[{"id":41554,"date":"2026-09-28T13:51:40","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T18:51:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/?p=41554"},"modified":"2026-09-28T14:22:32","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T19:22:32","slug":"vulnerability-index","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/vulnerability-index\/","title":{"rendered":"VULNERABILITY INDEX"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":true},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":true},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[389],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","post-password-required","hentry","category-feature"],"yoast_head":"\nVULNERABILITY INDEX - Rain Taxi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/vulnerability-index\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"VULNERABILITY INDEX\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/vulnerability-index\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Rain Taxi\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/raintaxireview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-28T18:51:40+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-09-28T19:22:32+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Kelly\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@RainTaxiReview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@RainTaxiReview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Kelly\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/raintaxi.com\\\/vulnerability-index\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/raintaxi.com\\\/vulnerability-index\\\/\",\"name\":\"VULNERABILITY INDEX - 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S. Comic Book Trade<\/strong>\u00a0 <em>| by Chris Barsanti<\/em><br><strong>A Remarkable Collection of Angels: A History of the 6 Gallery Reading<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 David S. Wills\u00a0 <br>|\u00a0 <em>by Zack Kopp<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-interviews\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">INTERVIEWS<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mark Nowak: Seasonal Work<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>Interviewed by Eric Lorberer<\/em><br><strong>Sara Levine: When the Story Crumbles<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>Interviewed by Rachel Robbins<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PLUS: Cover art by: <a href=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/marlena-myles\/\">Marlena Myles<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full is-resized\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"594\" height=\"774\" src=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Rain-Taxi-Fall-2026-123-Cover-s.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-41504\" style=\"aspect-ratio:0.767452658779828;width:507px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Rain-Taxi-Fall-2026-123-Cover-s.jpg 594w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Rain-Taxi-Fall-2026-123-Cover-s-208x271.jpg 208w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Rain-Taxi-Fall-2026-123-Cover-s-500x652.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 594px) 100vw, 594px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-fiction-reviews\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">FICTION REVIEWS<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rasputin Swims the Potamic\u00a0<\/strong> |\u00a0 Ben Fountain\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Steven G. Kellman<\/em><br><strong>Objects of Desire\u00a0<\/strong> |\u00a0 Adam O\u2019Fallon Price\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Haylee G. Morman<\/em><br><strong>My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein\u00a0<\/strong> |\u00a0 Deborah Levy\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Jillian Damiani<\/em><br><strong>The Lifeguard\u00a0<\/strong> |\u00a0 Laura Kasischke\u00a0 |\u00a0<em> by Christopher Connor<\/em><br><strong>There Is No Antimemetics Division<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 QNTM\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Laurie Sara Oliver<\/em><br><strong>Babylon, South Dakota\u00a0<\/strong> |\u00a0 Tom Lin\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Amber Ruth Paulen<\/em><br><strong>Transcription<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 Ben Lerner\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Lawrence Knowles<\/em><br><strong>Fights!\u00a0<\/strong> |\u00a0 Scott McClanahan\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Conor Hultman<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-nonfiction-reviews\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">NONFICTION REVIEWS<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson\u00a0<\/strong> |\u00a0 Leo Damrosch<br>and <strong>A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 Camille Peri\u00a0 <br>|<em>\u00a0 by Mike Dillon<\/em><br><strong>Nowhere Near<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 Miko Revereza\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Amanda L. Andrei<\/em><br><strong>Socially Wired: How Culture Shapes Our Brains\u00a0<\/strong> |\u00a0 Matthew W. Schelke\u00a0 |\u00a0<em> by Douglac C. MacLeod, Jr.<\/em><br><strong>My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 Hugh Ryan\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Claude Peck<\/em><br><strong>Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores that Changed Cinema<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 Steven C. Smith\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Nell Beram<\/em><br><strong>Criticism Without Authority:\u00a0 Gene Swenson\u2019s and Jill Johnston\u2019s Queer Practices<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 Jennifer Sichel\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Lauren R. Fulton<\/em><br><strong>Little Apocalypses: Essays on Motherhood, Climate Change, and Hope at the End of the World<\/strong>\u00a0 <br>|\u00a0 Kaitlyn Teer\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Jo Ann Zimmerman<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-poetry-reviews\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">POETRY REVIEWS<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Winter Night Rabbit Worries<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 Yoo Heekyung\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by John Colburn<\/em><br><strong>Las Horas Imposibles \/ The Impossible Hours<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 Octavio Quintanilla\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Jonathan Fletcher<\/em><br><strong>Shard<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 Judith Roitman\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Norman Fischer<\/em><br><strong>Visitations<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 Julia Alvarez\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Lawrence Knowles<\/em><br><strong>Hide<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 Carolina Ebeid\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by John Bradley<\/em><br><strong>Garden City<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 Sara Elkamel\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Nick Hilbourn<\/em><br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-other-features\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">OTHER FEATURES:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>From the Backlist: <em>Living! Go and Dream<\/em>\u00a0 <\/strong>|\u00a0 Julien Poirer\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Richard Kostelanetz<\/em><br><strong>The Satrapi Moment: In Memoriam Marjane Satrapi 1969\u20132026<\/strong>\u00a0 |\u00a0 <em>by Paul Buhle<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">To purchase issue #123 using Paypal,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/ncp\/payment\/FX4D4U6ZL7ZYS\">click here.<\/a><br>To become a member and get quarterly issues of\u00a0<em>Rain Taxi<\/em>\u00a0delivered to your door,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/rain-taxi-membership\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2026 (#123) To purchase issue #123 using Paypal,\u00a0click here.To become a member and get quarterly issues of\u00a0Rain Taxi\u00a0delivered to your door,\u00a0click here. 250 Years of American Literature Introductory Note\u00a0 |\u00a0 by Eric LorbererThe New Life\u00a0 |\u00a0 by Gary SullivanThose Nations of Poets: On Jerome Rothenberg\u2019s Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.5 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2026 (#123) - Rain Taxi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2026 (#123) To purchase issue #123 using Paypal,\u00a0click here.To become a member and get quarterly issues of\u00a0Rain Taxi\u00a0delivered\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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Myles"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"853\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Unci-Makhas-Shawl-10x12-s-853x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-41502\" style=\"aspect-ratio:0.8330186992031476;width:587px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Unci-Makhas-Shawl-10x12-s-853x1024.jpg 853w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Unci-Makhas-Shawl-10x12-s-226x271.jpg 226w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Unci-Makhas-Shawl-10x12-s-768x922.jpg 768w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Unci-Makhas-Shawl-10x12-s-500x600.jpg 500w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Unci-Makhas-Shawl-10x12-s.jpg 1080w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 853px) 100vw, 853px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">U\u014b\u010d\u00ed Makh\u00e1's Shawl (Grandmother Earth's Shawl)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Marlena Myles, a self-taught Spirit Lake Dakota artist in St. Paul, Minnesota, brings Indigenous history, language, and traditions into modern contexts through children\u2019s books, augmented reality, murals, and more. Her notable works include augmented reality public art installations such as the<em> Dakota Spirit Walk<\/em>, <em>Sacred Hoop Walk<\/em> and <em>Wodakota Walk<\/em>. She has exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and other prestigious galleries, created a Google Doodle, and launched W\u00edyou\u014bkihipi Productions to promote Dakota culture. In 2023, she won the Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship, Joyce Award, and created her first documentary, \"<em>Realms of Resilience<\/em>\". Learn more about this artist <a href=\"https:\/\/marlenamyl.es\/artwork\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/marlenamyl.es\/artwork\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>U\u014b\u010d\u00ed Makh\u00e1's Shawl (Grandmother Earth's Shawl) Marlena Myles, a self-taught Spirit Lake Dakota artist in St. Paul, Minnesota, brings Indigenous history, language, and traditions into modern contexts through children\u2019s books, augmented reality, murals, and more. Her notable works include augmented reality public art installations such as the Dakota Spirit Walk, Sacred Hoop Walk and Wodakota […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.5 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Marlena Myles - Rain Taxi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"U\u014b\u010d\u00ed Makh\u00e1's Shawl (Grandmother Earth's Shawl) Marlena Myles, a self-taught Spirit Lake Dakota artist in St. Paul, Minnesota, brings Indigenous history,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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Taxi"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/raintaxireview\/","https:\/\/x.com\/RainTaxiReview","https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/raintaxireview\/","https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/raintaxiinc"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/#\/schema\/person\/e28b8be04061c9257c26de9e1ca3bf7a","name":"Kelly","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/b07c58c92c2972e5653aab7c873d3dcf8c56e5198b3b3e043778c9a7434930fd?s=96&d=mm&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/b07c58c92c2972e5653aab7c873d3dcf8c56e5198b3b3e043778c9a7434930fd?