that the majority refused to acknowledge (including summary executions and exile to the Gulag), Breton did not diverge from his aim to root surrealist activity in the three reciprocating realms that were his beacons prior to the war: love, freedom, and poetry. As he explained in the 1952 essay “Link” that opens Cavalier Perspective: Last Essays 1952-1966, the emotional catalyst that inspires surrealist activity resides in the “realm of desire which everything today is conspiring to veil.” His advice on how best to respond, however quick it might seem, does not diminish the goal: “explore it in every direction until it reveals the secret of how to ‘change life’” [as Rimbaud demanded].

Austin Carder’s translation of these final volleys from Breton comes at a significant moment: The international celebration of the centenary of the Surrealist Manifesto in 2024, which prompted numerous exhibitions both retrospective and contemporary, along with the 2025 publication in English of Breton’s late work Magic Art (Fulgur Press) and a new translation of his landmark early work Nadja, make a ready stage for this book, his gathering of shorter essays published prior to his death in 1966.

Diverse in character, these forty-one selections reveal Breton’s personal voice and richly sculpted style. While they are not poems, of course, they are clearly texts written by a major poet, one whose sensitivity to nuance and clarity when opposing oppressive conditions kept his viewpoints—including on the Algerian Revolution (which he supported) and France’s ongoing colonialism (which he detested)—sharp and alive.

Cavalier Perspective contains prefaces, reviews, letters, interviews, poignant eulogies, and public speeches Breton gave during the fourteen years it covers. Certainly these pieces do not exhaust his entire output, but they provide what he felt was worth a reader’s time; Breton was always a fine anthologist. Tracking the issues that Breton dealt with and the people he discussed, the majority of whom he knew well—Antonin Artaud, Robert Desnos, Francis Picabia, George Bataille, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Guillaume Apollinaire, and others—they clarify the stakes at play and the risks involved.

For Surrealism that meant one thing, as Breton expresses in “At Long Last” from 1953: total refusal to join any camp, whether cultural or political, powerful or not. He called for sustaining surrealist group activity with younger artists, filmmakers, and writers joining those of the pre-war group who remained (death, exclusion, and defection having taken several). In brief, with two world wars and multiple genocides to prove it, the myths and mores that founded Judeo-Christian society were bankrupt (one might observe that a similar situation prevails for us now) and something new was needed. The effect was a broadening of Surrealism’s intellectual compass as indigenous cultures took center stage along with Western esotericism (alchemy and astrology especially).

The essays range widely in subject matter. “You have the floor, young seer of things . . .” (1952) celebrates the audacity of youth, as Breton recounts coming up with the initial artistic revolts of the 20th Century. “Stalin in History” (1953) offers a cutting response to the dictator’s death, in which Breton portrays Stalin this way: “Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.” In “Letter to Robert Amadou” (1954), Breton discusses the critical avenues opened up by psychoanalysis when considering art such as de Chirico’s painting The Child’s Brain, which profoundly influenced early Surrealism. That same year gives us three texts devoted to a new surrealist game called “The One in the Other,” a kind of riddling that forefronts analogical thought to socialize poetic discourse, and “Everyday Magic” (1955) consists of journal entries and reflections on chance events that occurred over six days—the kind of curious happenstance that uncovers hidden confluences between our exterior and internal worlds.

No matter the topic, striking insights are peppered throughout Cavalier Perspective: for example, in the 1956 piece “Embers at Ceridwen’s Cauldron” (written as a foreword to a book on the ancient Celts), Breton celebrates the “originality of Gallic art” contra Greek ideas of beauty at a time when such thinking was rare. “The Language of Stones” (1957) presents a charming, thoroughly researched piece on the history and pleasures of visionary minerology—when gazing at a stone induces a state of trance followed by the same “hyper-lucidity” that feeds poetic consciousness. In “Flora Tristan” (1957), Breton celebrates the legacy of Gauguin’s maternal aunt; several years prior to the publication of The Communist Manifesto, she advocated for workers (men and women both) to organize against their submission to the system of alienated labor that Marx would soon expose on a wide scale. (The relationship between this revolutionary tradition and esotericism becomes clear through Abbé Constant, later known Eliphas Levi, a theorist of magic who published Tristan’s The Emancipation of Women, or the Pariah’s Testimony in 1845, one year after her death).

