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Volume 31, Number 2, Summer 2026 (#122) - Rain Taxi

2026-09-15T16:11:36.000Z

Volume 31, Number 2, Summer 2026 (#122)

To purchase issue #122 using Paypal, click here.
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INTERVIEWS

Lindsay Stuart Hill: Clearer Than Mirrors | Interviewed by Brianna Flavin
Sara Maurer: Dispatch from the Rural North | Interviewed by Amber Ruth Paulen
Shavaun Scott: The Wounded Healer | Interviewed by Emma Ramos

FEATURES

250 Years of American Literature: Second in a Four-Part Series

Introductory Note | by Eric Lorberer
The New Life | by Gary Sullivan
A Fragmentary History of the U. S. Book Trade | by Chris Barsanti
Is American Literature a “National Literature”? | by Patrick James Dunagan
Set in Minnesota: The Case for Place in a Decade’s Worth of “Best Books” | by Anesa Miller

PLUS: Cover art by: Erik Krenz

FICTION REVIEWS

NONFICTION / ART REVIEWS

POETRY REVIEWS

COMICS REVIEW

The Once and Future Riot | Joe Sacco | by Paul Buhle

ESSAY

Sweet-Talked by AI | by Peg Guilfoyle

To purchase issue #122 using Paypal, click here.
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The post Volume 31, Number 2, Summer 2026 (#122) appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Muriel Rukeyser's Lessons for Social Poetics Today: A Conversation with Catherine Gander and Stefania Heim - Rain Taxi

2026-08-31T21:26:24.000Z

by Eric Keenaghan

Critical appreciation of American poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) has waxed and waned for decades, but it is certainly having a moment now. The latest example of the renaissance underway is the recent publication of Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser (West Virginia University Press, $27.99). Editors Catherine Gander and Stefania Heim solicited other poets to write about the continuing influence of Rukeyser; the resulting collection features contributions from the editors as well as Daniel Borzutzky, Susan Briante, Stacy Hardy, Erika Meitner, Philip Metres, Jena Osman, Deborah Paredes, Khadijah Queen, and Nomi Stone, plus an afterword by Solmaz Sharif.

Through an innovative mix of long poems, serial poems, critical studies, lyric essays, and memoirs, the collection’s authors develop personal and studied responses to Rukeyser. They engage a wide range of her works, including her well-known poetry as well as her lesser-known biographies, children’s literature, musical theater, fiction, and documentary film. Their perceptive and often moving insights provide new lessons about both the possibilities and limits of contemporary social poetics grounded in formal experimentation, personal experience, and activist commitments—three hallmarks of Rukeyser’s extraordinary body of work.

Rukeyser scholar Eric Keenaghan conversed with Gander and Heim to explore a few of the aspects that make Beyond Ourselves an important addition to Rukeyser studies.

Stefania Heim has published two poetry collections, most recently HOUR BOOK (Ahsahta Press, 2019), and two translations of writings by the Italian metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico, most recently his posthumous novel Mr. Dudron (A Public Space Books, 2024). A former poetry editor at Boston Review and a founding editor of CIRCUMFERENCE: Poetry in Translation, Heim teaches literature at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.

Catherine Gander teaches modern and contemporary American literature at Maynooth University in Kildare, Ireland. Her book Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) won the biennial book award of the Irish Association for American Studies; more recent scholarly publications include The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Also a poet, Gander is the author of Matches (Verve Poetry Press, 2024).

Eric Keenaghan, who teaches at the University at Albany, SUNY, is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulnerability in Cuba and the United States (Ohio State University Press, 2009); with Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, he co-edited The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose (Cornell University Press, 2023), a recipient of the MLA Prize for Bibliographical or Archival Scholarship. His forthcoming book, The Middle of the Air: A Critical Edition (Cornell University Press, 2027), recovers a previously unpublished antifascist play Rukeyser wrote in the 1940s. For more on poetry as antifascist cultural activism and the first publication of two poems from the 1940s which Rukeyser suppressed, “In a War on All Fronts” (c. 1943) and “The Strong Angel” (1944), see Keenaghan’s “Unburying History: Two Lost Antifascist Poems by Muriel Rukeyser” on the website Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive.

Eric Keenaghan: In her afterword for Beyond Ourselves, Solmaz Sharif movingly describes what first drew her to Muriel Rukeyser’s work, and it seems an attraction you and many of your collection’s contributors share too: “What I found in her was not unique to my own finding, but essential all the same: a poet who wrote of the material present in order to change it.” Why do you think it is “essential” to conceptualize poetry and other literature as vehicles or tools for social transformation today, and how do Rukeyser’s life and work in the twentieth century provide writers a unique and still-timely model for doing so?

Catherine Gander: What I love most about the line you pull from Solmaz’s deeply affecting afterword to the book is her description of the present as “material.” Our lived moment is not something in the abstract, but something real, alive, tangible. It is physical: it matters.

As we initially conceptualized the book, and then, as we came to assemble it, we knew Rukeyser’s approach to poetry was fundamental to our own understanding of how the various components of the book would come together—not as a self-contained, static arrangement of perspectives, but as Stefania beautifully phrased it in her essay for the volume, “a settling of the kaleidoscope,” a collection of parts that, like Rukeyser’s famous diagram of the dynamic relations within an artwork, from her poetics treatise The Life of Poetry (Current Books, 1949), “is false until all the components are shown in motion.”

Rukeyser, as you know, wrote and spoke often about poetry as a meeting-place: “Wherever it exists, it gives us a clue as to a possible kind of imagination with which to meet the world.” That kind of imagination, being motile, necessarily effects change. This is why she preferred the word “witness” to “reader”—because with its overtones of responsibility, it announces that, as Rukeyser writes in The Life of Poetry, “we are about to change, that work is being done on the self.” Rukeyser’s model is essential here, because she draws it from a model of physical science: poetry is the exchange of energy, and “exchange is creation.” What poetry and literature can produce, then, in her moment and in ours, is what Rukeyser calls an exchange of human consciousness: “the capacity to produce change from the existing conditions.”

In the poem from The Speed of Darkness (Random House, 1968) from which we took the title of our book, “Poem [I lived in the first century of world wars],” Rukeyser writes of the insanity that living in “the first century of world wars” can inflict. Her response is to “get to pen and paper.” The conditions that shaped that poem shape our century too. All this to say that your question is one I don’t think we will ever stop asking, and one as relevant today as it was then.

Stefania Heim: I’d like to build on this to grapple a bit more with that second part of your question, Eric, about how Rukeyser’s twentieth-century models remain unique and relevant. Her approaches to thinking about how poetry can be a force of change, a “resource” to be “used” beyond narrow aesthetic realms, are super various, in that truly interdisciplinary sense Catherine mentioned—and maybe even more importantly, they’re honest.

With “honest” I mean to get at something like not manicured, not tested or optimized. I want to foreground Rukeyser’s openness to––even courting of—risk and failure, which is something that many of the contributors to Beyond Ourselves notice and respond to in their pieces. I think often of the comments Rukeyser contributed to a 1945 anthology of war poetry (“War and Poetry,” reprinted in The Muriel Rukeyser Era), where she introduces a straw-poet who chastises her, “You bring the world in too much. Poems should not be written about the war. Are you not afraid of guessing wrong?” She responds simply, “I deny all of this.” Rukeyser understood poetry to be a vehicle both for approaching situations of tremendous complexity and for arriving at “the emotional meanings at every moment.” She eschewed easy or static answers as she eschewed orthodoxies. For Rukeyser, the straw-poet’s question is ridiculous because the consequences of not struggling to find the meanings are so much graver than trying with honesty, humility, and openness and getting it wrong.

At a time when we are experiencing existential crisis after existential crisis, when looking away feels sometimes like a relief, I think Rukeyser’s refusal to “put off” what is difficult, her insistence on looking unflinchingly at the world and at herself, and her commitment to “the truth of feeling” are part of what make her work essential and, as you put it, timely.

EK: Your characterization of Rukeyser’s work as built on honesty is provocative, Stefania. Such honesty grows out of her holistic response to her material conditions, including her body, emotions, intellectual ideas, and activist commitments. Making such a living poetic response, with her full self, is central to her continuing relevance, as you note, Catherine. In your introduction, you note that neither of you remembers exactly when the idea for Beyond Ourselves came about, but could you share how you identified poets who might respond to their moment in similarly honest ways as Rukeyser had to hers? What surprising revelations will readers discover in your collection through some of your contributors’ responses to Rukeyser, to present crises, or to poetry today?

SH: As we began to imagine the book and identify contributors, we reached out to writers we saw turning to Rukeyser in deep and surprising ways. A great example of a reference we encountered and followed up on was Khadijah Queen’s beautiful hybrid essay “False Dawn: a zuihitsu from the early months of the pandemic” (Harper’s Magazine, August 2020). Working in the zuihitsu form allowed Queen to move between facts, intimate musings, and miscellany as she explored modes for sustaining life—from a philodendron leaf to an aging mother and sick sister—amidst so much danger and fear. And interwoven among a “list of what [she] appreciate[s],” virus death tolls, and a trenchant examination of race and death was Muriel Rukeyser. In “False Dawn,” she reflects, “When I wrote that essay, about the value of studying Muriel Rukeyser even though, like Whitman and Melville . . . she operated from a baseline assumption of white supremacy, I meant to provide practical guidelines for analyzing older American literature . . . I meant to offer an alternative solution to throwing it all away.”

After reading the piece we immediately sent Queen an email, inviting her to build upon that “meant to” for our volume. Her essay for Beyond Ourselves—a reading of a wide range of Rukeyser’s works including her musical about legendary escape artist Harry Houdini (Houdini: A Musical, Paris Press, 2002), her children’s book More Night (Harper & Row, 1981), and her late book of poetry The Gates (McGraw-Hill, 1976)—rigorously and generously probes the effects, both positive and negative, of Rukeyser’s engagement with empathy, what Queen names her “open self.”

One thing I love most about our book is the way so many of the pieces use the occasion of writing to really think something through, to follow a question, some discomfort, the glimmer of an idea. I’m thinking too about Jena Osman’s confession in her essay on documentary, complicity, and critical consciousness about what is currently Rukeyser’s most famous work, “The Book of the Dead”: “For a long time, I wasn’t sure I liked the poem.” The confession makes it possible for Osman to interrogate the poem alongside Rukeyser’s short documentary film A Place to Live (1941) in a way that both honors and transcends discomfort, just as Osman’s grounding the essay in her daily commute insists upon a particular perspective, time, and space in order to both fully inhabit and move beyond that specificity.

CG: Yes! This impressed me, too. And it’s important, as Rukeyser becomes more visible to contemporary readers, that we do not ignore the more challenging or troubling aspects of her work alongside the wider difficulties of poetic positionality. Queen and Osman both advance these challenges as part of the necessity of thinking with Rukeyser to confront our current moment.

To address that second part of your question, Eric, it was a joy to be able to lift stylistic constraints in this book and allow contributors to work in whatever form they felt best fit the nature of their inquiry (another very Rukeyserian approach). What was revelatory at the outset was how this formal freedom enabled our contributors to really grapple with something—a difficulty, a fear, a frustration, a politics, even trauma—in a way that allowed both form and content to actively work as examples of what Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry called “usable truth.”

For example, we knew Philip Metres would have something important to say about Rukeyser’s legacy, but we weren’t prepared for his astonishingly open and vulnerable meditation on embodied poetics. Likewise, Erika Meitner’s essay visits her family history, in which the Holocaust looms large, at the same time as it wrestles with the vicissitudes of being a mother in a multiracial family in an increasingly racist country. Both draw on Rukeyser’s models of speaking with the whole self, out of silence. And then there’s the illustrated poem sequence “The Breathers” by Daniel Borzutzky and Stacy Hardy, which extends Rukeyser’s “politics of breath” into a poetic treatment of “the mere act of breathing as a form of political resistance” to ongoing colonial violences.

There’s much more to say here, including how contributors engaged with such a wide range of Rukeyser’s oeuvre, but I’ll conclude by noting that “revelation” is such a fitting word for Rukeyser, not only because it denotes the kind of exposure to light of hidden truth that one associates with her most famous works, but also because it involves a disclosure of the self to the self, by which process our denied and muted parts are examined and made speak. At root—and building on Stefania’s earlier point—revelation is a gesture of honesty, and it was this honesty that soon revealed itself as a kind of binding agent of the book.