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/b07c58c92c2972e5653aab7c873d3dcf8c56e5198b3b3e043778c9a7434930fd?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Kelly"}}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41497"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41503,"href":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41497\/revisions\/41503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":41068,"date":"2026-09-15T11:11:36","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T16:11:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/?p=41068"},"modified":"2026-09-21T11:22:03","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T16:22:03","slug":"volume-31-number-2-summer-2026-122","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/volume-31-number-2-summer-2026-122\/","title":{"rendered":"Volume 31, Number 2, Summer 2026 (#122)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">To purchase issue #122 using Paypal, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/cgi-bin\/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=SVLZE9FUTLWJS\">click here<\/a>.<br>To become a member and get quarterly issues of <em>Rain Taxi<\/em> delivered to your door, <a href=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/rain-taxi-membership\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-interviews\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">INTERVIEWS<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lindsay Stuart Hill:  Clearer Than Mirrors <\/strong> |  <em>Interviewed by Brianna Flavin<\/em><br><strong>Sara Maurer:  Dispatch from the Rural North<\/strong>  | <em> Interviewed by Amber Ruth Paulen<\/em><br><strong>Shavaun Scott: The Wounded Healer<\/strong>  | <em> Interviewed by Emma Ramos<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-features\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">FEATURES<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>250 Years of American Literature: Second in a Four-Part Series<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Introductory Note <\/strong> | <em>by Eric Lorberer<\/em><br><strong>The New Life<\/strong>  |  <em>by Gary Sullivan<\/em><br><strong>A Fragmentary History of the U. S. Book Trade <\/strong> | <em> by Chris Barsanti<\/em><br><strong>Is American Literature a \u201cNational Literature\u201d?  <\/strong>|  <em>by Patrick James Dunagan<\/em><br><strong>Set in Minnesota: The Case for Place in a Decade\u2019s Worth of \u201cBest Books\u201d<\/strong>  |  <em>by Anesa Miller<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PLUS: Cover art by: <a href=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/erik-krenz\/\">Erik Krenz<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large is-resized\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"786\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/122-Cover-Summer-2026-web-786x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-41069\" style=\"aspect-ratio:0.767582809953674;width:521px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/122-Cover-Summer-2026-web-786x1024.jpg 786w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/122-Cover-Summer-2026-web-208x271.jpg 208w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/122-Cover-Summer-2026-web-768x1001.jpg 768w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/122-Cover-Summer-2026-web-500x652.jpg 500w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/122-Cover-Summer-2026-web.jpg 864w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 786px) 100vw, 786px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-fiction-reviews\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">FICTION REVIEWS<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sunset at Zero Point <\/strong> |  Simon St\u00e5lenhag |  <em>by Mike Piero<\/em><br><strong>On the Calculation of Volume (Book IV)<\/strong>  | Solvej Balle  |  <em>by Vera Tomasi<\/em><br><strong>May Contain Murder <\/strong> |  Orlando Murrin  |  <em>by Nell Beram<\/em><br><strong>Last Seen<\/strong>  |  Christopher Castellani  |  <em>by Sara Harley<\/em><br><strong>Lone Dog Road<\/strong>  |  Kent Nerburn  |<em> by Thomas Rain Crowe<\/em><br><strong>Double Play on the Red Line<\/strong>  |  Rajesh C. Oza  |  <em>by Rohit Chopra<\/em><br><strong>Krackle\u2019s Last Movie<\/strong>  |  Chelsea Sutton  |  <em>by Davis MacMillan<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-nonfiction-art-reviews\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">NONFICTION \/ ART REVIEWS<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures: A Biography of Denis Johnson <\/strong> |  Ted Geltner  |  <em>by Robert Detman<\/em><br><strong>Returning to Benjamin: Art in the Age of AI <\/strong> |  Victor Burgin  | <em> by Kyle Sossamon<\/em><br><strong>Glacial Optics<\/strong>  |  Tristan Duke  |  <em>by Greg Bem<\/em><br><strong>The Heart Folds Early <\/strong> |  Jill Christman  |  <em>by Kelly Fordon<\/em><br><strong>The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . <\/strong> |  David Graeber  |  <em>by Poul Houe<\/em><br><strong>Ctrl+Alt+Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet<\/strong>  |  Joe Tidy  |  <em>by Douglas C. MacLeod, Jr.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-poetry-reviews\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">POETRY REVIEWS<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor<\/strong>  |  Kathryn Cowles  |  <em>by Kasey Jueds<\/em><br><strong>Say Fire<\/strong>  |  Selma Asotic  |  <em>by John Bradley<\/em><br><strong>Diary of Small Discontents: New and Selected Poems 1974\u20132024<\/strong>  |  John Yau  |  <em>by Amelia Sage Van Donsel<\/em><br><strong>This Household of Earthly Nature<\/strong>  |  Cody-Rose Clevidence  |  <em>by Patrick James Dunagan<\/em><br><strong>Ars Poeticas<\/strong>  |  Juliana Spahr  |  <em>by Daniela Naomi Molnar<\/em> <br><strong>Monk Fruit <\/strong> |  Edward Salem  |  <em>by Richard Hamilton<\/em><br><strong>Exercises 1950\u20131960<\/strong>  |  Yannis Ritsos  |  <em>by John Bradley<\/em><br><strong>Transit<\/strong>  |  David Baker  |  <em>by Alexis David<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-comics-review\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">COMICS REVIEW<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The Once and Future Riot <\/strong> |  Joe Sacco  | <em> by Paul Buhle<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-essay\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">ESSAY<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sweet-Talked by AI<\/strong>  |  <em>by Peg Guilfoyle<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">To purchase issue #122 using Paypal, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/cgi-bin\/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=SVLZE9FUTLWJS\">click here<\/a>.<br>To become a member and get quarterly issues of <em>Rain Taxi<\/em> delivered to your door, <a href=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/rain-taxi-membership\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To purchase issue #122 using Paypal, click here.To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here. INTERVIEWS Lindsay Stuart Hill:  Clearer Than Mirrors  |  Interviewed by Brianna FlavinSara Maurer:  Dispatch from the Rural North  |  Interviewed by Amber Ruth PaulenShavaun Scott: The Wounded Healer  |  Interviewed by Emma Ramos FEATURES 250 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.5 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Volume 31, Number 2, Summer 2026 (#122) - Rain Taxi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"To purchase issue #122 using Paypal, click here.To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/volume-31-number-2-summer-2026-122\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Volume 31, Number 2, Summer 2026 (#122)\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"To purchase issue #122 using Paypal, click here.To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/volume-31-number-2-summer-2026-122\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Rain Taxi\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/raintaxireview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-15T16:11:36+00:00\" \/>\n<meta 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Rukeyser's Lessons for Social Poetics Today: A Conversation with Catherine Gander and Stefania Heim"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"41474\" class=\"elementor elementor-41474\" data-elementor-post-type=\"post\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-73e2ec5 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"73e2ec5\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-5fca5cd8\" data-id=\"5fca5cd8\" data-element_type=\"column\" data-e-type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-70d826b elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"70d826b\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9781959000662\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"img-shadow wp-image-41476 size-medium alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/gander_heim_beyond_cover_front_final-181x271.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"181\" height=\"271\" srcset=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/gander_heim_beyond_cover_front_final-181x271.jpg 181w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/gander_heim_beyond_cover_front_final-683x1024.jpg 683w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/gander_heim_beyond_cover_front_final-768x1152.jpg 768w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/gander_heim_beyond_cover_front_final-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/gander_heim_beyond_cover_front_final-1365x2048.jpg 1365w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/gander_heim_beyond_cover_front_final-500x750.jpg 500w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/gander_heim_beyond_cover_front_final-scaled.jpg 1707w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 181px) 100vw, 181px\" \/><\/strong><\/a><em>by Eric Keenaghan<\/em><\/p><p>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 <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9781959000662\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser <\/em><\/a>(<a href=\"https:\/\/wvupressonline.com\/\">West Virginia University Press<\/a>, $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.<\/p><p>Through an innovative mix of long poems, serial poems, critical studies, lyric essays, and memoirs, the collection\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014three hallmarks of Rukeyser\u2019s extraordinary body of work.<\/p><p>Rukeyser scholar Eric Keenaghan conversed with Gander and Heim to explore a few of the aspects that make <em>Beyond Ourselves<\/em> an important addition to Rukeyser studies.<\/p><p>Stefania Heim has published two poetry collections, most recently <em>HOUR BOOK<\/em> (Ahsahta Press, 2019), and two translations of writings by the Italian metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico, most recently his posthumous novel\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/apublicspace.org\/books\/mr-dudron\"><em>Mr. Dudron<\/em><\/a> (A Public Space Books, 2024). \u00a0A former poetry editor at\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/bostonreview.net\/poetry\"><em>Boston Review<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and a founding editor of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/circumferencemag.org\/\"><em>CIRCUMFERENCE: Poetry in Translation<\/em><\/a>, Heim teaches literature at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.