Book Review

A Prague Flâneur

Vítězslav Nezval
Translated by Jed Slast
Twisted Spoon Press ($19)

by Allan Graubard

For those who enjoy strolling around a city they know well or don’t, which they live in or visit; who have no particular destination in mind; who wander at different times, drawn by places and people they encounter and which, for intimate reasons, captivate them, will find an ally in A Prague Flâneur. Its author, Vítězslav Nezval, founded the Czech Surrealist Group and was one of the leading poets and writers of the avant garde. A Prague Flâneur is Nezval’s paean to the city, his city, then on the brink of disaster: The Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia was complete by March 1939, soon after the publication of the book.

The flâneur, of course, comes to us from mid-19th century France. In The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire depicts the figure as a stroller who observes in poignant detail what he encounters in and around a city but who keeps his distance, preferring to represent the experience in solitude, visually or with words. Some eight decades later, Nezval reveals the legacy of the term anew. Inspired by Prague’s polyglot architecture, mechanized systems, distractions, crowds, and those rare spaces (streets, parks, playgrounds) that can transform the normal urban chaos we expect, enjoy, or endure, Nezval orchestrates the city’s analog—the book.

Nezval’s writing style mirrors the kind of critical-poetic journalism with which surrealists captured the currents of cities—particularly their marvelous, disorienting, delirious, or dreamlike aspects. A Prague Flâneur is replete with historical descriptions of this or that street, building, restaurant, or café, and how they played in Nezval’s life— from his days as a poor, hungry university student to his rise as a literary figure—as well as brief sketches of writers and artists important to him. As he describes it, Prague takes on a multiform, resonant charge, socially proscribed but personally invented.

After Nezval, others continued to revive the legacy of the flâneur as they conceived it. A decade on after World War II, the Situationists’ dérive (their drift through the city) provoked theoretical remarks on a new context: psychogeography, a term they coined and which, as things go, now appears as a sub-discipline of geography. Heightening the stakes for Nezval, though, are two pivotal events that bring an often-feverish poise to his writing: the immanence of World War II and the fate of the Surrealist Group.

The former stems from the September 30, 1938 signing of the Munich Agreement, by which England and France ceded to Nazi Germany the Sudetenland, then part of Czechoslovakia—a Hail Mary to delay the onset of war that Nezval knew would fail; the only question was when. Anxiety percolates through the book, sharpening its tempered edge. The planes that fly above Prague presage the battle to come. The country arms only to fall months later, betrayed by its allies.

The latter involves Nezval’s split with the Surrealist Group, the repercussions of which followed him and now cannot help but appear as subtext to the book’s exuberant, elegiac tone. The cause of the split was partly political: Nezval supported the USSR, despite the terror Stalin unleashed on his opponents. The majority in the group criticized Stalin’s hunger for victims, which included leading Russian poets and artists, Communist revolutionaries, and uncounted allies or bystanders. Most were put on trial, given sentences, exiled to the Gulag, or executed. There was no possibility of rapprochement.

Nezval’s recognition that only the USSR could mount a force equal to that of Nazi Germany and wage war against it to victory was true enough in retrospect. The other members of the group—whom, oddly, Nezval never names—re-organized and continued on. Perhaps for emotional balance, Nezval recounts his friendship with André Breton and Paul Éluard: the mutual esteem they held for each other, several experiences they shared in Prague, and something of their rich collaborations. A somewhat specious critique of psychic automatism follows, which allows Nezval to clarify how he would write from then on (faced with the immanence of war, cultivating the absence of intention was not something he prized). Be that as it may, when Nezval leaves his apartment, he enters a realm that he creates: the city as his avatar, with chance their conductor.

A Prague Flâneur lives up to its title in a fraught historical moment through which Nezval sought a way to live without sidelining in his writing the inspiration Prague gave him and that he now gives the reader: walking through it, loving and fighting in it, playing out his days and nights with a keen sense of what makes it all unique, even funny (a satirical escapade with an escaped crab its capstone).

This translation, finely done by Jed Slast, is of the rare, unexpurgated first edition with photographs by Nezval, which hit the streets in the fall of 1938, coincident with the signing of the Munich Agreement. Given the consequences of that agreement and the Nazi conquest soon to come, Nezval had the book pulled from its bookstores so that he could delete passages that might compromise him with Nazi authorities, including his celebration of Stalin and his cutting portrait of Hitler as a young agitator of the lumpenproletariat in seedy Berlin beerhalls. An appendix carries that content and the edits Nezval made.