EK: And Beyond Ourselves is full of revelations, and self-revelations. For me, some of the most paradigm-breaking ones are in moments like when Queen and Osman admit their skepticism about Rukeyser’s methods or acknowledge her limits, as you pointed out, Stefania. And then there is Metres’s incredible reading of her long poem “The Outer Banks” (1967), which you mentioned, Catherine, where he admires Rukeyser owning the softness of both her body and poetic form, usually devalued in a culture focused on hard bodies and poetic rigor. Such moments demonstrate how to keep a poet’s legacy alive by—not in spite of—avoiding hero worship and appreciating the unappreciated. To invoke another contributor, Deborah Paredez, it’s an anti-epic approach to an anti-epic writer.

For a poet who prioritized the future over the past, as Rukeyser did, it’s fitting to avoid such mythologizing. Such refusal reminds me of a line from “The Fear of Form: Third Elegy” from A Turning Wind (Viking Press, 1939), that I’ve been obsessing over: “The useable [sic] present starts my calendar.” Beyond Ourselves helps bring Rukeyser, her person and her work, more fully into our usable present. Do you have any parting words about the future possibilities you hope she can help readers discover when they reengage her, after reading your book?

CG: Thank you, Eric! That wonderful line brings us back to Rukeyser’s conviction that poetry’s imaginative response to the world disallows the postponement of its meanings. For while a key device of poetry is metaphor, the work it does is not metaphorical: as Rukeyser notes in The Life of Poetry, “our lives may rest on this; and our lives are our images.” The possibilities readers may discover in reengaging Rukeyser are as multiple as poetry’s possibilities to generate meaning. Stefania’s deceptively capacious essay for the book provides key insight here, not least because it enacts Rukeyser’s thinking with, through, and about poetry—how poetry allows us “to hold on to all the possibilities for what word and world might have to do with each other.” Those word-world relations might be ignited in ways that involve activism and communality—found in both Susan Briante’s and Nomi Stone’s pieces for the book, as they each appeal to Rukeyser to challenge the barriers and violences materialized by the language of othering.

Readers might discover, too, the prevalence of children in Rukeyser’s work. Again, her engagement here is not the transference of responsibility onto future generations, but attention to (among other things) how a child’s presentism is inseparable from their lack of fear—toward poetry, toward failure, toward “otherness.” Among the many human freedoms for which Rukeyser advocated was the freedom to choose our own ancestors; embedded in this, I think, is the implicit reminder—however corny this may sound—that we are all ancestors of the future.

SH: Threaded through this question, Catherine’s answer, and our book, is a concrete concern with how our present acts reverberate beyond their limits, temporal and otherwise. The simple but profound question of what we have to do with each other. How to make meaningful choices about actions whose effects we will not personally experience.

There’s a line from The Life of Poetry that shows up more than once in our introduction; in it, Rukeyser turns her gaze outward, asking, “You reading this book, who are you?” She is making direct contact with the future, invoking her readers as much more than her market. Her readers—we—become those who might take up the collective work she imagines. It belies an understanding of lineage that is predicated on something other than the raising up of individual genius.

A beloved mentor of mine, Joan Richardson, has a beautiful figure in her book Pragmatism and American Experience: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2014) for this sort of ongoing and collective project of truth seeking. She points out that Charles Sanders Peirce’s term for continuity, “synechism,” comes from the Greek for “‘to have or hold together,’ as the activity of rowers on a bi- or trireme.” I love imagining that taking up of oars across time as, for example, Briante and Stone respond directly to Rukeyser, or Paredez, Borzutzky, and Hardy weave her words through their own. I guess my big hope for readers of Beyond Ourselves is that they may feel called, too, to climb aboard and join this work.

CG: To return to Solmaz Sharif’s galvanizing afterword: “It’s over . . . So let’s begin.”

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Interview

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

The post Muriel Rukeyser's Lessons for Social Poetics Today: A Conversation with Catherine Gander and Stefania Heim appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Lyric is Cringe: An Interview with Ry Cook - Rain Taxi

2026-08-25T21:02:24.000Z

by Tiffany Troy

In their debut chapbook Freak of Nature (Choo Choo Press, $15), Ry Cook demands: “Look me in the eyes when / I’m talking to you.” The chapbook’s opening poem, “Burn Book,” introduces readers to many of its concerns, not least of which is its preoccupation with the aesthetics of cringe. Hewing to a form—single-stanza syllabic poems with alternating indented lines—Cook’s poems vacillate between self-deprecating humor (“On Monday a Dogecoin / tells me to kill myself / and I think about it”) and an almost-classical bravado (“I’m just waiting / here listening taking / everything in before / going downstairs knowing / exactly what to sing”).

Dwelling in and beyond cringe, Cook asks what it means to cope with pain and shame through humor. These questions swerve like the back-and-forth “spine” of Cook’s poems and land them in a sense of absolution as they “wolf and howl / at Cher’s tomato moon.”

Recently awarded the Belladonna* Residency in Nonbinary Poetics, Cook received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and has published poems in The Baffler, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, and other magazines. A resident of Brooklyn, New York, they have taught at Pratt Institute and currently work as a program manager at the Academy of American Poets.

Tiffany Troy: How did Freak of Nature come about?

Ryan Cook: It started because at a certain point during my MFA, everything I wrote felt too cringey to edit, and Timothy Donnelly told me to write about that feeling—the sense of shame that comes with looking at a past piece of work. As I did, I became interested in the idea that these kinds of feelings could literally be deleted in the past—it was possible to erase words from existence permanently. And there’s a luxury to that. People now pay services to scrub their digital footprint clean, even though theoretically the cloud keeps texts and images forever.

When I started writing and exploring my gender, I found that I was making myself smaller so that fewer people could interpret my mess. By writing Freak of Nature, I forced myself to take up as much space as I could and to claim as many things as I wanted, and every time I tried to edit something out, I would see if I could instead lean into the bit, so to speak. Everyone in the MFA sphere loves to quote that Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant”—but no one talks about how deep the slant can go.

TT: Let’s talk about cringe as an aesthetic. In “Rimbaud of Shit” the speaker introduces themself:

Me the Rimbaud of shit
O my good! O my boo-
tyful collection of
cringe. My potions my po-
ems.

As the poem goes on, figures like Rimbaud, Verlaine, and the “perfect genderqueer i- / con” seem to serve as foils to the speaker. The lyric magnifies some dark experiences—ranging from a car crash to suicidal ideation—into something beyond embarrassment.

RC: I’m glad you brought up “Rimbaud of Shit,” because writing it was probably the start of this project. I was thinking about how clowns find humor by being absolutely true to themselves when practicing their art—it creates a childlike sense of play—and I realized I hadn’t been allowing myself to play on the page because I was worried about the first thing I got published being the smartest, most groundbreaking work out there. To me, however, the self-awareness of a lot of contemporary writing feels like a way to avoid looking dumb, so I wanted this collection to be a lyric manifestation of, say, dancing to a goofy song to make someone you think is hot laugh.

The lyric itself is cringe; it requires us to look back on a moment or a feeling and conjure up an echo of it, or justify it, or try to understand it . . . while in reality, so much of what we experience is more complicated than understanding will admit.

During graduate school, a professor told me that you write a poem to try to figure out a question you have, even though most of the time you end up with more questions. To me, that’s like trying to get a fishhook out with more fishhooks—yet there’s something beautifully pitiful about that in terms of the contemporary lyric. I want to write about things that I’m feeling, or that matter to me, but I worry about how others will see them, or if they feel the same.

I also tend to over-intellectualize—as I think a lot of younger writers do—mostly because it feels safer to back something up with theory. This book actually started as a failed piece of theory exploring the aesthetic of cringe and how it has changed.

I think cringe started off as a physical reaction—at least this is how boomers tend to refer to cringe—you cringe at a rat in the street, for example. Cringe then turned into a weapon in the early 2000s through clips of people making fools of themselves online— early iterations of this became “lolcows,” or people who were made fun of on the internet—yet I found that a lot of the people who were being labeled as cringe were queer or neurodivergent.

When someone bullies another person in person, they typically only use the information they have available to them at the time, but that information is exponentially larger online—the digital footprint provides endless kindling for this type of behavior. I used to watch YouTube compilations of cringe moments, clips of people having meltdowns, singing poorly, claiming greatness, or whatever, that viewers found hilarious because they perceived these people as weak. So much of cringe compilation culture was a space for people to find community through making fun of the same targets—cringe as weapon. Yet I was also struck by the confidence of some of the people who were being deemed cringe.

The current phase of cringe is self-policing. I’ve had students tell me they won’t try something new because they don’t want to be seen as cringe. I’ve also seen people scrub their digital footprints in hopes that they won’t be seen as cringe later on. This fascinates me, because it feels so antithetical to the lyric.

Anyway, the more I tried to write about this theory of cringe, the less excited I became. I kept hitting blocks because I didn’t think I was smart enough. That’s when my amazing editor, Taylor Zhang, asked me to approach this idea in a different, more personal way—she suggested making it feel like a diary, a receptacle for all the self-aggrandizing and contradictory feelings. It was while working with her that I realized I didn’t have to write the perfect treatise on cringe right away; instead, I could explore the questions I had about how people feel about how much of their past is online, and how much of it ends up in their poetry.

TT: Your idea that the reactionary impulse to scrub the parts of the self that one considers cringe is anti-lyrical is fascinating. How are the aesthetics of cringe connected to the body? And does this connection reveal something about the speaker’s alter ego in Freak of Nature?

RC: I don’t know if there is an alter ego; I think we are all constantly testing out new alter egos online. I’ve seen people display themselves completely differently online than how they are in person. I often wonder how much the digital persona reflects the true nature of the person, or if it constructs something to the left of their personality.

At any rate, the speaker in these poems is certainly more outspoken than me, but they have the same amount of shame—of their body, their past, their work. I only recently noticed a lot of these poems feature bosses, which, while not intentional, shows where my head was at: I was working between three and four part-time or freelance jobs while writing this chapbook, and had a lot of different thoughts about the relationship between work and art.

Our bodies decay, bloat, and overflow. I was actually one of the clinical trial patients to try the fecal matter transplant pill (marketed as VOWST by Nestlé) because I had so many recurrences of C. diff—it worked, and I’ve never had a recurrence since, but this experience made me think a lot about the chronic health conditions myself and my loved ones have. Writing about the body is a cliche with the lyric, so “Rimbaud of Shit” gets in your face about that, while “Three Voices” discusses the speaker’s stepdad withering away and how quickly even that can be commodified:

I know
he’ll probably pass in
the next 10 years. I don’t
know what to do with that
information. Proba-
bly write a book. Sell it.
Have people pity me
with capital. Boo hoo
boo hoo boo hoo boo hoo
goes the lament of the
loudest possible flow-
er.

I wrote this poem from a place of disgust as I was trying to sort through my feelings about my stepdad’s health conditions. I don’t want to use his pain as a prop in my art, but at the same time I need to write about this stuff, or it stays burning away in my stomach. I love my stepdad dearly, but I found that in writing about him I was commodifying him.

TT: How is the aesthetic of cringe captured and heightened by the visual form of the poems in the chapbook?

RC: In regard to the visual form—the “spine poems,” as I like to call them—the main form consists of five-syllable lines indenting back and forth. The lines give an echo of iambic pentameter—the forward pulse. Working on the level of the syllable really helped me—it made the editing and writing feel like a puzzle, allowing me to play more within the guts of these words. I had to adjust what was there if I wanted to add more text. It felt important to me to explore the insides of these words and find moments where the sentence ruptures when fitting inside the verse. I wanted the clothes of the poem to feel too small. The feelings felt too big to write about, and the structure felt freeing.

I’ll probably look back on this interview and cringe, and I love that.

TT: What are you working on now?

