Featured post

JoAnn Verburg

WTC, 2003
© JoAnn Verburg; courtesy Pace Gallery

JoAnn Verburg’s current exhibit, Aftershocks, can be viewed at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through January 12, 2025. Click here for more info.

JoAnn Verburg received a BA in sociology from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MFA in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. From 1977 to 1979, she served as the research director and photographer for the Rephotographic Survey Project, traveling throughout the American West to replicate the same wilderness views made by 19th-century frontier photographers. While heading Polaroid’s Visiting Artist Program in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Verburg promoted technical innovation in the photographic field by inviting artists Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, and Jim Dine, among others, to experiment with new large format instant cameras.

Distinguished by its extraordinary sensitivity to the energy and sensuality of the natural world, Verburg’s own photographic work combines exquisite color, varied focus, and thoughtful composition to convey the beauty of its subject and setting. Often presented as diptychs and triptychs, her images of olive groves near her home in Spoleto, to which she has returned for over 30 years, envelop the viewer in a serene, dreamlike atmosphere and explore the passage of time both literally and figuratively. Verburg lives and works in Minneapolis and Spoleto, Italy. Visit her website for more info.

How to Submit: An Interview with Dennis James Sweeney

photo by Melanie Zacek

by Elise McHugh

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Library of Artistic Print on Demand

Post-Digital Publishing in Times of Platform Capitalism

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

by Richard Kostelanetz

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

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

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

• Michael Mandiberg, a CUNY media professor, has audaciously made PDFs (files prepared for printing) of the entire contents of Wikipedia, which he makes available as files for customers to print on demand (even if few actually do). I suppose this qualifies as an early masterpiece of a new genre, one I would call “Unprinted POD Literature.”

• Working in the tradition of the book arts and “Artists’ Books,” the theoretically inclined Italian artists Silvio Lorfosso and Giulia Ciliberto offer Blank on Demand (2011), in two volumes no less, with detailed specifications for all the sizes and formats available on the popular POD company Lulu. The absurdity of sending blank pages through a POD process is indeed a fitting indictment of “platform capitalism.”

• Eric Doeringer, a U.S. artist whose work acknowledges (some might say “copies”) modern masters, has taken a set of Sol LeWitt book-making instructions (initially used by LeWitt for a single edition of his 1974 The Location of Lines) and has realized them differently for eight different formats available on POD. Doeringer expands on a canonical modernist work in a fruitful direction: while LeWitt’s “content” is always the same, the look of each Doeringer edition is appreciably different.

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

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

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

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

Rain Taxi at AWP Baltimore

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

Visit us at Table T649 in the AWP Bookfair!

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

Book Reviews & Literary Community:
Why Criticism Continues to Matter

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

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

2026 Rain Taxi Readings and Events

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

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

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

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

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

The Old Man by the Sea

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

by Rick Henry

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Werthless

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

by Hank Kennedy

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Pink Lady

Denise Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press ($20)

by George Longenecker

 

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

 

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

 

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

She visited me in Florida the day after

Trump won in 2016. When I’d sent her a ticket,

I thought we’d both be celebrating

the first woman president. I was baffled, sure

that the planes of the world would stop flying,

their wings too heavy with grief.

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

I emptied her white purse—

tissue pack and reading glasses, coupons

and address book. I once lived in a purse

inside her, my first pink home, the umbilical cord

a knotted strap. When I grew up, I took care

of my own purse, its pristine lining never stretched

or stuffed with a fetus.           

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

 

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

I have my mother in my pocket—her face

on the prayer card we had printed for her wake.

I ate oatmeal with maple syrup for breakfast

so how can the front page news hurt me?

 

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

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

Portalmania

Debbie Urbanski
Simon & Schuster ($18.99)

by Alissa Hattman

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

I’d like to provide you with some background and statistics on marital r— now. Please skip the next two paragraphs, resuming your reading with the phrase Later that month, if any of the following apply:

• You consider interruptions like these an affront to your personal fictional escapism.

• You think marital r— in a story is stupid because why doesn’t she just get a divorce so we can stop talking about it.

• You are a marital r— expert.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

TRANSLATING THE WORLD

Ed Bok Lee, Robert Hedin, and Kaija Straumanis

in conversation

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

Free and open to the public—Register here.

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

About the Translators

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

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

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

Europe Without Borders

A History

Isaac Stanley-Becker
Princeton University Press ($35)

by Poul Houe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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