Characteristically, Nezval ends the book with a brief paragraph that recalls the narrative’s through line. It has a solitary atemporal quality—not yet mythic, but almost so. Place it as the first paragraph in the book and it works just as well. Is it an ending or a beginning? For Nezval, it could be both:

Oh Prague, I turn you in my fingers like an amethyst. But no. I just walk, and I see in the magical mirror of dusty crystal that is Prague the animated expression of someone who is fated to find himself and to wander, to find himself through wandering. 

 

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

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Clean

Alia Trabucco Zerán
Translated by Sophie Hughes
Riverhead Books ($29)

by Dimitris Passas

It all begins with a laconic advertisement in the newspaper: “Housemaid wanted, presentable, full time.” Thus, Estela Garcia, a young woman from a rural community populated by a largely underprivileged population in the southern Chilean island of Chiloe, comes to the big city of Santiago to become the housemaid of an upper-crust household. Estela’s employers (only referred to by her as señor and señora) and their young daughter Julia, are the sole actors in this claustrophobic environment of class discrimination, cultural distinctions, and the struggle to endure a dreary life in which monotony quenches any form of meaning and distorts one’s sense of time and reality.

In her second novel, Alia Trabucco Zerán revisits themes that dominated her first work, The Remainder, which dealt with the residues left in Chilean society by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. In Clean, the strictly domestic setting expels everything that takes place outside the house where Estela works as a cleaner, servant, and nanny. Trabucco Zerán offers as a backdrop Chile’s Estallido Social—the riots that erupted in the winter of 2019 after the sudden increase in the metro fare—yet the totality of her tale unfolds inside the house where Estela works.

The story starts with Estela being arrested for suspicion of foul play in Julia’s death. Sitting behind one-way glass, Estela narrates directly to silent interrogators,  determined to tell her own story. She often interjects comments directed to all those who may hear her—which of course includes us, the readers—urging them to keep notes of seemingly trivial details that are destined to play a major role in the story to come. As she says: “you have to skirt around the edge before getting to the heart of the story.”

Clean is not a typical domestic suspense novel, however; its prose blends the humdrum of Estela’s quotidian existence with her breakout insights and shrewd observations regarding universal, diachronic questions. As our narrator says, “This is a long story, my friends, . . . It’s a story born of a centuries-old tiredness and questions that presume too much.” Estela knows that she will never become a part of society’s upper echelons. Her wealthy employers’ thinly veiled hostility and distrust render her an outsider, bound to remain a stranger as long as she stays in the job. But she never leaves, and she voices the reason in the most austere and accurate of ways: “I never stopped believing I would leave that house, but routine is treacherous; the repetition of the same rituals . . . each one an attempt to gain mastery over time.”

One of the most striking elements of Clean is the way Trabucco Zerán sketches the contours of her youngest character. Julia is headstrong and inflexible, and her reactions to various emotional stimuli suggest that perhaps she should be visiting a specialist. However, her doctor father rejects this idea and keeps her as close as possible to teach her only what he deems necessary. As Estela’s crystalline narration illuminates the hidden dysfunctions and corrupt relationship dynamics in the family, it becomes evident that Julia’s detached parents and unloving upbringing have traumatized her from a very early age.

Sophie Hughes, who also translated The Remainder, again delivers Trabucco Zerán’s prose into English with skill and precision. While its distinctive mood may alienate genre-oriented readers, Clean is a slim but sparkling novel that will grab the attention of those who value literature that speaks truth to power.

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

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Autobiography of a Book

Glenn Ingersoll
AC Books ($24)

by Mike Bove

How does a book become a book? Do authors have actual creative agency, or are they instruments of unseen forces, translators of an unspoken language? These questions are the beating heart of Glenn Ingersoll’s Autobiography of a Book, an inventive, fun, and wildly philosophical reading experience.

In the Romantic era, artists and writers rediscovered an ancient musical instrument played by invisible currents: the Aeolian harp. Named for the Greek god of wind, it’s essentially a set of strings fixed to a long hollow box placed before an open window or on a flat surface outdoors; the strings convert wind energy into sound, haunting and ethereal. The Romantics loved the Aeolian harp as a metaphor for how the artist is simply a tool of nature, a way for natural forces to make themselves known.