“Phoenix of the Mask” (1960) is a significant statement on Breton’s affinities with indigenous cultures for whom ritual and ceremony infuse daily life. Along the way, he points out that while scholarship has advanced, it has done so through an assumed objectivity that keeps scholars distant from the experience they study—of particular relevance when the topic is how wearing a mask empowers and transforms the personality.

Other compelling texts lead to the finale, “Credits” (1966), an introduction to the eleventh international exhibition of Surrealism titled “L’Ecart Absolu” (“Absolute Divergence”). There are two lines in “Credits” which clarify the point of the surrealist adventure: “Reality must be pierced through in every sense of the word” and “I want to point the mind in an unfamiliar direction and awaken it.” For Breton, it was all truly that simple.

Austin Carder’s translation lends to Breton’s prose the colors it needs in English. Carder also provides a back matter “Note” that details the glue that binds the essays in the book into a shifting, absorbing, multileveled field. The book contains two introductions: one by City Lights editor Garrett Caples, and, thankfully, the original introduction to the 1970 French edition by Marguerite Bonnet. Finally available in English, Cavalier Perspective: Last Essays 1952-1966 delivers something precious from the founder of Surrealism.

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

Nonfiction Reviews

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

The post Cavalier Perspective appeared first on Rain Taxi.

North Sun - Rain Taxi

2025-10-15T17:16:55.000Z

or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther

Ethan Rutherford
Deep Vellum Publishing ($17.95)

by Nicole Emanuel

Annie Dillard observed that under the influence of Herman Melville’s pen, a whale becomes “an aesthetic or epistemological probe by means of which the artist analyzes the universe.” The same might be said of the whaleship in Ethan Rutherford’s novel North Sun: or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther. The material and metaphorical heft of the Esther, this nineteenth-century bark-rigged schooner, are how we come to understand the world of Rutherford’s fiction—and, by extension, a means of probing our contemporary world as well.

Rutherford understands that the whaleship-as-literary-probe is a peculiar craft, built for navigating paradox. The Esther sails from flesh-freezing ice to mind-melting sun; the ship is the stage for acts of butchery and messy labor, as well as for scenes of beauty and tender intimacy. Whales are chased, harpooned, and rendered. Men are lost at sea. Boys lose their innocence. The humans aboard the ship encounter dolphins, walruses, seabirds, crabs, and sharks, and the ensuing interspecies interactions are sometimes transcendent, sometimes harrowing, sometimes both.

These episodes form the bulk of the book, and they hang upon the framework of a plot that’s a bit like Heart of Darkness transposed from equator to pole. The novel opens in 1878 New Bedford, where Captain Arnold Lovejoy has returned from an unprofitable whaling voyage. He bears a letter for the Ashleys, a wealthy family who command a fleet of whaling vessels; their fortune was built upon this extractive industry (and possibly upon more occult sources too, as events later in the novel suggest). The Ashley patriarch is displeased that Captain Leander, who dispatched Lovejoy with the letter, has announced his intention to stay with the Ashleys’ most prized ship, which is in danger of being crushed by the ice pack. Lovejoy is to play the Marlowe to Leander’s Kurtz—to seek out the rogue captain and do his best to persuade him to return what the Ashleys feel is rightfully theirs. As the Esther sails ever further from her origin into a world dominated by forces both natural and supernatural, the tenuous hold of the ship’s human crew on their own lives becomes more and more shaky.

Like Moby-Dick and most other maritime literature, North Sun is not especially concerned with linear plot or fixed personae. Sea stories tend to navigate a complex relationship between the expansiveness of the ocean and the claustrophobic confinement of the ship. Time, too, is defamiliarized in a setting where days can be repetitive and monotonous yet are also punctuated by violent tempests. The spatiotemporal strangeness experienced by ocean-going humans has meant that many sea stories, from The Odyssey onward, have used episodic or picaresque forms—and North Sun is no exception. In brief bursts of action, we follow both the internal and external experiences of various characters, most notably Lovejoy, two young brothers who have signed on to their first voyage as ship’s boys, and in a crucial interlude, Sarah Ashley, the daughter who wrestles with moral qualms about her family’s business.