RC: I’m finishing a new chapbook, called ASUSHUNAMIR. This one feels different from Freak of Nature. It works with a mistranslation of the Descent of Isthar myth, which features one of the first instances of a nonbinary/genderqueer character in poetry: Asushunamir was created by the god of wisdom to save Ishtar, who was stuck in the underworld; when they do rescue Ishtar, they and everyone like them get cursed by the goddess of the underworld. Here’s a portion of the classic translation by Pirjo Lapinkivi (edited slightly by me):

I wanted to explore the implications of each curse in relation to nonbinary bodies today. It’s a big myth and it will probably take me many years to write about fully, but I’m grateful to Thom at Blue Bag Press for believing in the curse section of this much larger undertaking.

TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for readers?

RC: Thanks for letting me be messy.

Interview

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

The post Lyric is Cringe: An Interview with Ry Cook appeared first on Rain Taxi.

Colour / Grammar - Rain Taxi

2026-08-20T20:35:17.000Z

Greg Thomas
zimZalla

by Ross Hair

Colour / Grammar, Greg Thomas’s collection of 49 new and redesigned postcard-poems, offers an ideal introduction to the work and sensibilities of this prolific Glasgow-based poet, artist, and critic. Thomas is the author of one of the most authoritative critical studies of British concrete poetry, Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (Liverpool University Press, 2019) and more recently, with the poet and publisher Julie Johnson, has co-edited a new selection of Edwin Morgan’s poetry, Home in Space: Selected Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry (Reaktion Books, 2026). Although the poems that comprise Colour / Grammar wear this learning lightly, the concrete poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay (one of the subjects of Border Blurs) and the minimal poetry of Aram Saroyan are very much Thomas’s touchstones: “The feints and tricks I learned from Finlay’s work, but also from Saroyan’s,” Thomas claimed in a 2022 feature at the online zine SPAM, “are still probably the basis of what much of what I’m doing (in particular, the page not as an invitation to forward movement but as a visual frame).”

The influence of Saroyan is most evident in Thomas’s one-word poems, including “blissom” which conflates a prominent subject of Japanese haiku (blossom) with the sensation it elicits (bliss). However, whereas Saroyan utilized the solecism (most famously, misspelling “light” with an extra “ght”), Thomas’s one-word poems tend towards the portmanteau and neologism. The distinctive color of “blissom” also gives some indication of how, according to Thomas, the poems in Colour / Grammar explore “the possibilities of colour as grammar and grammar as colour.” In this instance, the rich plum of the word “blissom,” printed on a pale pink background, makes the ephemeral phenomena of blossom all the more tangible and vivid.

In terms of its colors and design, Colour / Grammar recalls Finlay’s Poems To Hear and See (Macmillan, 1971), a colorful collection of some of his most familiar and accessible concrete poems aimed at junior readers. In the case of Colour / Grammar, however, the page is replaced with the postcard—a simple format that suits the brevity of Thomas’s bright, playful poems. Maximizing the possibilities of simple colors and verbal configurations, the postcards never outsay their welcome and encourage being displayed and shared. Indeed, two copies of each postcard are included in the orange box that houses them, with the idea that the duplicates might be posted to friends and other sympathetic parties. It is a generous sentiment but perhaps one that is rather anachronistic, if not nostalgic, in its harkening back to a different (pre-digital) time when mail was an inexpensive means of communication and exchange.

Many of the poems in Colour / Grammar take a backward glance to evoke the heyday of concrete and visual poetry. In one such poem, for example, the word “sedge” (set in a bold Cooper Black font) is repeated to form a calligram of the grass-like plant which splays and sways against the card’s sage green stock. While this inevitably recalls Apollinaire, the result is also not dissimilar to Mary Ellen Solt’s concrete flower poems such as “Forsythia,” which manifests the titular shrub with the letters of its name. However, whereas Solt makes her shrub bloom by utilizing other methods common to concrete poetry (such as acrostics and encoded symbols), Thomas’s plant is made entirely from the consecutive repetition of “sedge,” which yields the additional words “edge” and “edges.” As a result, Thomas’s calligram makes a playful allusion to the mnemonic rhyme for identifying the plants of the Cyperaceae family: “sedges have edges.”

Unlike the triangular stems of sedge plants, the poems in Colour / Grammar are themselves rarely “edgy.” This is something that Thomas is evidently conscious of, and a quality that he recognizes in Finlay’s work. In his SPAM feature “Greg Thomas: Ten Things,” Thomas claims he learned from Finlay’s example

that it’s not inherently problematic to make poems that are small, simple, and express a kind of emotional warmth (I find ‘edginess’ quite a facile quality in poetry). The reader or viewer can feel they understand your work, feel a gentleness and love from it, without that signifying some sort of complicity with a damaged world.

If the challenge that comes from cultivating such warmth is to keep the poem from becoming anodyne or trite, then Thomas generally avoids such pitfalls. One way in which he does so is by subtly defamiliarizing otherwise common turns of phrase, making the everyday just a bit more incongruous and strange. In “the buzzing / of instincts / in hedgerows,” for example, Thomas subverts assumptions by substituting what one would expect, “insects,” with the more idiosyncratic “instincts.” Such a feint not only deftly evokes the liveliness of summer hedgerows, but it also conveys their diverse ecologies. In a similar spirit, the satisfyingly sibilant one-word poem “restlessnest” conjures both the insatiability of a burgeoning nest and the harried parents tending it.

Several poems in Colour / Grammar are commendable for how they breathe new life into the otherwise hackneyed subject of dawn. The non-gendered personification in “the dawn / clears / its throat,” for example, deftly ensures that this evocation of the dawn chorus is not mistaken for the less salubrious guttural hacks and hawks of a human early morning riser, while in the more aphoristic “day / breaks // night / mends” and the proverb-like “the dawn / was not / born / yesterday,” Thomas strikes a perfect balance between poignancy and whimsy. While such punning and wordplay confirms the extent to which Colour / Grammar is not an “edgy” collection of poetry, it nevertheless reminds us that the optimism and joy contained in its bright orange box is perhaps something that, in these dark and difficult times, we all need a bit more of right now.

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No God But Us - Rain Taxi

2026-08-17T20:47:44.000Z

Bobuq Sayed
Harper ($30)

by Zara Karschay

Bobuq Sayed’s deeply compassionate debut No God But Us takes us ten years back, the tragedy of critical distance apparent on every page. Distance—of time, place, nationality, race, sexuality, and gender identity—is essential to Sayed’s protagonists. Mansur and Delbar meet by chance in Turkey at a political turning point for the country. Through the dual perspectives of these two queer Afghans—one a refugee, the other an American citizen and closeted trans woman—Sayed creates a swirling narrative of intersectionality, a vortex within which their sharply drawn characters must negotiate the world at large.

The novel opens with Delbar’s story in 2015. A recent college graduate, they are heading to a party hosted by their mother Qandul but are instead apprehended, due to a surfaced photo showing them working at a drag club (where they also hope to perform one day). To spare them the family’s judgment, Qandul’s progressive sister Yosra gets Delbar on a flight to Istanbul, where she herself works as a professor.

Mansur takes a very different journey to Turkey. His story begins in Tehran in 2013 among a shadow class of migrant laborers, a perilous journey from Kabul already behind him. Life in Iran, however, is full of social inequities, and when Mansur’s sexuality is discovered, his lover, who lives in the capital’s wealthy north, helps him flee to Istanbul. But the work Mansur finds in Turkey—on roads, in kitchens, as a rent boy—isn’t much better; as Sayed puts it, “the weaker man met the needs of the stronger one.” Refugee status makes life difficult at every turn: Dispersal policies force many to live in rural areas, making urban jobs untenable, and many on the nebulous, slippery path toward asylum have already spent years in legal limbo, waiting for their papers to be processed while they keep out of trouble—including not joining protests where they’d otherwise find community. In the novel’s most tragic story arc, an Iranian trans woman is arrested at a pride march and finds that her new criminal record has devastated any chances of her being granted asylum.

Both Delbar and Mansur strive for a dignified, free life while finding belonging and stability as refugees. Through Yosra’s contacts, Delbar is offered an internship with Leif, a German “Anderson Cooper looking dude” who runs PeaceMeals, an aid program for queer and transgender refugees. While Delbar senses a performative dimension to Leif’s allyship, they also recognize an opportunity to help those with similar experiences. Mansur, despite his memories of western aid groups exploiting people in his homeland, is drawn to the degree of protection that Leif offers, whether it be from racial profiling, case worker distrust, or other refugees’ assumptions that being from Afghanistan makes it easier for him to apply for asylum.

Leif soon adopts an underhanded manner of domination. When he and Mansur become lovers, Leif controls every aspect of their relationship, from their apartment to their sexual partners, and he expects Mansur to reject his Afghan background. But No God But Us spares us the western cliché of the “good immigrant” who shucks the trammels of their past and supplicates to their white savior, focusing on human striving and the desire to be needed instead. Mansur confronts Leif after hearing him tell another aid worker he is “modernizing” the Afghan, and he later resists cultural erasure with a quiet dignity.

We know Delbar and Mansur must meet, and when they do, Sayed’s prose crackles with energy. Delbar describes intimate moments with phrases that seem plucked from the Persianate literary tradition, e.g., “fondling an ivory wildflower, gazing up at the same forked branches I was staring into, touching me without any point of contact.” No God But Us builds bridges between the critical distances that separate us and shows how deep the waters are that run beneath.

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Self-Construction: The Work of Édouard Louis - Rain Taxi

2026-08-12T20:50:57.000Z

2026 Books Reviewed
Collapse, translated by Tash Aw (FSG, $26)
Monique Escapes, translated by John Lambert (FSG, $25)

Also Discussed
The End of Eddy, translated by Michael Lucey, (Picador, 2017, $18)
Who Killed My Father, translated by Lorin Stein (New Directions, 2019, $15.95)
A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, translated by Tash Aw (Picador, 2022, $16)
Change, translated by John Lambert (Picador, 2024, $18)

by Claude Peck

Books about terrible, horrible, no good, very bad childhoods are not exactly scarce. From Dickens to Genet, Frank McCourt, Dorothy Allison, and Stuart Douglas, we read about orphans and outcasts, the abused, destitute, bullied and neglected. To this robust literature of misery, we can now add the work of a skinny queer provincial French boy with bad teeth who was determined to rise out of poverty, receive the finest education his country had to offer, and seek his revenge through plain yet piercing words. In a remarkable series of books, Édouard Louis recounts growing up in Hallencourt, a working-class village in northern France rife with unemployment, homophobia, racism, and violence.

Louis’s books have been appearing in English translations over the past decade (see list above for details of translators and years of US publication). First was The End of Eddy, originally published in 2014 when the author was just twenty-two; the book quickly sold a whopping 300,000 copies in France. Most critics praised it for baring a side of French life so at odds with the country’s reputation for égalité and liberal sophistication; some raised questions about its accuracy, and whether it should be marketed as fiction or memoir. Regardless of the disputes, it was a finalist for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in the debut-novel category and has been translated into twenty languages; Louis has given talks and readings all over the planet in its wake.

Louis went on to devote a book to his father (Who Killed My Father) and one to his mother’s midlife struggle to free herself of abusive, alcoholic men (A Woman’s Battles and Transformations). In the fascinating accretions of Change, published in France in 2021, Eddy leaves his childhood and village behind to attend lycée in Amiens and wins admittance to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Born Eddy Bellegueule, he fancifies his name to Édouard Louis, alters his too-loud laugh, straightens his teeth, attends the theater, and hangs out with a series of wealthy gay men, socialites, writers, and intellectuals—all to “gain worldwide recognition” for his books. The rags-to-riches arc of Change hints at such gradualist classics as Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.

With the English translations of Collapse, which concerns the early death of his older brother, and Monique Escapes, about helping his mother achieve independence after a string of bad relationships, Louis returns us to the squalid village of The End of Eddy. But wait: Do we really want to go there? To experience his dead-end brother’s alcohol-fueled violence against women? To relive the brothers’ woebegone mom, seemingly trapped in a cage with a series of insulting, domineering men? Also, why call these novels, when they are so clearly autobiographical?

Louis dismisses those who find his books repetitive: “I’ve been told that literature should never repeat itself, but I want to write only the same story again and again,” he tells us in A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, “returning to it until it reveals fragments of its truth, digging hole after hole in it until all that is hidden begins to seep out.”