Autobiography of a Book begins with a question followed immediately by an answer: “When does life begin? Life begins with an utterance. A word.” It is not the first nor the last question the book asks its reader, and gradually it becomes clear that Book itself, the protagonist and narrative voice, is asking because it really wants to know: What does it mean to exist, and how is life lived? “When did you know you existed? Does a cat know it exists? Does an elephant? What about a monk or a nun?”

This investigation of existence is often playful, framed with disarming humor and wit. It might be tempting to dismiss Book’s continual self-questioning as naive navel-gazing, but to do so would be to miss Ingersoll’s ability to echo the unconscious questioning that takes place in the human mind at any given moment. We are constantly at play with questions, seeking answers we may never get: How did I get here, what do I do next, what am I for? Book’s voice pivots from sarcasm to humility and authority and back again, proclaiming, “Reality is whatever I say it is.” We can’t deny that in so many ways our reality is a construct of our bouncy, confused minds, constantly filtering stimuli and making sounds out of the breeze.

Fun isn’t always part of the process of being. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, as Book freely admits: “I don’t want to be written right now. If you are reading me, that’s okay, I guess. You are just looking. But being written—it feels too much. It feels as though I am being wrenched from the spiritual to the . . . to the mortal.” One of Ingersoll’s primary narrative devices is Book’s vacillation. In one section, Book might be resentful of the reader, of being thrust into existence; in the next, Book might fawn over the reader’s benevolence: “it is only due to your unexpected mercy, it is only because of your infinite compassion, the grace you grant with a blink of your eye. It is for you I live. Without you I am nothing. Nothing!”

The visual design of the book also deserves attention. Autobiography of a Book begins with bright white type on black pages that slowly lighten to gray, mirroring the darkness of non-existence from which Book gradually emerges. About halfway through, the pages are light enough to warrant a shift from white type to black. Appropriately enough, Book’s first works in black type are “I am alive.” From here the pages continue to lighten, and by the time the book concludes, they are fully white, signaling Book’s achievement of existence, total and complete.

Just as the Romantics saw themselves as Aeolian harps, translating the vibrations of nature into poems and paintings, so too does Ingersoll harness the invisible forces residing within an author. The result is Book, who cajoles the reader into offering it life—for just as music needs a listener to hear it, so too does Book need a reader to read it. With Autobiography of a Book, Ingersoll invites the reader into a truly collaborative thought exercise and makes it both fulfilling and fun.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Here, There and Nowhere

Valery Oisteanu
Collages by Ruth Oisteanu
Spuyten Duyvil ($30)

by Bill Wolak

Valery Oisteanu’s Here, There and Nowhere depicts a life savored intensely in the moment—one that risks everything with every single breath. As Oisteanu states in the collection’s foreword, “My poems are spontaneous recollections of traumatic events, fragments of forgotten dreams, nebulous states of mind, illogical episodes and subliminal sequences of ecstasy and redemption.” These poems offer somnambulant marathons into the unconscious, trances that reach out like embraces of moonlight, sporadic erotic wildfires, and of course, a truckload of unabashed surrealistic provocations.

Like César Vallejo, Oisteanu offers a poetry of committed enactment rather than intellectual contemplation. Take “The Revolutionary Cultural Exchange”:

Struggle is a state off mind, awakened consciousness
Defend your rights, resist, persist, walk to the edge of life and death
The military invaders will hang themselves with tools of suppression
Freedom continues to grow in the harshest terrain
As clenched fists and open brave hearts march on

Clearly, Oisteanu isn’t waiting around for either the revolution or the apocalypse. He advocates a more active approach, as he states in “We March”:

We march and we march some more
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We march for the end of wars and for better human rights
We march in the polluted streets and demand clean water
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And we march for the women trafficked abroad
And for the workers dying at work
We march in our sleep
We march all night
We march ’til we die.

Extending his vision to all corners of the globe, Oisteanu’s poems about the war in Ukraine are exceptionally moving, and his “Navalny Blues” is simply heartbreaking. But just as he protests the current state of contemptible affairs, Oisteanu is also hopeful about the future. Love is where he grounds that hope, and in fact, Here, There and Nowhere is dedicated to his fifty-year relationship with his wife Ruth (who provides twelve color collages). “My Wife Ruth” contains extraordinary descriptions—“Her breasts move counter-clockwise to each other / . . . / Her hands create the secret greenhouse / Her songs make the flowers sway and shiver”—and praise of erotic love permeates the book:

Sweat on sweat, the lovely lover chanting improvisations;
these love chants remain suspended in the air.
No one is giving up their fantasies,
no one records their salty dreams.