Rutherford subdivides his book deftly, organizing the narrative into three discrete parts that are further broken down into chapters and fragmented still more into even shorter numbered sections; many of these are only a paragraph or two, though some span a few pages. This creates plenty of room for white space in North Sun, which is fitting for a voyage into distant regions unknown. As the arctic explorer George De Long wrote in his journal in 1880, “I frequently think that instead of recording the idle words that express our progress from day to day I might better keep these pages unwritten, leaving a blank properly to represent the utter blank of this Arctic expedition.”

Toward the end of North Sun, Mr. Ashley quotes a passage from Captain William Scoresby’s 1820 account of life as an arctic whaler. Scoresby saw the supposed docility of whales as evidence of God’s love for humanity, since it was what enabled relatively puny people to consume leviathans. Ashley embellishes Scoresby’s justification with an additional observation of his own: “That they cannot speak, nor answer back; it’s in their design. Their suffering is theirs alone. It’s unheard. And to it I offer neither consolation nor embrace.” North Sun itself does not give readers easy consolation. And yet, the suffering in its pages is heard. This applies to the pangs endured by whales and whalemen alike, by shipworms and pigs, by children and captains. The novel insists that there is no such thing as suffering borne by an individual; for better, and for worse, it is always shared. That idea may hold little consolation, but Rutherford’s lilting prose and carefully constructed narrative make North Sun into the kind of book that does in fact feel like the most expansive of embraces.

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

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

The post North Sun appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Crane - Rain Taxi

2025-10-09T16:00:39.000Z

Tessa Bolsover
Black Ocean ($18)

by Robert Eric Shoemaker

Tessa Bolsover’s Crane is an exercise in indexing and meshing. Though many poetry collections invest in the interconnectedness of words, concepts, and experiences, writers like Bolsover and her touchstones (including Nathaniel Mackey and Susan Howe, whose epigraph opens the book) strive to show the undercurrent beneath language’s seemingly obvious connections. Bolsover successfully immerses the reader in a cycle of reemerging motifs and ideas, a subliminal sublime that only poetry hinging on metaphor can concoct.

Crane is made up of three sections: “Crane,” “Delay Figure,” and “Inlet.” In the first, Bolsover offers an index that multiplies meanings among the Roman deity Janus and the figure Crane or Cardea, goddess of hinges. Its use of myth and archive recalls works such as Susan Howe’s Songs of the Labadie Tract, H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. Bolsover redefines her myth texts by discursively dissecting related words and indulging in etymological connections/confusions to cause the reader to question what is known or knowable. For instance, the name “Cardea” is said to be a leap, a hinge, a mechanical beam holding together, a line delimiting, an intersection, and a solstice. Interrelating these concepts as a barrage, Bolsover immerses the reader in a poetic flow that is both pleasant and disorienting, polluting the boundaries between stories to “willfully create error,” as Bolsover quotes from Anne Carson. The interrelation or hinge mechanism is more vital than the door itself. Crane/Cardea isn’t as well remembered as Janus, the god who looks both ways, but Crane is necessary in the way that the spaces between words both “connect and hold apart” to facilitate meaning. As Bolsover puts it, “the unsaid within the said lends a word both its particularity and its instability.”

For Crane and its forebears, true poetic potency is a capacity to explore the depths of an image through its instability. Bolsover tells us, “I do not want to draw equivalencies, but to place objects beside one another and witness how a surface shimmers in and out of form and loss itself”; the tender expectation of that loss is rendered by a surface that loses itself in tactical line breaks and shifts from lineated poetry to blocks of prose throughout the book, along with moments of transition or quotation that bring the reader above the lyric flow. One such transitional moment returns to Howe’s opening epigraph, in which the calendar, a mechanism intended to create order and clarity, is torn to pieces and tossed into the snow—units still differentiable but ultimately confounding.