<\/p><p>Catherine Gander teaches modern and contemporary American literature at Maynooth University in Kildare, Ireland. Her book <a href=\"https:\/\/edinburghuniversitypress.com\/book-muriel-rukeyser-and-documentary.html\"><em>Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The\u00a0Poetics of Connection<\/em><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/edinburghuniversitypress.com\/book-muriel-rukeyser-and-documentary.html\"> (Edinburgh University Press, 2013)<\/a>\u00a0won the biennial book award of the Irish Association for American Studies; more recent scholarly publications include <a href=\"https:\/\/edinburghuniversitypress.com\/book-the-edinburgh-companion-to-don-delillo-and-the-arts.html\"><em>The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts<\/em><\/a> (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Also a poet, Gander is the author of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vervepoetrybookshop.com\/product-page\/matches-catherine-gander\"><em>Matches<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Verve Poetry Press, 2024).<\/p><p>Eric Keenaghan, who teaches at the University at Albany, SUNY, is the author of\u00a0<em>Queering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulnerability in Cuba and the United States<\/em>\u00a0(Ohio State University Press, 2009); with Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, he co-edited\u00a0<em>The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose\u00a0<\/em>(Cornell University Press, 2023), a recipient of the MLA Prize for Bibliographical or Archival Scholarship. His forthcoming book, <em>The Middle of the Air: A Critical Edition<\/em><em>\u00a0<\/em>(Cornell University Press, 2027), recovers a previously unpublished antifascist play Rukeyser wrote in the 1940s.\u00a0For more on poetry as antifascist cultural activism and the first publication of two poems from the 1940s which Rukeyser suppressed, <a href=\"https:\/\/murielrukeyser.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Rukeyser-In-a-War-on-All-Fronts-recto-800x1043.jpg\">“In a War on All Fronts”<\/a> (c. 1943) and <a href=\"https:\/\/murielrukeyser.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Rukeyser-The-Strong-Angel-LoC-Rukeyser-Papers-box-II-5-Fol-14-1-800x1030.jpg\">“The Strong Angel”<\/a> (1944), see Keenaghan\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/murielrukeyser.org\/2026\/06\/10\/unburying-history-two-lost-antifascist-poems-by-muriel-rukeyser\/\">“Unburying History: Two Lost Antifascist Poems by Muriel Rukeyser”<\/a> on the website Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive.<\/p><p><strong>Eric Keenaghan:<\/strong> In her afterword for <em>Beyond Ourselves<\/em>, Solmaz Sharif movingly describes what first drew her to Muriel Rukeyser’s work, and it seems an attraction you and many of your collection\u2019s contributors share too: \u201cWhat 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.\u201d Why do you think it is \u201cessential\u201d 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?<\/p><p><strong>Catherine Gander:<\/strong>\u00a0What I love most about the line you pull from Solmaz\u2019s deeply affecting afterword to the book is her description of the present as \u201cmaterial.\u201d Our lived moment is not something in the abstract, but something real, alive, tangible. It is physical: it matters.<\/p><p>As we initially conceptualized the book, and then, as we came to assemble it, we knew Rukeyser\u2019s approach to poetry was fundamental to our own understanding of how the various components of the book would come together\u2014not as a self-contained, static arrangement of perspectives, but as Stefania beautifully phrased it in her essay for the volume,\u00a0\u201ca settling of the kaleidoscope,\u201d a collection of parts that, like Rukeyser\u2019s famous diagram of the dynamic relations within an artwork, from her poetics treatise <em>The Life of Poetry <\/em>(Current Books, 1949)<em>,<\/em> \u201cis false until all the components are shown in motion.\u201d<\/p><p>Rukeyser, as you know, wrote and spoke often about poetry as a meeting-place: \u201cWherever it exists, it gives us a clue as to a possible kind of imagination with which to meet the world.\u201d That kind of imagination, being motile, necessarily effects change. This is why she preferred the word \u201cwitness\u201d to \u201creader\u201d\u2014because with its overtones of responsibility, it announces that, as Rukeyser writes in <em>The Life of Poetry<\/em>, \u201cwe are about to change, that work is being done on the self.\u201d Rukeyser\u2019s model is essential here, because she draws it from a model of physical science: poetry is the exchange of energy, and \u201cexchange is creation.\u201d What poetry and literature can produce, then, in her moment and in ours, is what Rukeyser calls an exchange of human consciousness: \u201cthe capacity to produce change from the existing conditions.\u201d<\/p><p>In the poem from <em>The Speed of Darkness <\/em>(Random House, 1968) from which we took the title of our book, \u201cPoem [<em>I lived in the first century of world wars<\/em>],\u201d Rukeyser writes of the insanity that living in \u201cthe first century of world wars\u201d can inflict. Her response is to \u201cget to pen and paper.\u201d The conditions that shaped that poem shape our century too. All this to say that your question is one I don\u2019t think we will ever stop asking, and one as relevant today as it was then.<\/p><p><strong>Stefania Heim:<\/strong>\u00a0I\u2019d like to build on this to grapple a bit more with that second part of your question, Eric, about how Rukeyser\u2019s twentieth-century models remain unique and relevant. Her approaches to thinking about how poetry can be a force of change, a \u201cresource\u201d to be \u201cused\u201d beyond narrow aesthetic realms, are super various, in that truly interdisciplinary sense Catherine mentioned\u2014and maybe even more importantly, they\u2019re\u00a0<em>honest<\/em>.<\/p><p>With \u201chonest\u201d I mean to get at something like not manicured, not tested or optimized. I want to foreground Rukeyser\u2019s openness to\u2013\u2013even courting of\u2014risk and failure, which is something that many of the contributors to\u00a0<em>Beyond Ourselves<\/em>\u00a0notice and respond to in their pieces. I think often of the comments Rukeyser contributed to a 1945 anthology of war poetry (\u201cWar and Poetry,\u201d reprinted in <em>The Muriel Rukeyser Era<\/em>), where she introduces a straw-poet who chastises her, \u201cYou bring the world in too much. Poems should not be written about the war. Are you not afraid of guessing wrong?\u201d She responds simply, \u201cI deny all of this.\u201d Rukeyser understood poetry to be a vehicle both for approaching situations of tremendous complexity and for arriving at \u201cthe emotional meanings at every moment.\u201d She eschewed easy or static answers as she eschewed orthodoxies. For Rukeyser, the straw-poet\u2019s question is ridiculous because the consequences of\u00a0<em>not<\/em>\u00a0struggling to find the meanings are so much graver than trying with honesty, humility, and openness and getting it wrong.<\/p><p>At a time when we are experiencing existential crisis after existential crisis, when looking away feels sometimes like a relief, I think Rukeyser\u2019s refusal to \u201cput off\u201d what is difficult, her insistence on looking unflinchingly at the world and at herself, and her commitment to \u201cthe truth of feeling\u201d are part of what make her work essential and, as you put it, timely.<\/p><p><strong>EK: <\/strong>Your characterization of Rukeyser\u2019s 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 <em>Beyond Ourselves <\/em>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\u2019 responses to Rukeyser, to present crises, or to poetry today?<\/p><p><strong>SH: <\/strong>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\u2019s beautiful hybrid essay \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/harpers.org\/archive\/2020\/08\/false-dawn-khadijah-queen\/\">False Dawn: a zuihitsu from the early months of the pandemic<\/a>\u201d (<em>Harper\u2019s Magazine<\/em>, August 2020). Working in the zuihitsu form allowed Queen to move between facts, intimate musings, and miscellany as she explored modes for sustaining life\u2014from a philodendron leaf to an aging mother and sick sister\u2014amidst so much danger and fear. And interwoven among a \u201clist of what [she] appreciate[s],\u201d virus death tolls, and a trenchant examination of race and death was Muriel Rukeyser. In \u201cFalse Dawn,\u201d she reflects, \u201cWhen 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.\u201d<\/p><p>After reading the piece we immediately sent Queen an email, inviting her to build upon that \u201cmeant to\u201d for our volume. Her essay for <em>Beyond Ourselves<\/em>\u2014a reading of a wide range of Rukeyser\u2019s works including her musical about legendary escape artist Harry Houdini (<em>Houdini: A Musical<\/em>, Paris Press, 2002), her children\u2019s book <em>More Night <\/em>(Harper & Row, 1981), and her late book of poetry <em>The Gates<\/em> (McGraw-Hill, 1976)\u2014rigorously and generously probes the effects, both positive and negative, of Rukeyser\u2019s engagement with empathy, what Queen names her \u201copen self.\u201d<\/p><p>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\u2019m thinking too about Jena Osman\u2019s confession in her essay on documentary, complicity, and critical consciousness about what is currently Rukeyser\u2019s most famous work, \u201cThe Book of the Dead\u201d: \u201cFor a long time, I wasn\u2019t sure I liked the poem.\u201d The confession makes it possible for Osman to interrogate the poem alongside Rukeyser\u2019s short documentary film <em>A Place to Live<\/em> (1941) in a way that both honors and transcends discomfort, just as Osman\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p><p><strong>CG:<\/strong> Yes! This impressed me, too. And it\u2019s 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.<\/p><p>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 <em>grapple<\/em> with something\u2014a difficulty, a fear, a frustration, a politics, even trauma\u2014in a way that allowed both form and content to actively work as examples of what Rukeyser in <em>The Life of Poetry<\/em> called \u201cusable truth.\u201d<\/p><p>For example, we knew Philip Metres would have something important to say about Rukeyser\u2019s legacy, but we weren\u2019t prepared for his astonishingly open and vulnerable meditation on embodied poetics. Likewise, Erika Meitner\u2019s 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\u2019s models of speaking with the whole self, out of silence. And then there\u2019s the illustrated poem sequence \u201cThe Breathers\u201d by Daniel Borzutzky and Stacy Hardy, which extends Rukeyser\u2019s \u201cpolitics of breath\u201d into a poetic treatment of \u201cthe mere act of breathing as a form of political resistance\u201d to ongoing colonial violences.<\/p><p>There\u2019s much more to say here, including how contributors engaged with such a wide range of Rukeyser\u2019s oeuvre, but I\u2019ll conclude by noting that \u201crevelation\u201d 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\u2014and building on Stefania\u2019s earlier point\u2014revelation is a gesture of honesty, and it was this honesty that soon revealed itself as a kind of binding agent of the book.<\/p><p><strong>EK: <\/strong>And <em>Beyond Ourselves <\/em>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\u2019s methods or acknowledge her limits, as you pointed out, Stefania. And then there is Metres\u2019s incredible reading of her long poem \u201cThe Outer Banks\u201d (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\u2019s legacy alive by\u2014not in spite of\u2014avoiding hero worship and appreciating the unappreciated. To invoke another contributor, Deborah Paredez, it\u2019s an anti-epic approach to an anti-epic writer.