Book Review

Cavalier Perspective

Last Essays, 1952-1966

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

by Allan Graubard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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North Sun

or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther

Ethan Rutherford
A Strange Object ($17.95)

by Nicole Emanuel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Crane

Tessa Bolsover
Black Ocean ($18)

by Robert Eric Shoemaker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Document

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

by Greg Bem

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

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

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

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

beating heart doesn’t want peace only oblivion

on the highest branch of the sky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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3 Shades of Blue

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

James Kaplan
Penguin Books ($20)

by Daniel Picker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Odds

Suzanne Cleary
NYQ Books ($18.95)

by Peter Mladinic

In the poem “I Go Back, as I Am Today,” from Suzanne Cleary’s latest collection The Odds, Mr. Winslow, a teacher in an eighth grade classroom, wonders aloud if he should have read his students the E.A. Robinson poem “Richard Corey,” as it reflects the recent death of one of their classmates; like the man in Robinson’s poem, the classmate, William, died by his own hand. Mr. Winslow, his back to the class, wonders if he did the right thing or the wrong thing. The buses that will take his students home are yellow, like the “long hedge aflare with forsythia” out the window, while Cleary’s speaker sees “for the first time the bravery / . . . of displaying doubt to others.” The irony lies in the poet’s certainty: If there is any doubt, as surely as there must be, in these poems written by a woman alone in a room with language, it is all behind the scenes. The presentations on the page are rendered in a voice of certainty; like the forsythia, they are unmutable, and memorable. Cleary’s attentiveness to people, places, and things gives her poems access to the metaphorical resonance beneath the surface.

Thing-oriented poems involve the speaker’s discovering and placing her findings in an epistemological context. “Worry Stone” begins with a stone in a pocket, and ends with a boulder, encircled by small stones, near a house in the country. The speaker wonders which came first, the house or the boulder. She pictures a woman in the house, and finally the boulder flying over the roof, leaving the woman unharmed (beating the odds). The epistemological link between the stone and the boulder is forged by the imagination. Similarly, in “Lovespoon,” the spoon’s carved “hearts and doves and bells” are linked “with cables and braids and knots” stitched into “Aran / sweaters knit to protect the sailor / from cold” and “to identify the body washed ashore.” Gloves, artificial wings, a bumper sticker, a mural, a poem by Robert Bly, and an Emily Dickinson poem are among other objects Cleary includes. One entity of nature that appears is Dan, an endearing bulldog; another, which has no name, is a large snake that appears in a hot, dry dusty place, near a water trough. The speaker saw the snake daily

from her attic studio, the snake 
           sunning itself on the top of the stone wall,

all near-six-feet of it shining like black oil,
            like a slice of midnight come early 

               then gone, woven back into summer’s grasses.

When the speaker discovers that the snake has been raiding her hen house, she gets it into a thick sack, places it on her truck’s floorboard, drives to a mountain’s edge, and releases it into the wild, thus relinquishing, in this instance, 

the beauty that sometimes one sees
         and sometimes disappears for weeks,

invisible, though it spread itself long and shining
             in clear sight, hungry.

There is great variety in the places in these poems: an emergency room, classrooms, art galleries, studios, a park, an opera house, a college campus, a CVS drugstore, a virtual Zoom, winding roads, neighborhoods, and basement stacks in The New York Public Library serve as stages for narratives to unfold and be resolved. In “Bumper Sticker,” a stretch of road is described in images that lend credence to the book’s title, The Odds. Anna, the minister’s wife does not want her faith displayed on a bumper sticker. Driving the road her daughter drove when her daughter had an accident, she lives her faith. Fortunately, Anna’s daughter, Julia, survived the accident. As best she can, the speaker explains the odds:

No one is safe on that road built when cars were small and slow,

when trees now crowding the shoulder, their limbs overhanging, 
were saplings, planted not by gardeners but by wind carrying seeds
through the air and dropping them. We understand some things:

the air drops a seed, a bird eats the seed, the bird flies away,
The bird shits out the seed, which takes root. A tree grows.
A car hits the tree. The car is totaled. The girl lives, or not.

Just as the poems are particularized in form, content, and thematic concerns, so are the people. In “Emergency Room,” the book’s first poem, the speaker evokes empathy for her fellow-patients: “the construction worker holding his side / and the woman with long brown hair holding a baby.” In “Life Class” art students look at the model but do not start to draw or paint until they’ve left the model’s presence, because of “The first lesson: to see.” In “Baseball” a grandfather’s imagination conjures for himself and his grandsons the inner life of the beloved sport. Suzanne Cleary goes to the inner life in all of the poems in this collection, rendering a panorama of exacting images that emphatically evoke the joy of living—and that often underscore the idea that poetry is more about questions than answers. The Odds, in short, is one really good book. Poets and non-poets alike would do well to read it.

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Barley Patch

Gerald Murnane
And Other Stories ($19.95)

by Sam Tiratto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ingenious

A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist

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

by Rasoul Sorkhabi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Even the Sound of a River

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

by Alice-Catherine Carls

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

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

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

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

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The Ocean in the Next Room

Sarah V. Schweig
Milkweed Editions ($18)

by Walter Holland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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