Sound becomes a source of meaning (and meaninglessness) in “Delay Figure,” which also explores the capacity for archive to both hold and evade meaning. Nathaniel Mackey’s blues and cry of “Cante Moro,” itself an inherited evasion of meaning from ancestors such as Federico García Lorca, guides this part of the text along with other citations. Music, here, represents a more complete dismemberment of meaning amidst delicate sonics like “a numb limb shimmers,” and echoes in this section, like the echoes of Howe at the end of “Crane,” reinforce the expanded meanings referentiality creates—cords of mist that “run the seam of shore.”

Crane’s obsession with citation, indexing, and other trappings of the archive create some moments in which silence or metaphor would speak louder than the quotation on the page. These can feel like a poet’s cliché, akin to overusing words like “ghost” or “body” or reveling in the etymology of “essay.” Parts of “Delay Figure” also feel drily academic, citing works on Western theory by Édouard Glissant and Amanda Weidman at length. Even so, these heady moments seem to self-consciously hold a mirror up to postmodern poetics and its penchant for elucidating meaning via quotation rather than by sheer flow.

The strongest passages of Crane lean into associations and follow thought-trails away from quotation—giving rise to the possibility that the quotations were deployed as necessary foils to bring out the beauty in these associative moments. Like the work of each writer and thinker it cites, Crane rewards multiple readings for those who wish to submerge themselves in the spaces between what can be remembered and dismembered, the unsayable and the essential—however we point to it.

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

Poetry Reviews

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

The post Crane appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Document - Rain Taxi

2025-10-08T19:31:58.000Z

Amelia Rosselli
Translated by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard
World Poetry ($24)

by Greg Bem

We were looking for a crossing last night
not a clear country road nor a city street
but a simple passage: we found
death! as always, death!

The latest book by Italian poet Amelia Rosselli to be translated into English is her sprawling third collection, Document. Originally published in 1976, it captures a significant chapter of the late poet’s life, where daily musings and reflections were chiseled into literary form and experimentation. This marvelous bilingual edition is also a challenge to readers in its size and scope, offering over 400 pages of complex thoughts and linguistic layers.

Document searches a world moving past one arm of authoritarianism and fascism into new, confusing chapters. Rosselli’s intensely crafted book is both large and elegant, filled with intentional arrangements of verse that are inspired by the Petrarchan sonnet yet also offer the postmodern pleasures of sequential structure and call and response between poems. The poet invites the reader to critically examine the text through its relentless references and embedded connections, as in “Concatenation of causes: you’ve seen the shadow”:

Teargas bombs: they chose a field
completely indifferent to you to fraternize
with the strike of renouncing
yourself: that it was you, and so my

beating heart doesn’t want peace only oblivion

on the highest branch of the sky.

Though much of the book was written by 1969, the poems cover events between 1966 and 1973. The subject matter is intensely autobiographical, and the lack of context may occasionally feel frustrating; the editors acknowledge there isn’t nearly enough space in the text itself to address this, and offer a handful of notes in the back of the book to give the reader a sense of the poet’s journey through her own work. Still, even without biographical context, Rosselli’s poetry appears crafted through absorption—of the world and its trauma, its overbearing weights, its peripheries within shadows—leaving the reader with mystery and a phantasmagorical surfacing of images and settings.

It’s fortunate that Document comes in a bilingual format, because Rosselli’s poems are a joy to read across both languages. Her careful attention to musicality—the poet was, in fact, also an accomplished musician—leads to powerful moments in punctuation, syntax, and the line, as seen in “Cold is scary and blood too”:

I’m cold today and I don’t know why a new
attitude sifts through my heart: but
it’s not true that tomorrow is certain
and it’s not true that today is calm.