<\/p><p>For a poet who prioritized the future over the past, as Rukeyser did, it\u2019s fitting to avoid such mythologizing. Such refusal reminds me of a line from \u201cThe Fear of Form: Third Elegy\u201d from <em>A Turning Wind<\/em> (Viking Press, 1939), that I\u2019ve been obsessing over: \u201cThe useable [<em>sic<\/em>] present starts my calendar.\u201d <em>Beyond Ourselves<\/em> 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?<\/p><p><strong>CG<\/strong>: Thank you, Eric! That wonderful line brings us back to Rukeyser\u2019s conviction that poetry\u2019s 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 <em>The Life of Poetry<\/em>, \u201cour lives may rest on this; and our lives are our images.\u201d The possibilities readers may discover in reengaging Rukeyser are as multiple as poetry\u2019s possibilities to generate meaning. Stefania\u2019s deceptively capacious essay for the book provides key insight here, not least because it enacts Rukeyser\u2019s thinking with, through, and about poetry\u2014how poetry allows us \u201cto hold on to all the possibilities for what word and world might have to do with each other.\u201d Those word-world relations might be ignited in ways that involve activism and communality\u2014found in both Susan Briante\u2019s and Nomi Stone\u2019s pieces for the book, as they each appeal to Rukeyser to challenge the barriers and violences materialized by the language of othering.<\/p><p>Readers might discover, too, the prevalence of children in Rukeyser\u2019s work. Again, her engagement here is not the transference of responsibility onto future generations, but attention to (among other things) how a child\u2019s presentism is inseparable from their lack of fear\u2014toward poetry, toward failure, toward \u201cotherness.\u201d 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\u2014however corny this may sound\u2014that we are all ancestors of the future.<\/p><p><strong>SH: <\/strong>Threaded through this question, Catherine\u2019s 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.<\/p><p>There\u2019s a line from <em>The Life of Poetry <\/em>that shows up more than once in our introduction; in it, Rukeyser turns her gaze outward, asking, \u201cYou reading this book, who are you?\u201d She is making direct contact with the future, invoking her readers as much more than her market. Her readers\u2014<em>we<\/em>\u2014become 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.<\/p><p>A beloved mentor of mine, Joan Richardson, has a beautiful figure in her book <em>Pragmatism and American Experience: An Introduction<\/em> (Cambridge University Press, 2014) for this sort of ongoing and collective project of truth seeking. She points out that Charles Sanders Peirce\u2019s term for continuity, \u201csynechism,\u201d comes from the Greek for \u201c\u2018to have or hold together,’ as the activity of rowers on a bi- or trireme.\u201d 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 <em>Beyond Ourselves<\/em> is that they may feel called, too, to climb aboard and join this work.<\/p><p><strong>CG:<\/strong> To return to Solmaz Sharif\u2019s galvanizing afterword: \u201cIt\u2019s over . . . 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is Cringe: An Interview with Ry Cook"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"41434\" class=\"elementor elementor-41434\" data-elementor-post-type=\"post\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-f73f23a elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"f73f23a\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-5dbbad4\" data-id=\"5dbbad4\" data-element_type=\"column\" data-e-type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-03f60cd elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"03f60cd\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-73825b3\" data-id=\"73825b3\" data-element_type=\"column\" data-e-type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-b731b91 elementor-widget elementor-widget-image\" data-id=\"b731b91\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"image.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<figure class=\"wp-caption\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"181\" height=\"271\" src=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/credit-Emily-Fairweather-181x271.jpeg\" class=\"attachment-medium size-medium wp-image-41446\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/credit-Emily-Fairweather-181x271.jpeg 181w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/credit-Emily-Fairweather.jpeg 427w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 181px) 100vw, 181px\" \/>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<figcaption class=\"widget-image-caption wp-caption-text\">photo by Emily Fairweather<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-3c7f7050 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"3c7f7050\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-7370d512\" data-id=\"7370d512\" data-element_type=\"column\" data-e-type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-2540e13a elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"2540e13a\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p>\u00a0<em>by Tiffany Troy<\/em><\/p><p>In their debut chapbook<a href=\"https:\/\/choo-choo-press.square.site\/?item=ED3JW4WSYLEJVQWVUCHRVAJV#VZKFRVDMYKEPNBBV45JMH4J5\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em> <strong>Freak of Nature<\/strong><\/em><\/a><strong> (<a href=\"https:\/\/choochoopress.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Choo Choo Press<\/a>, $15)<\/strong>, Ry Cook demands: \u201cLook me in the eyes when \/ I\u2019m talking to you.\u201d The chapbook\u2019s opening poem, \u201cBurn Book,\u201d introduces readers to many of its concerns, not least of which is its preoccupation with the aesthetics of cringe. Hewing to a form\u2014single-stanza syllabic poems with alternating indented lines\u2014Cook\u2019s poems vacillate between self-deprecating humor (\u201cOn Monday a Dogecoin \/ tells me to kill myself \/ and I think about it\u201d) and an almost-classical bravado (\u201cI\u2019m just waiting \/ here listening taking \/ everything in before \/ going downstairs knowing \/ exactly what to sing\u201d).<\/p><p>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 \u201cspine\u201d of Cook\u2019s poems and land them in a sense of absolution as they \u201cwolf and howl \/ at Cher\u2019s tomato moon.\u201d<\/p><p>Recently awarded the Belladonna* Residency in Nonbinary Poetics, Cook received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and has published poems in <em>The<\/em> <em>Baffler<\/em>, <em>The<\/em> <em>Brooklyn Rail<\/em>, <em>BOMB<\/em>, 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.<\/p><p><strong>Tiffany Troy:<\/strong> How did <em>Freak of Nature<\/em> come about?<\/p><p><strong>Ryan Cook<\/strong>: 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 <em>that<\/em> feeling\u2014the 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\u2014it was possible to erase words from existence permanently. And there\u2019s a luxury to that. People now pay services to scrub their digital footprint clean, even though theoretically the cloud keeps texts and images forever.\u00a0<\/p><p>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 <em>Freak of Nature<\/em>, 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, \u201cTell all the truth, but tell it slant\u201d\u2014but no one talks about how deep the slant can go.<\/p><p><a href=\"https:\/\/choo-choo-press.square.site\/?item=ED3JW4WSYLEJVQWVUCHRVAJV#VZKFRVDMYKEPNBBV45JMH4J5\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-41464 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/FreakofNature2-e1787692325787-192x271.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"192\" height=\"271\" srcset=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/FreakofNature2-e1787692325787-192x271.jpg 192w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/FreakofNature2-e1787692325787-725x1024.jpg 725w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/FreakofNature2-e1787692325787-768x1084.jpg 768w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/FreakofNature2-e1787692325787-500x706.jpg 500w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/FreakofNature2-e1787692325787.jpg 1020w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 192px) 100vw, 192px\" \/><\/a><\/p><p><strong>TT: <\/strong>Let\u2019s talk about cringe as an aesthetic. In \u201cRimbaud of Shit\u201d the speaker introduces themself:<\/p><blockquote><p>Me the Rimbaud of shit<br \/>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0O my good! O my boo-<br \/>tyful collection of<br \/>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 cringe. My potions my po-<br \/>ems.<\/p><\/blockquote><p>As the poem goes on, figures like Rimbaud, Verlaine, and the \u201cperfect genderqueer i- \/ con\u201d seem to serve as foils to the speaker. The lyric magnifies some dark experiences\u2014ranging from a car crash to suicidal ideation\u2014into something beyond embarrassment.<\/p><p><strong>RC: <\/strong>I\u2019m glad you brought up \u201cRimbaud of Shit,\u201d 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\u2014it creates a childlike sense of play\u2014and I realized I hadn\u2019t 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.<\/p><p>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.<\/p><p>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\u2019s like trying to get a fishhook out with more fishhooks\u2014yet there\u2019s something beautifully pitiful about that in terms of the contemporary lyric. I want to write about things that I\u2019m feeling, or that matter to me, but I worry about how others will see them, or if they feel the same.<\/p><p>I also tend to over-intellectualize\u2014as I think a lot of younger writers do\u2014mostly 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.<\/p><p>I think cringe started off as a physical reaction\u2014at least this is how boomers tend to refer to cringe\u2014you 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\u2014 early iterations of this became \u201clolcows,\u201d or people who were made fun of on the internet\u2014yet I found that a lot of the people who were being labeled as cringe were queer or neurodivergent.<\/p><p>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\u2014the 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\u2014cringe as weapon. Yet I was also struck by the confidence of some of the people who were being deemed cringe.<\/p><p>The current phase of cringe is self-policing. I\u2019ve had students tell me they won\u2019t try something new because they don\u2019t want to be seen as cringe. I\u2019ve also seen people scrub their digital footprints in hopes that they won\u2019t be seen as cringe later on. This fascinates me, because it feels so antithetical to the lyric.<\/p><p>Anyway, the more I tried to write about this theory of cringe, the less excited I became. I kept hitting blocks because I didn\u2019t think I was smart enough. That\u2019s when my amazing editor, Taylor Zhang, asked me to approach this idea in a different, more personal way\u2014she 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\u2019t 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.<\/p><p><strong>TT:<\/strong> 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 <em>Freak of Nature<\/em>?<\/p><p><strong>RC<\/strong>: I don\u2019t know if there is an alter ego; I think we are all constantly testing out new alter egos online. I\u2019ve 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.<\/p><p>At any rate, the speaker in these poems is certainly more outspoken than me, but they have the same amount of shame\u2014of 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.<\/p><p>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 Nestl\u00e9) because I had so many recurrences of <em>C. diff<\/em>\u2014it worked, and I\u2019ve 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 \u201cRimbaud of Shit\u201d gets in your face about that, while \u201cThree Voices\u201d discusses the speaker\u2019s stepdad withering away and how quickly even that can be commodified:<\/p><blockquote><p>I know<br \/>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0he\u2019ll probably pass in<br \/>the next 10 years. I don\u2019t<br \/>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 know what to do with that<br \/>information. Proba-<br \/>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 bly write a book. Sell it.