Monique Escapes, however, doesn’t repeat much of the story of his mother told in previous books. As it opens, she is in her mid-fifties. (The writer, twenty-eight, is already a celebrated author, in Greece at a writing residency.) She calls her son from Paris, where she has been living for seven years with a man she met after she gave the boot to her chauvinist husband (Eddy’s father). Old patterns die hard, however; the new guy gets drunk nightly, calls her a whore and fat cow, and insults her “faggot” son. Fed up, she is determined to leave, and when she seeks her estranged son’s help, he throws himself into abetting her escape.

The mother-son dynamic here shifts dramatically from Louis’s long disregard for her, the family, and the town where he grew up. His mother, as young Eddy came to learn, abandoned hopes for a culinary career when she dropped out of school, married in her teens, had children, and embarked on a dreary life of scrimping, cooking, cleaning, and putting up with a verbally abusive, alcoholic husband. She mostly embraces (or fails to object to) the far-right, antigay, anti-immigrant politics of her husband and the town. Cowed, she rarely defends her effeminate young son from insults and attacks by bullies. She is prone to guilt-tripping and self-pity along the lines of “why can’t I have even a small measure of happiness?”

The author’s mother initially resents him for writing about her and his miserable childhood in The End of Eddy: “But paradoxically it’s because I’d written that book, and the ones that followed, that I’d earned the money we could now spend on her.” Even as he praises and reassures her, even as he provides her with money and temporary housing, Louis recalls her failures as a mother, wondering, “Why did I feel such a deep need to help her?” and concluding that it’s “because my hurt and hers are linked.”

In all his books, Louis laces his personal story with philosophy and social theory. Monique Escapes offers a class and feminist critique, especially about poor women in abusive relationships, for whom the possibility of escape is thwarted by financial constraints. “How many women would change their lives if they got a check?” he asks. He traces parallels between his childhood and that of his friend and mentor, the writer and philosopher Didier Eribon, who also grew up gay and poor, and wrote about it in his 2009 memoir Returning to Reims (Semiotext(e), 2013, translated by Michael Lucey).

When encountering “The Guy” his mother was ditching, Louis has a revelation reminiscent of the sort of moral inversion common in the works of his countryman Jean Genet: “I suddenly began to think that maybe this man was neither guilty nor responsible for what he had done,” but was rather “the element through which a violence had passed . . . the violence of male domination.” He and his estranged sister reunite to help their mother find and furnish a suitable place to live; she will also need money for groceries and living expenses. Louis praises Virginia Woolf for postulating a century ago, in A Room of One’s Own, that “freedom is not first and foremost an aesthetic and symbolic issue, but a material and practical one.”

With her children helping her, Monique blossoms into a new life where “no one’s going to walk all over me anymore.” She delights in trying new things, wearing makeup, fixing her hair, walking her dog, cooking for one. When she is featured in a German theater production based on Louis’s writing about her, she is invited to the opening; the journey marks her first time in an airplane and her first trip outside France. The director brings her onstage to applause at the curtain call, concluding on a joyous note for mother and son.

More than an upbeat happy-ending story, Monique Escapes is about rapprochement and metamorphosis. It reflects on Eddy’s own escape from his painful childhood, described in Change, as he sought revenge through education and hoped-for fame. It embraces a feminist ideal for a working-class woman. Near the end of Change, Louis entertains, for the first time, doubts about the values of the bourgeois life he has so doggedly pursued, combined with an ounce or two of nostalgia for the village life he left behind—for his mother’s humor, her pluck, her dreams so long deferred.

Throughout his oeuvre, Louis has argued that violence, homophobia, and racism in the town where he grew up must be seen as socially determined—a result of systems of class, economics, and masculinity that advantage those in power, even progressives, and not just in tiny Hallencourt. “By writing about my small town, I can put light on certain mechanisms that you can find everywhere in the world,” he told Interview Magazine in 2019.

“I write to shame the ruling class,” the self-described “class defector” told the New York Times in an interview. Louis seems thus to occupy a foggy space between revenge (against small-town bigots and gay-baiting bullies) and the thirst for vengeance (for a father and brother buffeted by post-industrial economic decline and systemic misogyny). This becomes overt in Who Killed My Father, where Louis names a series of French leaders whose politics, he argues, were responsible for turning many in his hometown into supporters of the far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.

A brother’s death

Louis’s older (by seven years) half-brother died of alcohol-related illness at the age of thirty-eight. “I received the news as one would receive information on the weather,” writes Louis, who had avoided his brother for the preceding ten years. In Collapse, as he helps his mother and sister with funeral arrangements, he combines his own recollections with stories from interviewing his brother’s friends and lovers.

When not drunk, the brother (never named) could be kind, generous, loving, a good listener. He barely knew his birth father, which gives the boy a lifelong sense of being abandoned. As a teen, he begins doing drugs, drinking, lying, stealing. He drops out of school, which to Louis seems to be a masculinist impulse. His brother, along with his male peers, views school itself as feminine, even faggy, not something that “real males” would consider valuable when they followed their fathers into factory work.

When he does ponder his future, the brother is grandiose. At twenty, he announces to his parents that he would learn the meat trade and become the finest butcher in all of France, or he would work with a crew restoring historic cathedrals for the glory of the republic. His adoptive father laughs in his face to it all and turns back to the ever-on television. “It was the size of his dreams,” Louis writes, “and the mismatch between their dimensions and all the impossibilities that had shaped his life, the misery, the poverty, the north of France, his destiny, I think it was all these contradictions that made him so unhappy.”

The brother is suicidally depressed, fixating on being abandoned by his birth father; he is also cruel, selfish, and violent. He beats women. He gets in bar fights. When he hears about Eddy’s gayness, he sets out to kill him, armed with a baseball bat. Louis, however, begins to find sympathy for his largely unlovable brother. Their father should have been more supportive. There was no vocabulary in the working-class town for mental illness; no one ever talked about depression, trauma or therapy. Psychiatric care was a luxury for those with money and education. His brother self-medicated with alcohol. He grew up around violence and used it himself to feel more powerful.

As Louis gained access to a more privileged world, first in the provincial city of Amiens and later in Paris, he saw that fuckups like his brother might have had better chances to heal and prosper if they were born into wealthier families where missteps were not terminal. “Injustice,” he writes in Change, “is nothing but the difference in access to attempts.”

And consider that if his straight older brother was “of” his village, Louis, being gay, was “apart” from Hallencourt from a young age. This helps explain why Louis, like so many smalltown gays, escaped to the city: In Paris, he was able “to finally live, even more radically and easily than in Amiens, to have what I had desired since my birth, the feeling of bodily freedom and of entering, thanks to sexuality, myriad new universes.” The quintessential pop anthem of this phenom is Bronski Beat’s 1984 single “Smalltown Boy” which asserts “the answers you seek will never be found at home.” But for Louis, unearthing home’s hurt is the key to finding painful truths and paths forward.

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The Real and Unreal: An Interview with Molly Gaudry - Rain Taxi

2026-08-10T22:08:51.000Z

by Emily Webber

I first met Molly Gaudry in Florida during her book tour. As we walked along the Jupiter Inlet, a pelican dived into the water, scooped up an impossibly large fish, and held it in its elastic neck pouch. The fish wrestled for a long time, and the pelican mostly remained calm before swallowing it whole. As Gaudry and I talked about writing, I returned to this image again and again. Sometimes you’re the fish, where it feels like all fight and no reward; sometimes you’re the pelican just calmly waiting, and it all comes together.

Gaudry holds master’s degrees in fiction and poetry from the University of Cincinnati and George Mason University, respectively, and a PhD in experimental prose from the University of Utah. She is the author of two novels in verse, We Take Me Apart (Mud Luscious Press, 2010) and Desire: A Haunting (Ampersand, 2018); both explore the same fictional world through the perspective of a mother and daughter. Her latest book, Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir (Rose Metal Press, $17.95), is a hybrid work revisiting other characters—including the tea house woman, who appears in her earlier works first as a bride-to-be and then as a widow.

In the following interview, Gaudry offers a fascinating look into her creative process.

EW: How did you become a writer? Was it something you always wanted to do?

MG: I don’t really know how I became a writer, but I’m sure that I was a reader first. When I was very young, I used to make up little stories and turn them into booklets with construction paper “covers.” In kindergarten, I remember my desk was separated from the other kids’ and I was encouraged to work on reading and writing skills. Later, in grade school, I was never the best student in my classes, but I was often allowed to turn in stories for extra credit to help save my grades. Eventually, I ended up studying creative writing in a vocational arts high school. Although I’d gone there to study jazz and music composition, I learned quickly that I didn’t have the chops or dedication that my fellow music majors did, so I ended up switching majors to creative writing. By senior year, our portfolios included short stories, poems, and a one-act play. I think it was around this time, transitioning out of high school and into college, that I began to think of myself as someone who could one day be a writer.

EW: So you were exposed to writing across genres early, and your first two books are novels in verse. Did you mostly identify as a poet in the beginning?

MG: Oh, gosh, no. I definitely considered myself a fiction writer back then. I still do, really. But when my first book, We Take Me Apart, came out, even though my publisher and I considered it experimental fiction, only the poets paid it any attention. The book was shortlisted for the PEN/Osterweil, a poetry prize, and named a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award for Poetry, and this was when my identity crisis as a writer began. Because I felt like such a fraud, I ended up in George Mason University’s MFA program, so I could study poetry for three years, even though it terrified me. I think for three years, I sat in those classes thinking of myself as a terrified fiction writer. Even upon graduating, I still felt like I didn’t really understand poetry. I was wrong, though—I can see this now, more clearly—because my professors and my fellow classmates really did help me become a stronger reader of poems, and they gave me the skills I would need to continue to develop on my own as a reader, and now as a professor, of poetry.

EW: You had a period when you were renovating a dollhouse. What interested you about this creative outlet compared to writing?

MG: That was long after my MFA and toward the very end of my PhD program, when I lived in Salt Lake City. I was working on Fit Into Me, a hybrid novel/memoir for my dissertation, and I had become obsessed with 1:12 scale miniature artists from around the world. Two of my favorite Instagram accounts were @ibuildsmallthings and @lavenderbelle_miniatures, and just like other miniature artists they both included their hands in their photos. Without their hand, it was really hard to tell that their work was miniature!

On a whim I found an old dollhouse for sale on Craigslist, and I started refurbishing it. I spent maybe a month or two fixing it up. I think what I loved most was that I could focus on specific tasks and, by the end of the day, see tangible results. I would tell myself, “Today, I’m going to prime and paint the walls on the second floor,” and “Today, I’ll cut and install the floorboards,” and “Today, I’ll put the lights in.” I really needed it at the time. With writing, I often had nothing to show by the end of the day, but with the dollhouse I could see the progress I was making, day by day, even hour by hour.

EW: Speaking of blending the real and unreal, I hadn’t encountered a work quite like Fit Into Me. How would you describe this book?

MG: I think of it as a memoir titled Fit Into Me, which is about trying to write a novel titled Fit Into Me. To put this another way: Fit Into Me: A Novel is the subject to Fit Into Me: A Memoir.

EW: Rose Metal Press seems like the perfect publisher for a book like Fit Into Me because of their championing of hybrid work, but I know you had a slightly difficult path to publishing this work. Can you describe the book’s journey and how you persevered through some setbacks?

MG: Well, my first two books were published by small presses that no longer exist—Mud Luscious and Ampersand Books. After Mud Luscious shut down, Jason Cook at Ampersand offered me a multi-book contract, which included a reprint of We Take Me Apart. Together, we worked closely on my second verse novel, and I also completed the first full draft of Fit Into Me with him. We really had a great working relationship, and I’m grateful for all the time and attention he gave me and my work. Unfortunately, for personal reasons, he decided to shut down Ampersand, and so I no longer had a publisher for Fit.

EW: What kept you going? Did you continue to revise the book?