There is always something stunning, surprising, or enigmatic in an Oisteanu poem. Sometimes it’s a startling title (“Landscape of Unfinished Dream,” “The Subway in the Sky,” “Rent My Shadow”); sometimes it’s an astonishing first line (“This is a poem inside a poem”; “Welcome to the end of the mind”; “No more sleeping on the roof of imagination”). As a surrealist, he is no stranger to the marvelous, and his poems abound in striking linguistic transformations. Consider what he does with the image of trees in “The Peace Enigma of Stillness”:

Herds of trees in the distance
Wailing below a dark undertow
Some fall toward the empty sky
Burning with the speed of an invasion
How hard they try to become birds

Perhaps Oisteanu himself best describes what his poetry aims for in “Madness Unlocked”:

We revolutionize clouds from within,
we purge ourselves of sentimentalism,
of avant-clones, of bourgeois culture.
No more brainwash of hip academia
back to the roots of blues and jazz.

What else, after all, should poetry do in the face of disasters of the changing climate, horrors of ever-widening wars, and the stubborn persistence of worldwide pandemics, but “save the holy madness of Life”?

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Dead Weight

Essays on Hunger and Harm

Emmeline Clein
Knopf ($30)

by Olivia Q. Pintair

When Emmeline Clein began writing her debut essay collection, Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, she originally planned to document female hysteria. Her subjects would be fictional and non-fictional women branded with that diagnosis by a misogynistic culture that pathologizes and fetishizes the pain it produces—women hallucinating into their wallpaper, sobbing in hospital hallways, and wasting away in the folds of Y2K tabloids. Her focus shifted, though, as Clein has said in interviews, when she realized how many of the figures she was researching shared struggles with disordered eating. As Clein began “to harmonize with a ghost choir” that includes medieval anorexic saints, anonymous Tumblr users, Ottessa Moshfegh protagonists, Simone Weil, Cass Elliot, Karen Carpenter, and many of us readers, the book transformed into an attempt to frame disordered eating within the context of the systems and industries that profit from it.

Tracing the cultural and medical histories of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and orthorexia, Dead Weight undoes several tricks of the light. Through investigative reporting, criticism, and prose, Clein reveals that disordered eating is not a solipsistic malady; rather, it is an integral weapon of a racist, classist, and misogynistic society that depends upon the age-old lie that sick and sad young women are crazy, unreliable narrators. To undo that lie’s prismatic refractions, Clein shows us how common and culturally incentivized disordered eating is. Meditating on the casual gore of modern womanhood, she excavates the cultural, economic, and political underbellies of an epidemic wrought by and for a capitalist world. The result is a manifesto against “dissociative feminism” and the “lethal culture” that Western beauty standards empower.

Across Dead Weight’s thirteen essays, Clein navigates the rabbit holes of Reddit feminism, the aughts-era Tumblr-verse, diagnostic hierarchies, the eating disorder recovery industry, modern wellness culture, Ozempic’s arrival to mass markets, and the unsettling allure of bimboism. Her voice is sharp and familiar, moored to a sense of solidarity with the people living and dying along the faultlines she documents. In most autobiographical accounts of eating disorders, Clein writes, “the only way to survive seems to be renouncing your suffering sisters . . . I’m trying to find out what might happen if we blame someone other than each other and ourselves for a change.”

Clein quickly dispels any expectations for the nostalgic and bone-laden accounts of eating disorders that readers may be used to. Instead, she recasts the often isolating struggle as a collective one. In one essay, Clein explores how phases of capitalism mirror disordered eating patterns:

If bulimia was the eating disorder of Reaganomics and millennial girlbossery, and anorexia was the eating disorder of aughts-era austerity, [injectable weight loss] drugs might foster an eating disorder for a new age of technocapitalism, wherein we try to recast hunger as just another inconvenience we can eliminate with an app.

Elsewhere, Clein traces the normalization of eating disorders in a culture of ubiquitous commodification. “Eating disorders are good for capital,” reads one essay, which traces “the chain of money that leads from eating disorder treatment centers, weight loss companies, CBT companies, and pharmaceutical companies back to the same pool of investment capital.”