<br \/>Have people pity me<br \/>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 with capital. Boo hoo<br \/>boo hoo boo hoo boo hoo<br \/>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 goes the lament of the<br \/>loudest possible flow-<br \/>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0er.<\/p><\/blockquote><p>I wrote this poem from a place of disgust as I was trying to sort through my feelings about my stepdad\u2019s health conditions. I don\u2019t 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.<\/p><p><strong>TT: <\/strong>How is the aesthetic of cringe captured and heightened by the visual form of the poems in the chapbook?<\/p><p><strong>RC: <\/strong>In regard to the visual form\u2014the \u201cspine poems,\u201d as I like to call them\u2014the main form consists of five-syllable lines indenting back and forth. The lines give an echo of iambic pentameter\u2014the forward pulse. Working on the level of the syllable really helped me\u2014it 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.<\/p><p>I\u2019ll probably look back on this interview and cringe, and I love that.<\/p><p><strong>TT: <\/strong>What are you working on now?<\/p><p><strong>RC: <\/strong>I\u2019m finishing a new chapbook, called <em>ASUSHUNAMIR<\/em>. This one feels different from <em>Freak of Nature. <\/em>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\u2019s a portion of the classic translation by\u00a0Pirjo Lapinkivi (edited slightly by me):\u00a0<\/p><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-41445 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Ry-Cook-Poetry-block-quote.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1275\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Ry-Cook-Poetry-block-quote.jpg 1275w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Ry-Cook-Poetry-block-quote-500x176.jpg 500w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Ry-Cook-Poetry-block-quote-1024x361.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Ry-Cook-Poetry-block-quote-768x271.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1275px) 100vw, 1275px\" \/><\/p><p>I wanted to explore the implications of each curse in relation to nonbinary bodies today. It\u2019s 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.<\/p><p><strong>TT: <\/strong>Do you have any closing thoughts for readers?<\/p><p><strong>RC<\/strong>: Thanks for letting me be messy.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-7e505f64 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"7e505f64\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-1deae68c\" data-id=\"1deae68c\" data-element_type=\"column\" 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style=\"text-align: center;\"><a style=\"font-size: 15px; text-align: center;\" href=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/summer-2026-online-edition\/\"><strong style=\"font-size: 15px;\">Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2026 <\/strong><\/a><strong style=\"font-size: 15px; color: #444444; text-align: center;\">| \u00a9 Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026<\/strong><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Discussing their chapbook <i>Freak of Nature<\/I>, poet Ry Cook offers an expansive view of the aesthetics of cringe, the uses of form, and the many kinds of bodies that wear the \u201cclothes of the poem.\u201d <i>Interview by Tiffany Troy <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[383],"tags":[551],"class_list":["post-41434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interview","tag-summer-2026"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.5 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Lyric is Cringe: An Interview with Ry Cook - Rain Taxi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Discussing their chapbook Freak of Nature, poet Ry Cook offers an expansive view of the aesthetics of cringe, the uses of form, and the many kinds of bodies that wear the \u201cclothes of the poem.\u201d Interview by Tiffany Troy\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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\/ Grammar"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"41412\" class=\"elementor elementor-41412\" data-elementor-post-type=\"post\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-283483a2 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"283483a2\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-36524675\" data-id=\"36524675\" data-element_type=\"column\" data-e-type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-6e4c9a06 elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"6e4c9a06\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/https:\/\/zimzalla.co.uk\/072-colour-grammar-greg-thomas\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" data-wplink-url-error=\"true\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"img-shadow alignright wp-image-41416 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/1-1-e1787257818501-190x271.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"190\" height=\"271\" srcset=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/1-1-e1787257818501-190x271.jpg 190w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/1-1-e1787257818501-717x1024.jpg 717w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/1-1-e1787257818501-768x1097.jpg 768w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/1-1-e1787257818501-1076x1536.jpg 1076w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/1-1-e1787257818501-500x714.jpg 500w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/1-1-e1787257818501.jpg 1136w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 190px) 100vw, 190px\" \/><\/a><\/strong><strong>Greg Thomas<\/strong><br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/zimzalla.co.uk\/\">zimZalla<\/a><\/p><p><em>by Ross Hair<\/em><\/p><p><em>Colour \/ Grammar<\/em>, Greg Thomas\u2019s 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, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9781802077087\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland<\/em><\/a> (Liverpool University Press, 2019) and more recently, with the poet and publisher Julie Johnson, has co-edited a new selection of Edwin Morgan\u2019s poetry, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9781836391968\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Home in Space: Selected Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry<\/em><\/a> (Reaktion Books, 2026). Although the poems that comprise <em>Colour \/ Grammar <\/em>wear this learning lightly, the concrete poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay (one of the subjects of <em>Border Blurs<\/em>) and the minimal poetry of Aram Saroyan are very much Thomas\u2019s touchstones: \u201cThe feints and tricks I learned from Finlay\u2019s work, but also from Saroyan\u2019s,\u201d Thomas claimed in a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.spamzine.co.uk\/post\/feature-greg-thomas-ten-things\">2022 feature at the online zine SPAM<\/a>, \u201care still probably the basis of what much of what I\u2019m doing (in particular, the page not as an invitation to forward movement but as a visual frame).\u201d<\/p><p>The influence of Saroyan is most evident in Thomas\u2019s one-word poems, including \u201cblissom\u201d which conflates a prominent subject of Japanese haiku (blossom) with the sensation it elicits (bliss). However, whereas Saroyan utilized the solecism (most famously, misspelling \u201clight\u201d with an extra \u201cght\u201d), Thomas\u2019s one-word poems tend towards the portmanteau and neologism. The distinctive color of \u201cblissom\u201d also gives some indication of how, according to Thomas, the poems in <em>Colour \/ Grammar<\/em> explore \u201cthe possibilities of colour as grammar and grammar as colour.\u201d In this instance, the rich plum of the word \u201cblissom,\u201d printed on a pale pink background, makes the ephemeral phenomena of blossom all the more tangible and vivid.<\/p><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-41414 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Thomas_Colour-Grammar-image-cropped-e1787257245748-382x271.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"382\" height=\"271\" srcset=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Thomas_Colour-Grammar-image-cropped-e1787257245748-382x271.jpg 382w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Thomas_Colour-Grammar-image-cropped-e1787257245748-768x545.jpg 768w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Thomas_Colour-Grammar-image-cropped-e1787257245748-500x355.jpg 500w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Thomas_Colour-Grammar-image-cropped-e1787257245748.jpg 852w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 382px) 100vw, 382px\" \/><\/p><p>In terms of its colors and design, <em>Colour \/ Grammar<\/em> recalls Finlay\u2019s <em>Poems To Hear and See <\/em>(Macmillan, 1971), a colorful collection of some of his most familiar and accessible concrete poems aimed at junior readers. In the case of <em>Colour \/ Grammar<\/em>, however, the page is replaced with the postcard\u2014a simple format that suits the brevity of Thomas\u2019s 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.<\/p><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-41417 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/4-1-e1787257974580-387x271.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"387\" height=\"271\" srcset=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/4-1-e1787257974580-387x271.jpg 387w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/4-1-e1787257974580-768x538.jpg 768w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/4-1-e1787257974580-500x351.jpg 500w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/4-1-e1787257974580.jpg 796w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 387px) 100vw, 387px\" \/><\/p><p>Many of the poems in <em>Colour \/ Grammar<\/em> take a backward glance to evoke the heyday of concrete and visual poetry. In one such poem, for example, the word \u201csedge\u201d (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\u2019s sage green stock. While this inevitably recalls Apollinaire, the result is also not dissimilar to Mary Ellen Solt\u2019s concrete flower poems such as \u201cForsythia,\u201d 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\u2019s plant is made entirely from the consecutive repetition of \u201csedge,\u201d which yields the additional words \u201cedge\u201d and \u201cedges.\u201d As a result, Thomas\u2019s calligram makes a playful allusion to the mnemonic rhyme for identifying the plants of the <em>Cyperaceae<\/em> family: \u201csedges have edges.\u201d \u00a0<\/p><p>Unlike the triangular stems of sedge plants, the poems in <em>Colour \/ Grammar<\/em> are themselves rarely \u201cedgy.\u201d This is something that Thomas is evidently conscious of, and a quality that he recognizes in Finlay\u2019s work. In his SPAM feature \u201cGreg Thomas: Ten Things,\u201d Thomas claims he learned from Finlay\u2019s example<\/p><blockquote><p>that it\u2019s not inherently problematic to make poems that are small, simple, and express a kind of emotional warmth (I find \u2018edginess\u2019 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.<\/p><\/blockquote><p>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 \u201cthe buzzing \/ of instincts \/ in hedgerows,\u201d for example, Thomas subverts assumptions by substituting what one would expect, \u201cinsects,\u201d with the more idiosyncratic \u201cinstincts.\u201d 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 \u201crestlessnest\u201d conjures both the insatiability of a burgeoning nest and the harried parents tending it.