MG: I mostly put it away, but occasionally I’d pull it back out and revise a bit more. As the years went by, I was able to pursue leads with a few other small presses, but ultimately none of these panned out. In truth, I never really felt like I was in any particular rush to find a publisher. At some point, I set it aside completely and challenged myself to write more long-form, mainstream work. Over the course of three years, I wrote and published a few short stories and a long essay about my biological family in Korea. At first, I didn’t think of this essay as anything but a standalone piece. Later, though, I decided to include it at the end of Fit Into Me, and I subbed it in for what had been the final essay. Once I had done this, I knew it was the last substantial edit I would make on my own. Around this time, I decided to submit this version to the Rose Metal Press Hybrid Genre Open contest, and in my mind, this was it. If it didn’t get accepted, I would let it go and forget about it.

EW: In that essay, you start to incorporate fiction into your story, describing an incident with your biological family that didn’t actually happen. Why this shift to including fiction even within your own story?

MG: That essay was written in 2022, while the rest of the book was written in 2015. By then, I had been teaching and writing across genres, and this multi-genre identity had served me well on the academic job market. But somewhere around my third-year review, I felt I was spreading myself too thin, and after I had a chance to catch up with my former dissertation advisor, Lance Olsen, I decided to focus on a specific genre so I could try to home in on just one area of expertise. I chose nonfiction, and that essay was my first attempt at speculative nonfiction.

EW: What are some good examples of speculative nonfiction?

MG: I recommend the online journal Speculative Nonfiction: Jerald Walker’s “Advice to an Honorable Man,” Caite McNeil’s “She Ran Like A ______,” and Sean Prentiss’s “Buying a House: Every Story Is True and Every Story Is A Lie” are particular favorites of mine. Of course, there’s Jami Nakamura Lin’s The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir (Mariner Books, 2023), and Larraine Herring released an anthology fairly recently titled Becoming Real: Women Reclaim the Power of the Imagined through Speculative Nonfiction (Regal House Publishing, 2024).

EW: Your two previous verse novels and the fictional novel that constitutes part of Fit Into Me feature the same characters. They don’t need to be read together, but I had the pleasure of reading your work in reverse. Getting an introduction to your fictional world along with your creative process through Fit Into Me, I loved that I could dive into your novels and get more of these characters with this inside knowledge. Did you always know you’d write multiple books with these characters?

MG: No. After We Take Me Apart came out, though, I came up with the idea for Desire: A Haunting. It was not, from the start, a companion project. But once I realized it could be, I knew I wanted to tell one of the main events in We Take Me Apart from a different perspective—to show how the same event could affect another character differently.

I think there’s something wonderful about books that have a shared universe. I’m obsessed with Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad mysteries, for instance, and more recently I’ve gotten into the Lucy Barton books by Elizabeth Strout. Even as a young writer, I loved interconnected books. Probably one of my greatest early influences was Gabriel García Márquez, and I always loved seeing Macondo from the different perspectives of his characters across books.

When I began writing the fiction sections of Fit Into Me, I wasn’t thinking they would become a book. But eventually, when I realized Fit Into Me could be a novel, and that Fit Into Me could be a memoir about that novel, that’s when I realized I could say goodbye to one of the more important minor characters, Sam, who appears across all three books as the tea house woman’s father.

EW: Do you think you’ll revisit these characters again?

MG: It’s possible, but in some ways I feel I’ve moved on. During the editing process, I was asked to change the name of the city from a made-up city to a real city. The easiest answer was to call it Salt Lake City, whose grid and street names I had used as inspiration anyway. But because, suddenly, the tea house woman existed in Salt Lake City, in the real world, rather than in the made-up place I always thought it was, that made it feel like the end of the tea house for me. I no longer live in Salt Lake City, and Salt Lake City feels to me like the past, not like any part of my future.

EW: At your book event, you said every story we tell is a love story to everything we’ve read; Fit Into Me embodies this on every page. You have over 170 footnotes, many of which serve as citations for where you seamlessly weave in sentences from other works of literature. Without the footnotes, the reader wouldn’t even be able to tell. What was your process like, and how did you choose the source material and formatting?

MG: It’s only because of interviews like this one that I’ve been able to go back and revisit my process for including quotations. In my memory, all the cited texts were always there, but in reality, they were not. The only time I quoted anyone in the earliest drafts were when I was in fact engaging with authors that were, themselves, the subjects of my nonfiction: Marguerite Duras, Sappho and Anne Carson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the fiction, one of the characters is reading José Saramago’s Blindness to another character, and so that was quoted text from the start as well. But every other author, every other quotation, was added later, at various times.

EW: In a multi-page footnote I adore, you finally give the tea house woman a name, Constance or Connie, in a very offhand, casual way. Can you talk about how you name your characters and why you sometimes don’t?

MG: My first book was largely influenced by fairy tales, fables, and myths. So, the tea house woman didn’t have a name in We Take Me Apart. She didn’t get a name in Desire either. But by the third book, since the tea house was handed down through the generations, I suddenly had multiple tea house women, and it was becoming confusing telling them apart. So I just had fun in the footnotes and directly addressed the problem of needing to name them. I chose the name Connie because my grandfather’s name was Conrad, but he went by Connie his whole life. Then I named the tea house woman’s mother Clarissa, after Mrs. Dalloway, because why not?

EW: A lot of your writing leans into this sense of play. In Fit Into Me, you demonstrate the process you use to generate your work: You take a piece of literature meaningful to you, cut up the words, and select some to incorporate into your own writing. You show the word lists you pull and how you use them. How did you develop this process? Have you used it for all your books?

MG: With my first book, I was up against a deadline, so I transcribed words from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons as an act of desperation. I get into the specifics in Fit Into Me, but the quick version is that I created lists of ten words each and had to use these lists to quickly write and finish that book. Because it worked for We Take Me Apart, I did the same thing for Desire, using words from John Ratti’s poetry collection A Remembered Darkness.

I like to think that this process helps to infuse your writing with the spirit of the works you pull from. We Take Me Apart is obsessed with food, rooms, and objects. Desire turned out to be a Gothic-ish ghost story. Both reflect the spirit of Tender Buttons and A Remembered Darkness. So I repeated the process for Fit Into Me, using words from Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s If Not, Winter.

EW: Now that you’ve finally seen Fit Into Me go out into the world and receive positive reviews, what comes next?

MG: Well, I’ve finished another hybrid work, The Time Loop: A Speculative Memoir: A Novel, which is currently out on submission. It’s a novel, but it presents as a speculative memoir that asks: What if I got stuck in a time loop as a metaphor for being stuck in grief?

When I began this manuscript, I still did not have a publisher for Fit Into Me, and I knew I had to finish this one quickly in order to have any chance of meeting my publication requirement for tenure. Because I’m such a slow writer, though, and from day to day often delete everything and start over, I needed to find a way to make consistent forward progress. That’s how the idea of the time loop came to me, because all I had to do was write a version of the day, and if I hated it, I could just write a different version of the day without deleting all of that material. The many variations of the day in the time loop allowed me to keep making progress without losing pages in the process. The conceit of my narrator’s need to finally get her day right applied perfectly to my own need to finally get the writing of her day right.

EW: What advice do you have for writers, especially those trying to do something experimental or in a different genre?

MG: It’s funny that you ask this, because I find myself now in need of such advice! I suppose a lot of it comes down to just trying different things on the page—like word lists, or like any other constraints you might come up with for yourself—and seeing what happens. The writing process can and should be messy (which is something I’m emphasizing for myself by saying, and repeating, it here!). Likely, what’s in your heart will eventually come out onto the page. Just trust yourself, let go of fear and doubt and ego and the idea of whatever it is you think you need to have happen on the page, and see what emerges instead. I think, if we’re lucky, it’ll feel fresh and weird and exciting and interesting, and we’ll want to keep molding that clay until we can step back and say, “It’s done.”

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Interview

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What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To - Rain Taxi

2026-08-06T22:18:36.000Z

Mary Lucia
University of Minnesota Press ($22.95)

by Frank Randall

A groundbreaking and widely acclaimed radio DJ in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, Mary Lucia has played a pivotal role in the development and sustained popularity of indie rock in the Midwest and beyond. Aware of her talent for “connecting with the listener,” her employers at Minnesota Public Radio built a brand around her savvy take on modern music, steeped in reverence for punk, Prince, and pugs (in this case her beloved dogs, not the band). Lucia’s first book is an impressive and attention-worthy memoir that combines a behind-the-scenes account of her unique professional journey with the harrowing story of being targeted by a deranged stalker.

Starting out as host for the eclectic REV105 (“Revolution Radio”) in the 1990s, Lucia’s success as an on-air personality was immediate. With an irreverent attitude that matched her genre-resistant approach to curating rock and roll, she was everyone’s cool friend with an ass-kicking record collection. In this enlightened realm, Jackie Wilson’s “Reet Petite” would be immediately followed by the New York Dolls blasting “Personality Crisis,” then Madonna urging everyone to “Express Yourself,” David Bowie walking the walk on “Heroes,” and Prince burning through “D.M.S.R.” By 2005, she was asked to be the central voice for MPR’s foray into the rock world with the launch of The Current. Her audience followed and the bands played on.

Like many talented performers, however, Lucia’s ease with a radio audience masked an array of personal insecurities, including bouts with anxiety and depression. When unsolicited and inarguably bizarre packages (raw meat, religious artifacts, blurry Polaroids) started to arrive addressed to her in the office mailroom, the mental alarms began sounding. For years, Lucia was the victim of a listener who targeted her with disturbing voice mails, letters professing a delusional romantic connection, and eventually visits to her home despite a restraining order.

How on earth does a person deal with a nightmarish situation like this? Thankfully, part of Lucia’s survival plan included keeping a journal, which not only helped her navigate the experience, but acted as a starting point for this unflinching narrative. Lucia bravely opens up about virtually every aspect of her journey—the professional disruption, the emotional trauma, and the ultimately ineffective legal system, which she navigates with remarkable composure. Lucia felt trapped in a dangerous situation unlike anything she had experienced before: “I was up against an unknown force of mental illness that acted fearlessly. All I could do was sink deeper into the dank hole that had burrowed inside of me.”

The unwanted effects of Lucia’s case impact every aspect of her life: Parents too wrapped up in their own emotional dilemmas to offer support; inept bosses that are not only jealous of your success but want your job as well; well-meaning but misguided help from friends and family; tone-deaf reactions from legal and mental health professionals. Lucia makes her life appear normal for as long as possible, until it becomes impossible. With survival instincts kicking in, she seeks traditional mental health and legal care, but she pivots to improvised methods of self-preservation when the traditional falls short. These lead to unforeseen setbacks and roadblocks on the path to wellness, but Lucia embraces her choices and their consequences with an emotional honesty that is supported by her unrestrained prose. “A lifetime of sticking my neck out for possible beheading is my choice,” she proclaims. “That way the failures (F.A.I.L. = First Attempt in Learning) and successes rest on my shoulders.” Throughout panic attacks, stress-induced shingles, dangerous weight loss, and years of fear for her own safety, she remains amazingly resilient in the face of circumstances beyond her control.

Lucia’s ability to find the humor in the darkest and most unfathomable situations stands out as her remarkable superpower. When she reluctantly sends out the call to her siblings for help, she has one brother (older, and yes, adult) literally swinging from the trees in her yard in a misguided attempt at branch maintenance. The other brother house sits overnight, leaving a note explaining that all was quiet, but he was swiping her vintage leather coat “as payment for standing watch.” Unafraid to portray the dysfunctional family she somehow survived through childhood and her own shortcomings as an adult, Lucia possesses the rare ability to maintain a state of jaded grace in the telling of uncomfortable events.

Lucia’s portrayal of her relationship with her mother is especially poignant—and painful: “When you’re told as a child by your mother that she can’t stand your father and you’re just like him, it does a number on your head. I get it. You don’t like me.” Despite Lucia’s efforts to help her mother deal with her own traumatic past, the adage that no good deed goes unpunished seems to be written in the stars:

Foolishly, I put aside a lifetime of boundaries to confide in her about the daily fear I was living with. Even I couldn’t have been prepared for her callous dismissal of my current situation.
“He’s just a fan. Lighten up.”

The editors of this bold memoir deserve special praise for not polishing every rough edge in Lucia’s intensely personal prose. The genuine anxiety, the dark humor, the appreciation for the absurd, the misplaced faith in institutions that should protect us, the awesome power of music when the written word simply can’t rise to the occasion—Lucia wraps her arms around it all and somehow manages to wrestle it to the ground. Understandably shaken, appropriately resentful, but intact. After multiple rounds of unwanted attention, courtroom trauma, and ultimately an unjustified dismissal from an unsupportive employer, she remains defiant. “The system is deeply flawed. Do I accept that? Never.”