These acrobatics in logic reflect a mind that is curious, wandering, and far from satisfied. Rosselli’s work in Document yields many emotional and psychic tributaries of thought, though many of them are deceiving; a poem may feel or allude to doom and malaise on its first read, only to offer confidence and critical inquiry on its second. Take these lines from “Flanking the empty tree the ants’”:

What could it have been
this arid genius that put so many obstacles

in the way of a richer safeguard? Maybe
life is defeated and has no species resolved
to fight evil.

Emerging out of incredibly transformative years in the 1960s and ¢70s, these poems are deeply embedded in contemporary moral inquiries across disciplines, and while they may be presented neatly, they are far from neat; their kaleidoscopic nature resonates.

It would be remiss to not mention Rosselli’s death by suicide approximately thirty years after the poems in this book were written. The editors describe the work of this collection as profound, as it established the arrival of Rosselli’s poetry when it was first published; Rosselli’s was indeed a profound voice of the postwar period, offering comments through a raw and emerging anti-fascist lens in Europe. How might Document inspire readers in another chapter, as we watch the world corrode with fascism again? Translator Roberta Antognini’s afterword provides Rosselli’s emerging English-language audience with biographical information that may inspire some answers, as well as further exploration of her work.

Poetry Reviews

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

The post Document appeared first on Rain Taxi.

3 Shades of Blue - Rain Taxi

2025-10-03T15:45:33.000Z

Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool

James Kaplan
Penguin Books ($20)

by Daniel Picker

Early on in 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, author James Kaplan mentions how disaffected jazz fans journeyed into New York City to rub elbows with the likes of “painters Willem De Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Mark Rothko; the writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Frank O’Hara; and the young jazz titans Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans” at the Five Spot Café while listening to performers who would change the course of jazz music. Kaplan brings this milieu to life in his new triple biography of Davis, Coltrane, and Evans. From Manhattan and its legendary venues such as the Village Vanguard and Birdland to the sleepier suburb of Dix Hills on Long Island, where John Coltrane lived and created his late masterworks, it’s all here.

Kaplan begins with the backstory of Miles Davis, a dentist’s son from East St. Louis. Davis dropped out of Juilliard after a year there and began the peripatetic life of a jazz musician in New York City, which included traveling and performing with Charlie Parker. This lifestyle lent itself to an immersion in a culture rife with heroin and alcohol; early in his career, Davis retreated to his father’s farm outside St. Louis, where he began a painful withdrawal from heroin, only to relapse. Davis eventually kicked his heroin addiction—only to replace it later with a devotion to pain killers, cocaine, and alcohol.

John Coltrane also battled heroin addiction for much of his adult life as he pursued a musical quest for perfection, which culminated in 1965 with the best-selling album A Love Supreme, which outsold even 1961’s popular My Favorite Things. That previous album includes Coltrane’s signature single based on the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein tune, which fans clamored to hear to the extent he wearied of playing it—but this weariness led to the soaring achievement of A Love Supreme and the road to free jazz, which Coltrane embraced and began to fuel by taking LSD.

Pianist Bill Evans, the only white member of the Miles Davis sextet, at first imbibed in heroin to fit in with the culture of jazz musicians; Evans’s fall to this temptation brought consternation from Davis, who knew the difficulties that would ensue. Evans, originally from Plainfield, New Jersey, remained fully aware that New York City was the center of jazz in America, boasting Columbia Records and a bounty of famed jazz clubs that supported musicians who played in the city before they returned to the road and endless touring.

All three musicians were military veterans; Davis and Evans were classically trained musicians as well. Coltrane, too, took advantage of the GI Bill after a stint in the Navy and studied at the Granoff School of Music in Philadelphia, where his family had relocated from North Carolina, and which enjoyed a bustling jazz scene of its own.

As one might guess from the title, 3 Shades of Blue builds to the creation of Miles Davis’s seminal 1959 album Kind of Blue. Kaplan offers abundant detail on this masterpiece of modal jazz and the inspiration it drew from both the solos of bebop musicians and the classical compositions of Ravel. Davis’s idea of freeing musicians from the jazz standards of the day was bolstered by the knowledge of Evans, who composed the album’s “Blue in Green” (the royalties for which Davis claimed; later, when Evans argued they should be his, Davis wrote him a check for $25).