<\/p><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-41415 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Thomas_Colour-Grammar-image2-e1787257589751-385x271.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"385\" height=\"271\" srcset=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Thomas_Colour-Grammar-image2-e1787257589751-385x271.jpg 385w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Thomas_Colour-Grammar-image2-e1787257589751-768x541.jpg 768w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Thomas_Colour-Grammar-image2-e1787257589751-500x352.jpg 500w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Thomas_Colour-Grammar-image2-e1787257589751.jpg 863w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 385px) 100vw, 385px\" \/><\/p><p>Several poems in <em>Colour \/ Grammar<\/em> are commendable for how they breathe new life into the otherwise hackneyed subject of dawn. The non-gendered personification in \u201cthe dawn \/ clears \/ its throat,\u201d 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 \u201cday \/ breaks \/\/ night \/ mends\u201d and the proverb-like \u201cthe dawn \/ was not \/ born \/ yesterday,\u201d Thomas strikes a perfect balance between poignancy and whimsy. While such punning and wordplay confirms the extent to which <em>Colour \/ Grammar<\/em> is not an \u201cedgy\u201d 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.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-d2ba91 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"d2ba91\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-2c51d3db\" data-id=\"2c51d3db\" data-element_type=\"column\" 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God But Us"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"41387\" class=\"elementor elementor-41387\" data-elementor-post-type=\"post\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-6aae9819 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"6aae9819\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-176759aa\" data-id=\"176759aa\" data-element_type=\"column\" data-e-type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-5f5f520d elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"5f5f520d\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9780063419469\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"img-shadow wp-image-41389 size-medium alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/9780063419469-181x271.webp\" alt=\"\" width=\"181\" height=\"271\" srcset=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/9780063419469-181x271.webp 181w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/9780063419469-500x750.webp 500w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/9780063419469.webp 600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 181px) 100vw, 181px\" \/><\/strong><\/a><strong>Bobuq Sayed<\/strong><br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.harpercollins.com\/pages\/harperbooks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Harper<\/a> ($30)<\/p><p><em>by Zara Karschay<\/em><\/p><p>Bobuq Sayed\u2019s deeply compassionate debut <em>No God But Us <\/em>takes us ten years back, the tragedy of critical distance apparent on every page. Distance\u2014of time, place, nationality, race, sexuality, and gender identity\u2014is essential to Sayed\u2019s 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\u2014one a refugee, the other an American citizen and closeted trans woman\u2014Sayed creates a swirling narrative of intersectionality, a vortex within which their sharply drawn characters must negotiate the world at large.<\/p><p>The novel opens with Delbar\u2019s 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\u2019s judgment, Qandul\u2019s progressive sister Yosra gets Delbar on a flight to Istanbul, where she herself works as a professor.<\/p><p>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\u2019s sexuality is discovered, his lover, who lives in the capital\u2019s wealthy north, helps him flee to Istanbul. But the work Mansur finds in Turkey\u2014on roads, in kitchens, as a rent boy\u2014isn\u2019t much better; as Sayed puts it, \u201cthe weaker man met the needs of the stronger one.\u201d 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\u2014including not joining protests where they’d otherwise find community. In the novel\u2019s 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.<\/p><p>Both Delbar and Mansur strive for a dignified, free life while finding belonging and stability as refugees. Through Yosra\u2019s contacts, Delbar is offered an internship with Leif, a German \u201cAnderson Cooper looking dude\u201d who runs PeaceMeals, an aid program for queer and transgender refugees. While Delbar senses a performative dimension to Leif\u2019s 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.<\/p><p>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 <em>No God But Us <\/em>spares us the western clich\u00e9 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 \u201cmodernizing\u201d the Afghan, and he later resists cultural erasure with a quiet dignity.\u00a0<\/p><p>We know Delbar and Mansur must meet, and when they do, Sayed\u2019s prose crackles with energy. Delbar describes intimate moments with phrases that seem plucked from the Persianate literary tradition, e.g., \u201cfondling an ivory wildflower, gazing up at the same forked branches I was staring into, touching me without any point of contact.\u201d <em>No God But Us<\/em> builds bridges between the critical distances that separate us and shows how deep the waters are that run beneath.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-632a4c84 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"632a4c84\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-a3ac728\" 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<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[384],"tags":[551],"class_list":["post-41387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction-reviews","tag-summer-2026"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.5 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>No God But Us - Rain Taxi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Babuq Sayed's stunning debut novel captures, through the lens of two queer Afghan characters, the tragic choices many are forced to make as refugees escaping persecution. 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The Work of \u00c9douard Louis"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"41339\" class=\"elementor elementor-41339\" data-elementor-post-type=\"post\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-26736bf elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"26736bf\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-2a60748\" data-id=\"2a60748\" data-element_type=\"column\" data-e-type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-73d5f51 elementor-widget elementor-widget-image\" data-id=\"73d5f51\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"image.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<figure class=\"wp-caption\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"625\" height=\"833\" src=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/2019.12.07._Edouard_Louis_Fot_Mariusz_Kubik_01-768x1024.jpg\" class=\"attachment-medium_large size-medium_large wp-image-41349\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/2019.12.07._Edouard_Louis_Fot_Mariusz_Kubik_01-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/2019.12.07._Edouard_Louis_Fot_Mariusz_Kubik_01-203x271.jpg 203w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/2019.12.07._Edouard_Louis_Fot_Mariusz_Kubik_01-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/2019.12.07._Edouard_Louis_Fot_Mariusz_Kubik_01-1536x2048.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/2019.12.07._Edouard_Louis_Fot_Mariusz_Kubik_01-500x667.jpg 500w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/2019.12.07._Edouard_Louis_Fot_Mariusz_Kubik_01-scaled.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 625px) 100vw, 625px\" \/>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<figcaption class=\"widget-image-caption wp-caption-text\"> \u00c9douard Louis in Warsaw (\u00a9 Mariusz Kubik. All rights reserved)<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-f278a54 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"f278a54\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\" data-settings=\"{"background_background":"classic"}\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-4dd44e1\" data-id=\"4dd44e1\" data-element_type=\"column\" data-e-type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-inner-section elementor-element elementor-element-7a6f365 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"7a6f365\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-inner-column elementor-element elementor-element-b4defc6\" data-id=\"b4defc6\" data-element_type=\"column\" data-e-type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-1319152 elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"1319152\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\"><strong>New Books Reviewed in this Essay:<br \/><\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9780374616830\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Collapse<\/em><\/a>, translated by Tash Aw (<a href=\"https:\/\/us.macmillan.com\/fsg\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FSG<\/a>, $26)<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9780374616809\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Monique Escapes<\/em><\/a>, translated by John Lambert (<a href=\"https:\/\/us.macmillan.com\/fsg\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FSG<\/a>, $25)<\/span><\/p><p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\"><strong>Also Discussed:<\/strong><\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9781250449801\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The End of Eddy<\/em><\/a>, translated by Michael Lucey, (Picador, 2017, $18)<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\"><em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9780811235044\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Who Killed My Father<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>translated by Lorin Stein (New Directions, 2019, $15.95)<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9781250449832\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>A Woman\u2019s Battles and Transformations<\/em><\/a>, translated by Tash Aw (Picador, 2022, $16)<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9781250449825\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Change<\/em><\/a>, translated by John Lambert (Picador, 2024, $18)<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-6c7e05dc elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"6c7e05dc\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-60869c21\" data-id=\"60869c21\" data-element_type=\"column\" data-e-type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-1d731b56 elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"1d731b56\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p><br \/><em>by Claude Peck<\/em><\/p><p>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, \u00c9douard Louis recounts growing up in Hallencourt, a working-class village in northern France rife with unemployment, homophobia, racism, and violence.<\/p><p>Louis\u2019s 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9781250449801\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The End of Eddy<\/em><\/a>, 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\u2019s reputation for \u00e9galit\u00e9 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.