Having battled demons in public and in private—and on multiple fronts—Lucia comes through the ordeal with her rock and roll spirit intact. She never downplays the toll it has taken on her outlook and health, but she refuses to let these events define her. “I don’t want to be the face of stalking,” she admits, fully self-aware and realistic about the challenges that still lie ahead. “My eyes are open, and if it’s a heathy dose of anger I need to feel slightly less powerless, so be it.”

What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To provides a deeply moving narrative of the multitude of negative impacts a stalker can have on the life of a victim. There is no happy ending, as any victim would attest, but Lucia has a natural gift for storytelling, and the very existence of this account is a reason for hope. If we are lucky, she will report back on her future endeavors, surrounded by friends, devoted pugs, and eccentric cats, all accompanied by a brilliant playlist.

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Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetry of Antifascism - Rain Taxi

2026-07-31T20:50:31.000Z

by Jeremy Wang-Iverson

This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the onset of the Spanish Civil War, which had a profound effect on the American writer Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980). The days she spent in Barcelona when the war began in July 1936 served as a source of inspiration throughout her life, forging her commitment to antifascism and her unwavering belief in writing’s ability to create the conditions for political change.

The unrestrained idealism expressed in Rukeyser’s work inspired succeeding generations of American poets: Sharon Olds, Kate Daniels, Natasha Trethewey, Daniel Borzutzky, and Solmaz Sharif are among her legion of admirers. Many critics found her artistic approach less convincing and her political commitments suspect, but in recent years, with fascism once again on the rise globally, the tide has turned in her favor, and a Rukeyser revival is firmly underway.

This is not to say that Rukeyser was neglected in her lifetime. She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first collection, Theories of Flight (Yale University Press, 1935); a few years later, she was called “the most inventive and challenging poet of the generation which has not yet reached thirty” by Louis Untermeyer in The Saturday Review of Literature. Along with winning more prestigious awards and fellowships, she lived to see her collected poems published—a significant capstone—and published fiction, plays, memoirs, biographies, criticism, children’s books, and translations of poets such as Mexico’s Octavio Paz and Sweden’s Gunnar Ekelöf. And not incidentally for a writer committed to political activism, Rukeyser served as president of PEN America and wrote op-eds for the New York Times.

Despite her accomplishments, Rukeyser did not achieve the canonical status that many poets and scholars believe she deserves. Partly this is because so much of her writing has not been given the same consideration as her poetry, but with the recent publication of The Muriel Rukeyser Era (Cornell University Press, 2023), a selection of her prose edited by Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, that can begin to change.

Gathering work from the full span of Rukeyser’s life, The Muriel Rukeyser Era shows the extent to which she experimented with genre and technique in an effort to connect with larger audiences and advocate for social justice. With many of its entries originally written for a general readership, this anthology is an excellent starting point to learn about Rukeyser: Here we meet a writer with genuine concern for those struggling, and we gain a clear understanding of her profound desire to share what she witnessed. The volume is an inspiring reminder of the ways in which an artist can defy a political reality and strive to create something new.

Rukeyser’s resolve to pursue this lofty project crystallized in the days following the start of the Spanish Civil War, an experience into which newly published pieces offer further insight. She was twenty-two years old, and it was an improbable turn of events that led her to Spain. Initially, she went to London, accompanying the activists George and Elizabeth Dublin Marshall, who were researching cooperatives. While in London, she met Robert Herring, the editor of Life and Letters To-Day; Herring asked if she would go to Barcelona to cover the People’s Olympiad, a gathering of athletes protesting the official games held in Nazi Germany that summer. She left London on July 18, and as Herring notes in the header for the article Rukesyer eventually wrote: “She was on the last train to enter Spain after fighting began and arrived back in London on July 27th. This was her first trip to Europe.”

And what a trip it was: The People’s Olympiad never took place. When Rukeyser arrived in Barcelona, as she explained in another journalistic account included in The Muriel Rukeyser Era, the war had begun:

I could never find the man who was managing the publicity for the Olympics because he was always out on the street fighting with the People’s Front. We were taken to dinner that night in an automobile spangled with bullet holes, the upholstery stained with blood; the officials apologized for the condition of the car, explaining there had been fighting that day.

Rukeyser returned to New York later that year and wrote the novel Savage Coast, which fictionalized her experience in Spain, including an account of falling in love with a German athlete named Otto Boch, who was later killed fighting the fascists. The novel, written before George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, was rejected by her publisher and only released in 2013 by The Feminist Press. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, who discovered the believed-to-be-lost manuscript for Savage Coast in Rukeyser’s archive at the Library of Congress, writes in the book’s introduction that it “defies and remakes the artistic, political, and gendered categories of twentieth-century modernism.” Eulàlia Busquets, who has translated Savage Coast into Catalan, describes it as a “documentary, biographical, and experimental” novel, writing in her 2020 essay “Returning to Savage Coast” (published in Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, /2020/05/08/eulalia-busquets-returning-to-savage-coast/):

Savage Coast tells us about the things that could have been possible but that ultimately did not happen . . . We must go on fighting . . . This is the message Rukeyser held on to as she left Spain on the ship Ciudad de Ibiza and accepted the responsibility to tell what she had seen the day she “was born” in Spain.

This moment of epiphany on the ship as she was evacuated from Spain is narrated by Rukeyser in several non-fiction pieces as well. In The Muriel Rukeyser Era, Keenaghan and Kennedy-Epstein include a series of lectures that she gave at Vassar in 1940, when she was twenty-six, that were previously part of the one book of essays published in her lifetime, The Life of Poetry. This is Rukeyser from the original introduction:

We were on a small ship, five times past our capacity in refugees, sailing for the first port at peace. On the deck that night, people talked quietly about what they had just seen and what it might mean to the world . . . Suddenly, throwing his question into talk not at all leading up to it—not seeming to—a man—a printer, several times a refugee—asked, ‘And poetry—among all this—where is there a place for poetry?’

Then I began to say what I believe.

Rukeyser’s attempts to answer the printer’s question can be traced across several lectures, essays, and reviews in pieces included in The Muriel Rukeyser Era. The most direct (and amusing) answer is in a radio script that she prepared in 1949, aired by a San Francisco station that summer. There are moments where Rukeyser sounds like a writer tentatively trying a new technology—think of Joyce Carol Oates’s earliest tweets—before she locks in:

Mrs. Melville said to her mother—and you can hear the misery of her words—“Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.” What is this distaste for poetry? If you ask your friends about it, you will find, as I have, that they will give you the same answers. Your friends may say that they have not the time for poetry. Now this is a curious position to take; for poetry, of all the arts that live in time—music, theater, movies, writing—poetry is the briefest and most compact of these.

She continues: “A poem invites a total response from you . . . A first-rate poem, a fine poem, will reach you intellectually . . . or may I say that when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too . . . but the way is through emotion . . . through what we call feeling.”

Rukeyser could have been describing her own extraordinary poem sequence The Book of the Dead, first published as part of her second full-length collection, U.S. 1 (Covici Friede, 1938). Remarkably, her trip to Spain was the second reporting trip the poet took in 1936; earlier in the year, with photographer Nancy Naumburg, she went to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, where thousands worked in unsafe conditions to build a tunnel for Union Carbide, and reported on the 1931 industrial tragedy known as the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster. (Naumburg’s photos were meant to be published with the poem, which was not realized until an edition published by West Virginia University Press in 2018.)

Rukeyser revealed in The Book of the Dead “how the company cheated these men out of their lives,” as Naumburg put it. She approached her work on the poem not unlike a documentary filmmaker, as Catherine Gander details in her book Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Documentary was an emerging artform at the time; Rukeyser co-wrote with Ben Maddow (a distant cousin of Rachel) the 1941 documentary short “A Place to Live,” which was an Oscar nominee. As late as the 1970s, Gander tells us, Rukeyser was in touch with the producer Paul Rotha about adapting The Book of the Dead into a film.

Along with her interest in film and radio, Rukeyser also worked as a translator, biographer, and literary critic; aspects of this work are also represented in The Muriel Rukeyser Era. The careful selection of pieces, accompanied by insightful and detailed notes, provide a coherent presentation of writings that span Rukeyser’s life, clearly showing how key themes and ideas echoed throughout her work. The editors’ sleuthing, subtle and penetrating, gives us a peek into Rukeyser’s process, even how she grappled with language as she was working. The volume amply makes its case that Rukeyser should be considered a major American writer of the 20th Century.

Over twenty years ago, Adrienne Rich wrote that Rukeyser “created a poetics of historical sensibility—not as nostalgia, but as a resource to express and interpret contemporary experience and imagine a different future.” Now, in another time of crisis, her voice is indispensable once again—and many are listening.

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What God in the Kingdom of Bastards - Rain Taxi

2026-07-24T19:21:18.000Z

Brian Gyamfi
University of Pittsburgh Press ($20)

by John Bradley

“I was made in Kumasi, Ghana,” states Brian Gyamfi in What God in the Kingdom of Bastards, his stunning debut book of poetry. This is no mere autobiographical detail, for the author’s African heritage is a source that continually enriches this collection’s thirty-five poems. It’s difficult to believe that this is Gyamfi’s first book, as his work exhibits both strong confidence and an original voice.

The very title of the book reflects this originality. While most poetry collections feature a title drawn from a poem in the book, nowhere in these pages will the reader find Gyamfi’s titular phrase. The poem “Kingdom” comes closest, and it does deal with religious matters, though in surprising ways: “It is said, Jesus killed fleas to save his dog. / Even a boy must perform acts of sadism.” The leap between those lines is thought-provoking to say the least. Later in the poem, the speaker tells us, “I once shoved wind into my brother’s mouth, / whispered in his ear, ‘the kingdom of God is a wild animal.’” There’s nothing cliched or reassuring about religion in this book.

Though Gyamfi’s poems are often visionary, they are not romantic, as can be seen, ironically, in “Our Romantics.” In this playful poem, “The earth shivers and a crowd of poodles / urinate by the streetlight.” Note how the initially cute image of the poodles is undone in the next line. Other unromantic images populate the poem—a cat chasing beetles, someone swallowing a sword—yet a woman in the poem “blooms as a daylily.” Paradoxes abound in Gyamfi’s work.

In “The Tree Carries Water,” set in New Mexico, we hear of a boy rescued from a river. The action is ambiguous but always evocative:

—I write this to understand the sorcerer in Benin:
the breaker of mountains, a heavy voice
in the story of a gardener fetching a boy from the river,
his hand under the heavy current, a beetle climbing a tree

Benin, a West African country not far from Ghana, is known as the birthplace of voodoo, and the poem has the hallucinatory quality often associated with that religion: The relationships between the sorcerer in Benin, the gardener in New Mexico, the voice, the beetle, all seem to shift as the rushing water threatens the boy’s life. Later in the poem, another layer of complexity is added: “in my thoughts, the sorcerer in Benin is the river.” Rather than confuse, however, the ambiguity adds depth and mystery.

Gyamfi is unafraid to challenge the reader. The longest poem in the book at twelve pages, “Praxis of Being,” uses a form that resembles a notebook, with entries separated by a dash, and it continually evokes Nobel-Prize-winning Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, not only in an epigraph but in direct references throughout, such as: “Soyinka’s words dictate anger is not a pomposity for justice, you / say, fidgeting.” You should know Soyinka’s work, Gyamfi implies.

While allusive, “Praxis of Being” is also highly personal. Some of the most moving lines in the book can be found in this poem: “In 2013, I detangled mother’s braids, brushed them out gently / and braided them again. I kissed her long fingers.” The tenderness of this recollection follows the news that “mother will soon lose her memory.” Gyamfi’s most devastating observation, though, might be this double-barreled one near the end of the piece: “We are all just lonely. That’s a quiet sentence.”