Kaplan’s book seems to lull after the creation of Kind of Blue, though he rounds out the three biographies of the stars and presents the pressures that challenged jazz, including the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. Evans kicked his heroin addiction to settle down with his wife and child in New Jersey, but eventually returned to drugs (this time cocaine) and toured Europe, where his music and performances brought reverence from rapt fans. He died in New York in 1980 at age fifty-one. (John Coltrane sadly died of liver cancer in 1967, only forty years old.) Davis’s life had more tumult, including incarcerations, narcotic use, and suffering a police beating outside a New York jazz club for not moving along; he also endured several hip surgeries and constant physical pain, which he numbed with alcohol and cocaine. Kaplan notes matter-of-factly that Davis mistreated four wives, including the young fashion model Betty Mabry and, later, Cecily Tyson, but he refrains from judging Davis—instead focusing on how he nurtured Coltrane and Evans under his wing, freeing them to pursue their own musical journeys even as he helped to create jazz fusion. A better book on this jazz triumvirate seems impossible; Kaplan brilliantly relates a vital chapter of the history of jazz in 3 Shades of Blue.

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

Nonfiction Reviews

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

The post 3 Shades of Blue appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Barley Patch - Rain Taxi

2025-09-24T17:20:00.000Z

Gerald Murnane
And Other Stories ($19.95)

by Sam Tiratto

Australian author Gerald Murnane isn’t known for sticking to convention. His books lack plot, characters, or setting; though often autobiographical, they hardly resemble memoir (too much left out) and could not be called autofiction (too much left in). He pokes fun at literary conventions with wry asides about writing “set, as the expression goes, in ancient Egypt,” for example, or that showing “vivid detail, as some or another reviewer might later put it.” Yet despite the astounding novelty of his 2009 novel, Barley Patch—which was Murnane’s first published work after an unexplained fourteen-year writing hiatus, and has only recently been republished in the U.S. and U.K.—it addresses a quite conventional question: Why do writers write?

By way of reply, and like almost all of Murnane’s writing, Barley Patch comprises a wide range of the author’s personal experiences and thoughts, mostly taking place in the Australian state of Victoria in the middle of the twentieth century. Many of the same images reoccur throughout Murnane’s long writing career; readers of works such as The Plains (1982), Inland (1988), or Border Districts (2017) might recognize a two-story house with a verandah overlooking grasslands, a solitary man reading the weekly horse racing reports, the sunlight through a piece of colored glass. Barley Patch is partly about the afterglow such images leave on our psyches as writers and readers, but Murnane makes it clear he’s not interested in analyzing his canon as such; he turns instead to the children’s literature of his youth, aiming to show that reading these stories provides the young reader-writer with a “network of images” that far outlast the narratives themselves—hence Murnane’s enthrallment to them even in his old age.

Throughout Barley Patch, Murnane curiously insists that he lacks an imagination. Perhaps this is because his “personages”—those aspects of his mind that take the place of “characters” in his unusual fiction—contain the imaginative element; the plot of the book, such as there is, revolves around the inner workings of its personages. “If the boy-man had possessed an imagination, as he surely did,” Murnane writes, “then he would have seen in his mind images of himself strolling with his new-found companions against backgrounds of beeches or of heather.” The terrific irony, of course, is that Barley Patch is a work of profound imagination, for Murnane takes what we assume is familiar to him and makes it unfamiliar by placing it in the minds of personages who aren’t him. Thus the houses are empty, the grasslands barren, the adults unknowable—yet life persists in these image-places, with the young writer fervently clacking upon a typewriter or scribbling a note, gazing out at a clump of trees along the horizon.

After reading about Thomas Merton, the chief personage in Barley Patch (like Murnane himself) gained the impression that priests, unmarried and celibate, had a lot of free time to read and write, so he set out on the path to priesthood. (The full explanation for Murnane eventually leaving the faith might be the subject of a future book, but one suspects it partly has to do with the calling interfering with his writing.) Earlier in the novel, he recalls knowing a man who spent all his time at the library reading newspapers to try to figure out the secret to betting on horse racing so that he could be freed from employment and follow whatever his “true task” might have been. The two get yoked together to answer the book’s focal question: the writer needs to write. It’s his true task.