<\/p><p><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9781250449801\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/images-us.bookshop.org\/ingram\/9781250449801.jpg?v=b3ed204595fcf7077a1ea398437b9e9b&width=600\" alt=\"The End of Eddy bookcover\" width=\"192\" height=\"289\" \/><\/a><\/p><p>Louis went on to devote a book to his father (<a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9780811235044\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Who Killed My Father<\/em><\/a>) and one to his mother\u2019s midlife struggle to free herself of abusive, alcoholic men (<a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9781250449832\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>A Woman\u2019s Battles and Transformations<\/em><\/a>). In the fascinating accretions of <em>Change<\/em>, published in France in 2021, Eddy leaves his childhood and village behind to attend lyc\u00e9e in Amiens and wins admittance to the prestigious \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure in Paris. Born Eddy Bellegueule, he fancifies his name to \u00c9douard 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\u2014all to \u201cgain worldwide recognition\u201d for his books. The rags-to-riches arc of <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9781250449825\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Change<\/em> <\/a>hints at such gradualist classics as Knut Hamsun\u2019s <em>Growth of the Soil<\/em> and Edith Wharton\u2019s <em>The Custom of the Country<\/em>.<\/p><p>With the English translations of <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9780374616830\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Collapse<\/a>, <\/em>which concerns the early death of his older brother, and <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9780374616809\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Monique Escapes<\/em><\/a>, about helping his mother achieve independence after a string of bad relationships, Louis returns us to the squalid village of <em>The End of Eddy<\/em>. But wait: Do we really want to go there? To experience his dead-end brother\u2019s alcohol-fueled violence against women? To relive the brothers\u2019 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?<\/p><p>Louis dismisses those who find his books repetitive: \u201cI\u2019ve been told that literature should never repeat itself, but I want to write only the same story again and again,\u201d he tells us in <em>A Woman\u2019s Battles and Transformations<\/em>, \u201creturning to it until it reveals fragments of its truth, <em>digging hole after hole in it until all that is hidden begins to seep out<\/em>.\u201d<\/p><p><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9780374616830\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/m.media-amazon.com\/images\/I\/71J2BJ+yscL._SY466_.jpg\" alt=\"Collapse: A Novel\" width=\"207\" height=\"317\" \/><\/a><\/p><p><em>Monique Escapes<\/em>, however, doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s father). Old patterns die hard, however; the new guy gets drunk nightly, calls her a whore and fat cow, and insults her \u201cfaggot\u201d son. Fed up, she is determined to leave, and when she seeks her estranged son\u2019s help, he throws himself into abetting her escape.<\/p><p>The mother-son dynamic here shifts dramatically from Louis\u2019s 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 \u201cwhy can\u2019t I have even a small measure of happiness?\u201d<\/p><p>The author\u2019s mother initially resents him for writing about her and his miserable childhood in <em>The End of Eddy<\/em>: \u201cBut paradoxically it\u2019s because I\u2019d written that book, and the ones that followed, that I\u2019d earned the money we could now spend on her.\u201d 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, \u201c<em>Why did I feel such a deep need to help her?<\/em>\u201d and concluding that it\u2019s \u201cbecause my hurt and hers are linked.\u201d<\/p><p>In all his books, Louis laces his personal story with philosophy and social theory. <em>Monique Escapes<\/em> offers a class and feminist critique, especially about poor women in abusive relationships, for whom the possibility of escape is thwarted by financial constraints. \u201cHow many women would change their lives if they got a check?\u201d 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 <em>Returning to Reims<\/em> (Semiotext(e), 2013, translated by Michael Lucey).<\/p><p>When encountering \u201cThe Guy\u201d his mother was ditching, Louis has a revelation reminiscent of the sort of moral inversion common in the works of his countryman Jean Genet: \u201cI suddenly began to think that maybe this man was neither guilty nor responsible for what he had done,\u201d but was rather \u201cthe element through which a violence had passed . . . the violence of male domination.\u201d 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 <em>A Room of One\u2019s Own<\/em>, that \u201cfreedom is not first and foremost an aesthetic and symbolic issue, but a material and practical one.\u201d<\/p><p>With her children helping her, Monique blossoms into a new life where \u201cno one\u2019s going to walk all over me anymore.\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p><p>More than an upbeat happy-ending story, <em>Monique Escapes<\/em> is about rapprochement and metamorphosis. It reflects on Eddy\u2019s own escape from his painful childhood, described in <em>Change<\/em>, as he sought revenge through education and hoped-for fame. It embraces a feminist ideal for a working-class woman. Near the end of <em>Change,<\/em> 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\u2014for his mother\u2019s humor, her pluck, her dreams so long deferred.<\/p><p><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9780374616809\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/m.media-amazon.com\/images\/I\/71TS6eUBK+L._SY466_.jpg\" alt=\"Monique Escapes: A Novel\" width=\"217\" height=\"333\" \/><\/a><\/p><p>Throughout his oeuvre, Louis has argued that violence, homophobia, and racism in the town where he grew up must be seen as socially determined\u2014a result of systems of class, economics, and masculinity that advantage those in power, even progressives, and not just in tiny Hallencourt. \u201cBy writing about my small town, I can put light on certain mechanisms that you can find everywhere in the world,\u201d he told <em>Interview<\/em> <em>Magazin<\/em>e in 2019.<\/p><p>\u201cI write to shame the ruling class,\u201d the self-described \u201cclass defector\u201d told the <em>New York Times <\/em>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 <em>Who Killed My Father<\/em>, 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.<\/p><h2><strong>A brother\u2019s death<\/strong><\/h2><p>Louis\u2019s older (by seven years) half-brother died of alcohol-related illness at the age of thirty-eight. \u201cI received the news as one would receive information on the weather,\u201d writes Louis, who had avoided his brother for the preceding ten years. In <em>Collapse<\/em>, as he helps his mother and sister with funeral arrangements, he combines his own recollections with stories from interviewing his brother\u2019s friends and lovers.<\/p><p>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 \u201creal males\u201d would consider valuable when they followed their fathers into factory work.<\/p><p>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. \u201cIt was the size of his dreams,\u201d Louis writes, \u201cand 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.\u201d<\/p><p><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9780811235044\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/images-us.bookshop.org\/ingram\/9780811235044.jpg?v=enc-v1&width=600\" alt=\"Who Killed My Father bookcover\" width=\"207\" height=\"333\" \/><\/a><\/p><p>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\u2019s 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.<\/p><p>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. \u201cInjustice,\u201d he writes in <em>Change<\/em>, \u201cis nothing but the difference in access to attempts.\u201d<\/p><p>And consider that if his straight older brother was \u201cof\u201d his village, Louis, being gay, was \u201capart\u201d 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 \u201cto 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.\u201d The quintessential pop anthem of this phenom is Bronski Beat\u2019s 1984 single \u201cSmalltown Boy\u201d which asserts \u201cthe answers you seek will never be found at home.\u201d But for Louis, unearthing home\u2019s hurt is the key to finding painful truths and paths forward.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-4e7bb220 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"4e7bb220\" data-element_type=\"section\" 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Real and Unreal: An Interview with Molly Gaudry"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"41308\" class=\"elementor elementor-41308\" data-elementor-post-type=\"post\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-291ed78 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"291ed78\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-721bf91\" data-id=\"721bf91\" data-element_type=\"column\" data-e-type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-83ea06b elementor-widget elementor-widget-image\" data-id=\"83ea06b\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"image.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<figure class=\"wp-caption\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"213\" height=\"271\" src=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Molly-Gaudry-Author-Photo-Credit-Molly-Gaudry-213x271.jpg\" class=\"attachment-medium size-medium wp-image-41310\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Molly-Gaudry-Author-Photo-Credit-Molly-Gaudry-213x271.jpg 213w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Molly-Gaudry-Author-Photo-Credit-Molly-Gaudry-806x1024.jpg 806w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Molly-Gaudry-Author-Photo-Credit-Molly-Gaudry-768x976.jpg 768w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Molly-Gaudry-Author-Photo-Credit-Molly-Gaudry-1209x1536.jpg 1209w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Molly-Gaudry-Author-Photo-Credit-Molly-Gaudry-1612x2048.jpg 1612w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Molly-Gaudry-Author-Photo-Credit-Molly-Gaudry-500x635.jpg 500w, https:\/\/raintaxi.com\/media\/Molly-Gaudry-Author-Photo-Credit-Molly-Gaudry-scaled.jpg 2015w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 213px) 100vw, 213px\" \/>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<figcaption class=\"widget-image-caption wp-caption-text\">photo by Molly Gaudry<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-87477af elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"87477af\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-e-type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-afab75e\" data-id=\"afab75e\" data-element_type=\"column\" data-e-type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-a8436b9 elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"a8436b9\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p><em>by Emily Webber<\/em><\/p><p>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\u2019re the fish, where it feels like all fight and no reward; sometimes you\u2019re the pelican just calmly waiting, and it all comes together.<\/p><p>Gaudry holds master\u2019s 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, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9780988732889\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>We Take Me Apart<\/em><\/a> (Mud Luscious Press, 2010) and <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9780986137037\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Desire: A Haunting <\/em><\/a>(Ampersand, 2018); both explore the same fictional world through the perspective of a mother and daughter. Her latest book, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9781941628379\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong><em>Fit Into Me:<\/em><\/strong> <strong><em>A Novel: A Memoir<\/em><\/strong><\/a><strong> (<a href=\"https:\/\/rosemetalpress.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rose Metal Press<\/a>, <\/strong><strong>$17.95<\/strong><strong>)<\/strong>, is a hybrid work revisiting other characters\u2014including the tea house woman, who appears in her earlier works first as a bride-to-be and then as a widow.