Gyamfi’s many Ghanian cultural references can be confusing at first for readers not already familiar—in “New World,” for example, we hear, “The word petrichor does not exist in our language. / There’s no equivalent in Ewe or Ga”—but the poet’s multilingual engagement with sense and meaning making ultimately pays off. “I am a person in many languages,” Gyamfi reminds us later in the book. Like Whitman, his poetic identity is expansive, and his poetry is affecting not despite its complexities, but often because of them. What God in the Kingdom of Bastards introduces an exciting new voice in American poetry, with the promise of more ground-breaking work to come.

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Poetry Reviews

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Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department - Rain Taxi

2026-07-22T20:38:55.000Z

Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis
Penguin Press ($32)

by Robert Zaller

The original Congress Building of the United States was destroyed by British forces during the War of 1812. It was threatened by a Confederate army during the Civil War. And it was stormed and partially sacked on January 6, 2021, with attendant loss of life and wounded limb, while Congress was seated to confirm the newly elected president and vice president of the country. The attack was instigated by the sitting president, Donald J. Trump, who thus became the nation’s first chief officer to attempt the overthrow of the government he led.

While working on the story of January 6, two investigative reporters for another now-imperiled institution, The Washington Post, realized how America’s prime instrument of law enforcement, the Department of Justice, had been turned into a mockery of itself by its failure to initiate a timely response to the insurrection. This larger story, the saga of the failure of one presidency and the corruption of another, would bring us to the crisis of American democracy we face today. Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis relate that story in Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department.

The immediate response to January 6 was that of Congress. While Trump still sat in office, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi pushed a bill of impeachment through a divided House. Since only a week remained of Trump’s term, the trial in the Senate could only take place after he had left office, and the only punishment available would-be disbarment from future office. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell argued that Citizen Trump would soon be subject to more sweeping action in civil courts, rendering Congressional judgment superfluous, and the impeachment failed.

Further federal action fell to the Justice Department, whose new Attorney General, Merrick Garland, was a seasoned prosecutor and judge. As Leonnig and Davis point out, Garland made a category error from the beginning: While trying and convicting more than 1,500 of those who breached the Capitol on crimes ranging from criminal violence and conspiracy to simple trespass, he left the principal actor untouched. It may fairly be said that this was the greatest misprision of justice in the country’s history, and Leonnig and Davis do say it in crushingly mustered detail. The fault lies, they assert, with Garland himself and his employer, President Joseph R. Biden. Biden’s mistake lay in thinking that, with the country shaken by a lawless regime capped by attempted rebellion and its worst pandemic in a century, the public longed for what a predecessor in not dissimilar times (Warren G. Harding in 1920) had called a “return to normalcy.” But Biden hadn’t reckoned with the political resilience of Donald Trump, who had escaped two impeachments and would now evade punishment at the hands of the state he had nearly overthrown.

This did not mean that Biden and Garland paid no attention to Trump. The bipartisan House Select Committee on January 6, set up at the urging of Pelosi, received much material gathered by the FBI to begin its own investigation. But the Committee had no judicial authority, nor any effective power to compel testimony. What it did do, however, was rivet the public’s attention as no Congressional committee had since the Watergate hearings some fifty years before—which left Biden no choice but to respond to it. Biden also could not ignore the growing pressure both within and outside the Justice Department to deal directly with Trump. When asked whether it should tax those who had defied the Committee’s subpoenas, he answered affirmatively. Less than two hours later, Garland shot back the reply that the Department would make all charging decisions on its own. The lid on Trump had been clamped shut again, and with it, as it turned out, all efforts at holding him to account for January 6.

Garland’s response was predicated on his understanding with Biden that the Justice Department would, after its politicization under the Trump administration, act independently of any outside influence, including the White House. But to have crossed the President in such a manner at the same time challenged Biden’s own responsibility to enforce the laws of the land. His own blunder in speaking publicly was compounded by Garland’s intemperate response. Each man had tied the other’s hands. By the time Garland finally appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to investigate Trump, the clock was already timed to run out, and Biden’s forced withdrawal from his reelection race opened the door to Trump’s return to power.

Leonnig and Davis trace in rich detail the systematic evisceration of the Justice Department during the first year of the second Trump administration. Smith, having finally assembled his case against Trump, was forced to scuttle it. All pending state actions against Trump were dismissed or rendered moot. On Trump’s first new day in office, the convicted January 6 rioters were summarily pardoned—and from that point, the general dismantling of democratic practices and institutions that has undermined the republic was under way.

Injustice is told with novelistic speed and at times breathless complexity, marred only by the occasional colloquialism. So many figures are introduced that a chart of dramatis personae would have been useful. The grit and courage of many within the Justice Department who resisted the travesty it has become deserve chronicling, however, and point to the hope of its eventual restoration.

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I Have Not Considered Consequences - Rain Taxi

2026-07-16T21:54:56.000Z

Sherrie Flick
Autumn House Press ($19.95)

by Wes Blake

As co-editor of the anthology Flash Fiction America (Norton, 2023) and author of two previous short (sometimes very short) story collections, Sherrie Flick has distinguished herself as one of the foremost voices in flash fiction. Flick’s latest collection, I Have Not Considered Consequences, may be her most powerful work yet. The lead story, “Breaking,” opens with a startling image—“The bear holds his heart in his paws”—that resonates throughout. In the stories that follow, Flick chronicles the lives of restless characters, from bears questioning their life path to humans navigating the responsibilities and relationships of middle age amid family rifts and a pandemic—all haunted by a wild moment from their past.

Past and present collide in fascinating ways throughout I Have Not Considered Consequences. “Chlorophyll and Oxidation” revisits the opening story, allowing the characters to reflect on their histories (as well as the book’s key trope):

I’m in my kitchen, but also in Italy, 1991. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
     Now I call up one of the men I traveled with all those years ago . . . We reminisce about it all. The mistakes we made. Our disregard for the future, for consequences. We should have lived together forever, we both say. Single and happy in a city, we say. “But I was feral then,” I say. “I was a bear then, remember?” . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
     We both laugh.
    Eventually, we both cry a little.

Another tale of maturation, “Lost in Time,” features Matt and Trudy, a Generation X couple navigating pandemic boredom while trying to reconcile who they’ve been with who they are. To break up the monotony, they go on a date night to a new arcade in town: “The building smelled like electronics, the same smell that once wafted out of the arcade in Trudy’s hometown mall. It made her heart pitter-patter. She loved the grease and the wires behind it all. The mechanics. It was so much better than AI or code. Fuck Zoom, she thought.” As they walk home through misty rain holding hands, Trudy recalls the one gig her band (“The Lickers”) played in London: “You didn’t know me in the ‘90s,” she says; “I never cried then.” Rejuvenated by the nostalgia their date provokes, and feeling a renewed sense of connection, they each consider a wilder version of themselves from the past—as well as what they’ve lost and gained by settling down.

Flick’s stories masterfully mine both past and present to recover what has been lost, but the outcome isn’t always rosy: In “Progress,” for example, Martha attempts to quell family dysfunction while circling around the uncomfortable truth that for her and her brother, the present is marred by the hurt in their past. And alas, even bears can lose touch with the feral parts of themselves. In “Arnie and the Bear Think About Risk,” a middle-aged corporate manager bear gives his employee Arnold an extended leave of absence so that he can recover his mojo; he has “become a Ringo kind of guy,” as Arnie himself tells us, “but back then, man, I was Lennon. Lennon!” This causes the manager bear to reflect on his own life and whether he wants to pursue his dream of becoming a piano sensation. Conventional wisdom prevails, however, and the bear admits with a sense of defeat that “there are only so many changes one can make in a lifetime.”

The passage of time is a formidable foil throughout I Have Not Considered Consequences, but there are moments when Flick suggests it can be transcended. “Trench Coat” illuminates such a moment, as a middle-aged woman named Natalie finds a long-lost favorite piece of clothing (the titular coat) and thinks back on when she last wore it. Back then, in the prime of her high school experience, she is oblivious to what the future holds: “this night she’s here to support her friend Christie and to feel, she doesn’t know, a kind of freedom. Just leaving her home and clicking her seatbelt and driving to the school, making that decision. Natalie feels amazing.” Flick deftly writes the entire story in present tense, collapsing the distance between the adult and teen versions of Natalie.

Whether readers wince with recognition or fondly remember the people they have been is largely up to them, but one thing is certain: I Have Not Considered Consequences will have readers pondering how the actions of their own lives have led them to the present moment.

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Fiction Reviews

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Elegies of the Earth - Rain Taxi

2026-07-15T20:54:20.000Z

Selected Poems

Ahmad Shamlou
Translated by Niloufar Talebi
World Poetry ($24)

by Patrick James Dunagan

The poetry of Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000) towers over 20th-century Iranian literature, but has been too little appreciated outside the Middle East. Fortunately, Niloufar Talebi’s translations in Elegies of the Earth offer the most comprehensive selection of his poems yet to appear in English. Shamlou, who never earned a high school diploma and was imprisoned several times, found in poetry a venue for expressing the inexplicable. He eschewed traditional Persian poetic forms, writing free verse that blended the richness of Persian visual tropes and surrealist leaning metaphors with a stylized self-scrutiny. As Talebi describes in an introduction, Shamlou’s poems “synthesize East and West, the classical with the contemporary, the high and low to invent language that propelled Persian poetry into the pulse of a rapidly evolving Iran. . . . Without sacrificing its depth, he democratized his literary mode, giving voice to the ‘everyman’ in a range of registers.”

The clarity and immediacy of Shamlou’s work is indeed striking. What exactly a poem is “about” may not be entirely clear, but the imagery and associated feeling are always animated; as well, there’s an easy-going dreamlike fluidity to his descriptions of abstruse scenes, though they are nevertheless loaded with emotional heft. Take these lines from “I Can’t Help But Be Beautiful”:

in my world
blood
is never the spirit laid bare
and the fear of lead
doesn’t deter the partridge
from its strut

Talebi knew Shamlou personally, and she attests to his magnetism, saying, “he was the sun around which everyone at my parents’ secret literary salons in Tehran gathered. I recall him abruptly retreating from our bustling living room, where he was holding court, into a bedroom because a poem had seized him, demanding immediate transcription.” Even if enigmatic at times, his poems are deeply personal; in Shamlou’s own words, “My work is my complete autobiography. Poetry isn’t just an interpretation of life—it’s life itself.” He embeds weighted depth into mundane existence, as in “Still Life”:

An obscure book and
a burnt-to-ashes cigarette next to the forgotten cup of tea.
A forbidden thought
on the mind.

While Talebi’s selection of poems, drawn from the full range of Shamlou’s oeuvre, succeeds in delivering some sense of his poetic purview, one might wish for more commentary upon his life and the poems themselves. Talebi supplies footnotes for many of the poems, but they leave much unsaid. For instance, Shamlou has a number of poems scattered throughout volumes across the years with an overarching title of “Nocturnal,” which would seem to indicate some specific reference linking these poems together for him (a disrupted poem-series coming in fits and starts over an extended period of time)—yet Talebi supplies no information in this regard. As if in expectation of such grousing, she offers this short explanation: “I had prepared a lengthy introduction filled with biography and analysis, drawn from my previous writings about Shamlou. But let’s just get straight to the poems.”

Given ongoing current developments within Iran—where the people are in a perpetual state of peril under the brutality of the regime, thousands have been gunned down in the streets for daring to rise up and express discontent, and war with the United States continues—Shamlou’s poetry is a welcome demonstration of the vibrant cultural and imaginative resources of the Persian people and a dependable bulwark to lean against whatever the future holds. Let’s let him have the last word with these lines from “Nocturnal (Among the Eternal Suns)”:

Your gaze
is the fall of tyranny—
a gaze that dressed
my bare soul
in love
so fully that now
the darkest night of never
feels like nothing but a comedy of ironies.
Your eyes told me
tomorrow
is a new day—

Poetry Reviews

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Erato's Inbox - Rain Taxi

2026-07-14T22:20:15.000Z

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
Xanadu Press ($28)

by Kieron Murphy

Erato has always been a busy girl. One of the Nine Muses of ancient Greek lore, she ruled over lyric poetry and inspired lovers to pen countless romantic songs. These days, she keeps up with the times, managing her overflowing text feed by replying to supplicants with words befitting a legendary cypherpunk with a cryptocurrency all her own. She was born from the union of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, who granted speech to humans—so she knows a thing or two about being an influencer.