But is the prolific Murnane any different from the man in the library, someone totally absorbed in a task of his own making? That he has been rumored to be a contender for the Nobel Prize suggests so, although he isn’t one to let the Swedish Academy make those kinds of decisions about literature. And of course, the man in the library is another personage, since horse racing is known to be Murnane’s greatest passion in life. “If God were to take his chance as an owner of racehorses,” he writes, “He would experience the gamut of human emotions.” It doesn’t take much imagination to picture a praying gambler, but the gambler in the novel goes beyond praying. He’s reading and picturing images of victory, writing a hopeful narrative on the sheet of newsprint. For a mind that lies somewhere between the mystic and the horse racing fanatic, prayer and writing are the same thing: The writer struggles to discover subject matter “in some far part of his mind” just as the mystic struggles to “glimpse God or heaven.”

And this is ultimately the grand invitation of Barley Patch. Murnane wants us to look into some small, dark place within ourselves, find what’s living there, and maybe even find a way to speak with it.

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

Fiction Reviews

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

The post Barley Patch appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Volume 30, Number 3, Fall 2025 (#119) - Rain Taxi

2025-09-23T22:23:58.000Z

To purchase issue #119 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Marcia Butler: Woolfian Voyager | Interviewed by E. J. Levy
Esteban Rodríguez: No Choice But To Believe | Interviewed by Tiffany Troy

FEATURES

The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan
René Char: Resistant | by Mike Dillon
From the Backlist: Wanda Coleman | Heart First Into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets | by Walter Holland

PLUS: Cover art by Jeffrey Hansen

FICTION

NONFICTION

Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans | Steven Belletto
| by Patrick James Dunagan
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers | Caroline Fraser
| by Chris Barsanti
The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation | Charlotte Beradt
| by W. C. Bamberger
The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light | Craig Childs
| by Emily Wortman-Wunder
An Island To Myself: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life | Michael N. McGregor
| by Joanne B. Mulcahy
Home Club: Up-and-Comers and Comebacks at Acme Comedy Company
| Patrick Strait | by Joshua Preston

POETRY

COMICS

Charlotte Brontë before Jane Eyre | Glynnis Fawkes
Persephone’s Garden | Glynnis Fawkes
1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed
| Eric H. Cline and Glynnis Fawkes | by Andrew Cleary

To purchase issue #119 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

The post Volume 30, Number 3, Fall 2025 (#119) appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Jeffrey Hansen - Rain Taxi

2025-09-11T16:19:48.000Z

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

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

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

The post Jeffrey Hansen appeared first on Rain Taxi.

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

2025-09-11T15:59:59.000Z

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

INTERVIEWS

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

FEATURES

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

PLUS: Cover art by Areca Roe

NONFICTION

FICTION

POETRY / MIXED GENRE

COMICS

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

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

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

James Schuyler: The Absolute of Feeling - Rain Taxi

2025-08-21T16:05:08.000Z

by Claude Peck

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

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

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

A Room of His Own

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

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

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

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

“No Juvenilia”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To New York, Italy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feature

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

Ingenious - Rain Taxi

2025-08-13T15:32:22.000Z

A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist

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

by Rasoul Sorkhabi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nonfiction Reviews

The post Ingenious appeared first on Rain Taxi.

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

2025-08-04T16:03:46.000Z

by Stephanie Burt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview

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

Success! - Rain Taxi

2025-07-24T22:19:44.000Z

Hi there!

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

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

The post Success! appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Not Even the Sound of a River - Rain Taxi

2025-07-24T18:51:48.000Z

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

by Alice-Catherine Carls

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

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

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

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

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

Fiction Reviews

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

The Ocean in the Next Room - Rain Taxi

2025-07-23T20:09:50.000Z

Sarah V. Schweig
Milkweed Editions ($18)

by Walter Holland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry Reviews

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