<\/p><p>In the following interview, Gaudry offers a fascinating look into her creative process.<\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>How did you become a writer? Was it something you always wanted to do?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> I don\u2019t really know how I became a writer, but I\u2019m 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 \u201ccovers.\u201d In kindergarten, I remember my desk was separated from the other kids\u2019 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\u2019d gone there to study jazz and music composition, I learned quickly that I didn\u2019t 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.<\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>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?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> Oh, gosh, no. I definitely considered myself a fiction writer back then. I still do, really. But when my first book, <em>We Take Me Apart<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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\u2019t really understand poetry. I was wrong, though\u2014I can see this now, more clearly\u2014because 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.<\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>You had a period when you were renovating a dollhouse. What interested you about this creative outlet compared to writing?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> 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 <em>Fit Into Me, <\/em>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!<\/p><p>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, \u201cToday, I\u2019m going to prime and paint the walls on the second floor,\u201d and \u201cToday, I\u2019ll cut and install the floorboards,\u201d and \u201cToday, I\u2019ll put the lights in.\u201d 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.<\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>Speaking of blending the real and unreal, I hadn\u2019t encountered a work quite like <em>Fit Into Me<\/em>. How would you describe this book?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> I think of it as a memoir titled <em>Fit Into Me<\/em>, which is about trying to write a novel titled <em>Fit Into Me<\/em>. To put this another way: <em>Fit Into Me: A Novel <\/em>is the subject to <em>Fit Into Me: A Memoir. <\/em><\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>Rose Metal Press seems like the perfect publisher for a book like <em>Fit Into Me<\/em> 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\u2019s journey and how you persevered through some setbacks?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> Well, my first two books were published by small presses that no longer exist\u2014Mud Luscious and Ampersand Books. After Mud Luscious shut down, Jason Cook at Ampersand offered me a multi-book contract, which included a reprint of <em>We Take Me Apart<\/em>. Together, we worked closely on my second verse novel, and I also completed the first full draft of <em>Fit Into Me<\/em> with him. We really had a great working relationship, and I\u2019m 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 <em>Fit. <\/em><\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>What kept you going? Did you continue to revise the book?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> I mostly put it away, but occasionally I\u2019d 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\u2019t think of this essay as anything but a standalone piece. Later, though, I decided to include it at the end of <em>Fit Into Me,<\/em> 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.\u00a0Around 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\u2019t get accepted, I would let it go and forget about it.<\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>In that essay, you start to incorporate fiction into your story, describing an incident with your biological family that didn\u2019t actually happen. Why this shift to including fiction even within your own story?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> 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.<\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>What are some good examples of speculative nonfiction?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> I recommend the online journal <a href=\"https:\/\/www.speculativenonfiction.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Speculative Nonfiction<\/em><\/a>: Jerald Walker\u2019s<a href=\"https:\/\/www.speculativenonfiction.org\/contributions\/2018\/10\/30\/advice-to-an-honorable-man\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> \u201cAdvice to an Honorable Man,\u201d<\/a> Caite McNeil\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.speculativenonfiction.org\/contributions\/2022\/2\/9\/she-ran-like-a-\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u201cShe Ran Like A ______,\u201d<\/a> and Sean Prentiss\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.speculativenonfiction.org\/contributions\/2019\/10\/15\/buying-a-house\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u201cBuying a House: Every Story Is True and Every Story Is A Lie\u201d<\/a> are particular favorites of mine. Of course, there\u2019s Jami Nakamura Lin\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9780063213234\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir <\/em><\/a>(Mariner Books, 2023)<em>, <\/em>and Larraine Herring released an anthology fairly recently titled <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/12834\/9781646034888\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Becoming Real: Women Reclaim the Power of the Imagined through Speculative Nonfiction <\/em><\/a>(Regal House Publishing, 2024).<\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>Your two previous verse novels and the fictional novel that constitutes part of <em>Fit Into Me<\/em> feature the same characters. They don\u2019t 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 <em>Fit Into Me<\/em>, I loved that I could dive into your novels and get more of these characters with this inside knowledge. Did you always know you\u2019d write multiple books with these characters?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> No. After <em>We Take Me Apart <\/em>came out, though, I came up with the idea for <em>Desire: A Haunting. <\/em>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 <em>We Take Me Apart<\/em> from a different perspective\u2014to show how the same event could affect another character differently.<\/p><p>I think there\u2019s something wonderful about books that have a shared universe. I\u2019m obsessed with Tana French\u2019s Dublin Murder Squad mysteries, for instance, and more recently I\u2019ve 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 Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, and I always loved seeing Macondo from the different perspectives of his characters across books.<\/p><p>When I began writing the fiction sections of <em>Fit Into Me,<\/em> I wasn\u2019t thinking they would become a book. But eventually, when I realized <em>Fit Into Me <\/em>could be a novel, and that <em>Fit Into Me <\/em>could be a memoir about that novel, that\u2019s 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\u2019s father.<\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>Do you think you\u2019ll revisit these characters again?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> It\u2019s possible, but in some ways I feel I\u2019ve 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.<\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>At your book event, you said every story we tell is a love story to everything we\u2019ve read; <em>Fit Into Me<\/em> 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\u2019t even be able to tell. What was your process like, and how did you choose the source material and formatting?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> It\u2019s only because of interviews like this one that I\u2019ve 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 Jos\u00e9 Saramago\u2019s <em>Blindness <\/em>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.<\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>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\u2019t?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> My first book was largely influenced by fairy tales, fables, and myths. So, the tea house woman didn\u2019t have a name in <em>We Take Me Apart<\/em>. She didn\u2019t get a name in <em>Desire <\/em>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\u2019s name was Conrad, but he went by Connie his whole life. Then I named the tea house woman\u2019s mother Clarissa, after <em>Mrs. Dalloway,<\/em> because why not?<\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>A lot of your writing leans into this sense of play. In <em>Fit Into Me, <\/em>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?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> With my first book, I was up against a deadline, so I transcribed words from Gertrude Stein\u2019s <em>Tender Buttons<\/em> as an act of desperation. I get into the specifics in <em>Fit Into Me, <\/em>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 <em>We Take Me Apart<\/em>, I did the same thing for <em>Desire<\/em>, using words from John Ratti\u2019s poetry collection <em>A Remembered Darkness<\/em>.<\/p><p>I like to think that this process helps to infuse your writing with the spirit of the works you pull from. <em>We Take Me Apart<\/em> is obsessed with food, rooms, and objects. <em>Desire<\/em> turned out to be a Gothic-ish ghost story. Both reflect the spirit of <em>Tender Buttons <\/em>and <em>A Remembered Darkness<\/em>. So I repeated the process for <em>Fit Into Me,<\/em> using words from Anne Carson\u2019s translation of Sappho\u2019s <em>If Not, Winter<\/em>. \u00a0<\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>Now that you\u2019ve finally seen <em>Fit Into Me<\/em> go out into the world and receive positive reviews, what comes next?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> Well, I\u2019ve finished another hybrid work, <em>The Time Loop: A Speculative Memoir: A Novel<\/em>, 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?<\/p><p>When I began this manuscript, I still did not have a publisher for <em>Fit Into Me, <\/em>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\u2019m 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\u2019s 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\u2019s need to finally get her day right applied perfectly to my own need to finally get the writing of her day right.<\/p><p><strong>EW: <\/strong>What advice do you have for writers, especially those trying to do something experimental or in a different genre?<\/p><p><strong>MG:<\/strong> It\u2019s 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\u2014like word lists, or like any other constraints you might come up with for yourself\u2014and seeing what happens. The writing process can and should be messy (which is something I\u2019m emphasizing for myself by saying, and repeating, it here!). Likely, what\u2019s 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. 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<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[383],"tags":[551],"class_list":["post-41308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interview","tag-summer-2026"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.5 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Real and Unreal: An Interview with Molly Gaudry - Rain Taxi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Molly Gaudry, author of Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, discusses her experimental combination of memoir and novel forms, her choice to revisit characters from her prior books, and her creative process and journey through publishing. 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