In Erato’s Inbox, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright tells us in a preface that he wanted to “write from her viewpoint, as opposed to writing about her.” He also notes that we have precious few fragments from ancient texts, such as those of Sappho, on which to base our understanding of what Erato meant to the “ghostly voices” of antiquity. But these bits and pieces are enough for him to offer “a negative space or vacuum” to bring this muse’s messages through the centuries. “Erato herself is timeless,” states Wright.

The book is constructed as a series of imagined inquiries, over the course of one week, by Erato’s many admirers—male and female, ancient and modern. These suitors anachronistically express their “affection and everlasting lust”; she replies to her would-be lovers in extraordinarily rich fragments, her words “especially loose-lipped and bawdy” (she’s related to Eros, after all). Under the username ’Muser, she spits out innuendos such as, “Use me, Mister, as your inside guide. We can make each other come alive.” She doubles down on ribald double-entendre whenever possible. Although she’s the queen of odes, she’s nobody’s strophe wife.

We get the word “lyrical” from the musical instrument Erato mastered; most refer to it as a lyre, but its proper name is a kithara, and it’s the instrument from which all guitars emerged. So, she’s also the first rock star. And Wright makes sure we know that her tastes run more alternative these days than any other genre, placing her squarely in the Downtown Scene with cultural references from Tompkins Square to the Howl! poetry club.

Erato’s replies come in punchy bunches, saturated with signifiers. In “Reply All” she begins, “Dear Lovers, ‘Cross star strewn stretches of time: I open for your eyes, my inbox—and my outbox—to share with you my musings,” before the floodgates open further:

I am a contranym from way back, e.g., sanction.
Wind up. Bolt. Buckle. Cleave.
I can be your counter threshold sieve.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I offer a remnant of the permanent
to whoever pens a pennant on love’s imminence.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
My lover’s tongue is a tonic
whose lyrics are a potion.

This picaresque romp through the ages is wonderfully choreographed by Barbara Rosenthal, using AI-generated artwork that combines surrealism with bright humor. The collaborators used the DALL-E engine from OpenAI to create images for every page, using prompts such as: “Guitar fingers nailing the light in a garden of violets.” The combination of talents produces a book that is as fun as it is heroic.

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

Poetry Reviews

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Erik Krenz - Rain Taxi

2026-06-19T16:04:27.000Z

Erik Krenz is a wild life and pop culture artist who paints exclusively with acrylic paints. Visit him at erikkrenzprints.squarespace.com.

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Volume 31, Number 1, Spring 2026 (#121) - Rain Taxi

2026-06-19T15:53:34.000Z

To purchase issue #121 using Paypal, click here .
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Shangyang Fang: Words for Lost Music | Interviewed by Mathew Weitman
Jeremy M. Davies: The House Always Wins | Interviewed by Michael Ward

FEATURES

250 Years of American Literature: First in a Four-Part Series

Introductory Note | by Eric Lorberer
The New Life | by Gary Sullivan
An American Book(ish) Miscellany | compiled by Chris Barsanti
Would I Burn Palaces? The Poetry of Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt | by Stephanie Burt
Photographic Memory: William Henry Jackson and the American West | Bill Griffith | by Paul Buhle

PLUS: Cover art by Jamie Kalakaru-Mava

POETRY REVIEWS

FROM THE BACKLIST

The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez | John Rechy | by Erwin Kamuene

NONFICTION REVIEWS

FICTION REVIEWS

To purchase issue #121 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

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Analog Cave at Northern Spark 2013 - Rain Taxi

2026-06-15T15:50:46.000Z

EXTRAORDINARYa brief recap of ANALOG CAVE

I love the word “extraordinary.” We all know it means “beyond the ordinary,” but I like how it sneaks in the notion that simply having more of the ordinary could lead to something wondrous. This is what happened at the ANALOG CAVE project that we at Rain Taxi created with our pals at mnartists.org for the third annual Northern Spark festival, in which scores of art projects large and small took place from dusk to dawn.

Hosted in the heart of Northern Spark at Bedlam Theater, ANALOG CAVE was a two-part construction: in one enclosed “room” decked out with funky retro care, we invited the public to enter and use our writing prompts and tools (a manual typewriter, a wooden desk with stationary for letter writing, a turntable with a notepad for responses, and an erasure station piled with old books). The author placed their words through a mail slot in the wall; on the receiving end, editors read (and sometimes revised) the work. Next, a team of artists transformed the writing into a visual work at various stations of their own (a cartooning desk, an overhead projector, an easel, a chalkboard)—all on view to the public through Bedlam’s giant street-facing window.

Our goals in this project were manifold: we wanted to honor the spontaneity and energy of artistic creation, the universal impulse toward self-expression through language, and the more specific stylistic drive toward quality and transformation. That we had lines half the night to get in was a testament to the spirit we hoped to provoke with this “crowd-sourcing” project, and that some of the work—on both sides of the mail slot—was so damn good was thrilling. FYI, each art piece (and some of the original and edited texts!) is being photographed and posted to mnartists.org’s tumblr, MNMADE—an extension of the project that not only celebrates the unique artistry of ANALOG CAVE but one that we hope shows the creativity of the documentary impulse too.

I want to thank everyone listed below: especially our collaborators at mnartists.org for their generous, genuine, and fun process while we developed this concept together, the amazing artists that joined us to visualize others’ words from dusk to dawn, and the thousands of people that passed through ANALOG CAVE and contributed or marveled at the artistic feats being accomplished in real time.

— Eric Lorberer, Executive Director, Rain Taxi Review of Books

COORDINATORS AND ARTISTS

Rain Taxi:
Eric Lorberer
Kelly Everding
Robert Martin
Sarah Evenson

mnartists.org:
Scott Stulen
Susannah Schouweiler
Jehra Patrick
Chloe Nelson

participating artists:
Jack Walsh
Bridget Mendel
Steve Stwalley
Ken Avidor
Ryan Dow
Jajeev Nithiananda
Kayla Halberg
Nicholas Straight
Emma Gallenberg
Kirubel Tebeje

VISIT MNMADE.TUMBLR FOR MORE PICS!

And see here for more photos of some of the people and art from Analog Cave:

Analog Art Cave one
Analog Art Cave two

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An Evening with Dessa and Friends - Rain Taxi

2026-06-15T15:36:29.000Z

Sold-out audience waits for Dessa

Charismatic Dessa reads from her new chapbook, A Pound of Steam.

Aby Wolf performs a song inspired by "Dear Sir or Madam."

Sims answers a question from the audience. He took the inspiration for his song from Dessa's poem "Mercy."

Benjamin Burwell and Jake Pavek performed Dessa's poem "Kept Company" in the classical style.

Dessa treated the audience to a couple of songs from her new album, Parts of Speech.

Dessa signs copies of A Pound of Steam at the book signing.

Exuberant crowd waits to get their books signed.

Rain Taxi, in partnership with Dessa, is a fiscal year 2013 recipient of a Cultural Community Partnership grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Return to Readings Page

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Wake Now in the Fire - Rain Taxi

2026-06-05T18:26:21.000Z

A Story of Censorship, Action, Love, and Hope

Jarrett Dapier and AJ Dungo
Ten Speed Graphic ($24.99)

By Hank Kennedy

Censorship, Robert Heinlein once remarked, is “like demanding grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.” Nevertheless, there have long been those who want to ban books. Comics have often been a prime target for censors, from the 1950s anti-comics crusade that resulted in congressional hearings to current challenges at schools and public libraries.

Jarrett Dapier and AJ Dungo’s Wake Now in the Fire fictionalizes the real-life banning of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis from Chicago Public Schools in 2013. Offering a comic book counterblast to CPS’s stance, this well-wrought graphic novel showcases the folly of censorship and the power students can have when they actively defend their freedom to learn and read.

Dapier, a real-life librarian, was inspired to write the book by research he did on the while in graduate school. That he conducted interviews with participants in the protests and sent Freedom of Information Act requests gives his fictional events the air of authenticity. Chicago’s political and social issues are depicted clearly in this context: for example, in the book, CPS claims the ban “sounds like something made up by the teachers union,” which scans as accurate considering that Chicago’s teachers had just gone on strike the previous year. Clearly, there were still bitter feelings.

The students are active in asserting their rights to read: They organize a demonstration, a read-in, and a mass meeting, and the school newspaper’s sleuths try to get to the bottom of who ordered Persepolis’s banning. To humanize the main characters, the creators weave the struggle against the book ban with more conventional YA drama: Aoife’s father is an alcoholic in denial; Weston’s cousin is missing; Didi worries about fulfilling the educational aspirations of her parents. This gives the story variety and prevents it from getting too one-note. Dapier and Dungo never lose sight of the fact that these are kids, going through the process of maturing into adults.

There are multiple sequences showing the unintended consequences of censorship. By banning Persepolis, the school administrators have created a forbidden fruit: When the book is returned to the school’s libraries, students clamor for it, wanting to see what all the fuss is about. The same has happened with more recent book bans, as when schools in McMinn County, Tennessee banned Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, only to see the book top sales charts decades after its release.

Despite the heroic example set by Chicago students, there have been further attempts to ban Persepolis from other school districts; California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas have all been sites of challenges to the book. Perhaps the release of Wake Now in the Fire will discourage further bans. It’s also possible that this title may end up banned itself, given its language and challenges to authority. If that happens, it will be in good company. The protest sign used by one of the story’s students will then find new life: “Give me books or give me death.”

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

Graphic Novel & Comics Reviews

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Attention-Seeking Behavior - Rain Taxi

2026-06-02T16:55:11.000Z

Aea Varfis-van Warmelo
Graywolf Press ($17)

by Zara Karschay

The narrator of Aea Varfis-van Warmelo’s debut novel Attention-Seeking Behavior is emphatic in her account of how she once found a man dead in the snow: She was first on the scene, she tells us, but this event has left no enduring mark on her life; she even managed to eat her croissant on her journey home. She is emphatically lying, however, and she wants us to know that, because soon after the opening scene, the narrator gives another account of the body she found, only now it is entirely changed—different place, different death.

Through the eyes of this fascinating antihero, Varfis-van Warmelo explores the lure of a fictional life over lived reality. Attention-Seeking Behavior takes on “truthiness” with a sprightly wit, moving beyond the belligerent screed that facts don’t care about your feelings and towards the even bleaker premise that “facts are very often irrelevant.” The novel’s narrator gestures towards the simpering advice offered by erstwhile academics turned social media commissars and body-language absolutists to underscore her point; she holds a particular fascination for the real-life psychologist Paul Ekman (1934-2025), a divisive but nonetheless powerful figure in the study of emotions whose much-debated work came to influence U.K. and U.S. police interrogation techniques.

Outside of these preoccupations, the novel’s protagonist tries to live the “normal” life of a woman in her mid-twenties. The result is invigorating; Varfis-van Warmelo has a clear eye for parsing the exploits of the emergent creative class. Her protagonist accumulates writing and “research” jobs where she is at the mercy of opportunists making the most of a post-COVID, libertarian world in which tasks are outsourced to the lowest bidder. Interactions with others are transactional—a string of lovers who fill a need; friends in ephemeral chat groups.

Somewhere along the slip-slide of pseudo-science, zero-hour contracts, and social obligations, our protagonist finds that, at best, her lies require pristine project management to operate smoothly. At worst, though, they might dismantle her blossoming relationship with “Normal Ben,” a man she regrets having wrapped in her untruths. And yet, she pathologically keeps returning to the lies that give her life structure. All this hints at a hidden trauma on the verge of coming to light, but Varfis-van Warmelo spares us any sentimentalism either way—her protagonist is unashamedly circuitous and absolutely compelling as a result.

Attention-Seeking Behavior takes a long look at the act of detection. “You should know,” the narrator’s refrain, is a double play, suggesting a contract of confidentiality between reader and narrator while also scolding the reader for their lack of awareness. As we attempt to cobble together a version of the truth, given what we know about our shifty protagonist and the shaky girders of police interrogation, the narrator sets a clear boundary—“the lyric I is not a documentary I”—goading the reader into facing their own voyeurism and inviting the question: Are we looking for the truth or for a confession?

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

Fiction Reviews

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