As Clein probes statistics and anecdotes, it becomes clear that disordered eating is not a mark of girlish insanity or vapid self-interest, but an apparatus of late capitalism. Women and femmes are peddled a beauty standard that remains a thinly veiled prerequisite for financial and social success, then are pathologized for trying to reach it. “Heroin chic is back,” The New York Post announced in 2022—Ozempic makes it easy now. As most anyone on the internet could attest, social media algorithms incentivize conformity and drain our energy to rebel. We seem to lose something when we follow their rules—and also when we don’t.

“I’m trying to be honest here: I’ve always wanted to live the kind of life that ends up in a story,” Clein writes, leveling with her audience. The women who starve themselves in books or on screen, she acknowledges, are often main characters, and maybe that is what the supposed trade-off is: Submit to the role, and you could be the heroine. But as Clein continually reminds us, those stories “are fiction,” repeated enough that they have become not only a cliché but also a narrative propping up several multi-billion-dollar industries and a conglomerate of mental illnesses with one of the highest collective death rates in the world.

For Clein, writing Dead Weight was an effort to humanize suffering people who, like the Victorian women drowning in white dresses in 19th century British and American literature, are usually romanticized in media but dismissed in real life. Like Simone Weil, Clein understands the visceral way in which the question of how or whether to eat is also a question of how or whether to be; the Self, as an experience and as an imagined ideal, is her primary interest. Early on in the book, she asks readers to picture the archetype of the “skinny, sexy, sad girl” as an ideal self that floats out at sea, “purring false promises from just over the horizon line”; she then points out that like those literary women whose misogyny-induced deaths are so predictably written as romantic inevitabilities, this archetype didn’t swim out to sea of her own accord. “Someone stranded her at the vanishing point . . .” Clein writes, “and they don’t want us to reach her because then we might save her, convince her she’s been lied to like the rest of us.”

Advancing toward the menacing clarity of that realization like a chess player, Clein refuses to talk down to her readers or underestimate their agency. She is interested in a political future beyond both the commodification of pain and the avoidance of it. “I have a question for bimbos and dissociated girls alike,” she writes in the collection’s coda. “How are we shaping our bodies and behaviors to become desirable to the most powerful, according to their value system?”

As Clein contextualizes her subject matter within existential questions about selfhood and solidarity, Dead Weight becomes relevant not only to those suffering from eating disorders, but to anyone trying to remain feeling and alive in a capitalist world that commodifies selfhood at the chaotic clip of a panopticonic auctioneer. The Self, Clein posits, is not an asset that should either escalate in perpetuity or submit to disappearance, but a synthesis of experience, alive insofar as it risks its own imagined stasis toward relationship and connection. Undermining narratives of our own isolation and insanity could destabilize industries that profit from them, Clein argues. “We don’t have to be solo heroines on lonely journeys; we can also be sisters and friends, side characters in someone else’s story . . . We can, maybe, even be the person who changes it.”

At the end of the book’s penultimate essay, Clein returns to consider the roots of her own suffering from disordered eating:

I watch my adolescent body get thrown like a pebble into a pond. The blame ripples out, past my therapist, another woman floating on her back in the water, into green fields of money and men. I see magazines filled with waifish models and . . . the Instagram ads . . .  offering me mental health quizzes and meditation for women apps and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix show and diet tea. I see the eating disorder memes and weight loss progress Instagram accounts and slim, smiling influencers, and wonder how I could have ended up anywhere but at the bottom of the lake.

“It can be politically mobilizing to feel the weight of that pain,” Clein said in a conversation with Rayne Fisher-Quann published in Nylon; “it makes me want to be alive in order to try to change it in what little ways I can so that maybe some younger girl doesn’t have to feel this bad.” Ultimately, Dead Weight is an offering born of Clein’s commitment to doing that—to envisioning a world in which girlhood isn’t a minefield of diet trends, where genuine human connection renders dissociation unnecessary, and where bodies are land and not property. In this world, Clein dreams, the lake might not be a place where people drown or disappear, but an expanse where we might find each other. This is a world she can see, she promises—not over a horizon line, but somewhere closer.

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

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

YOU

Rosa Alcalá
Coffee House Press ($17.95)

by Christopher Luna

Rosa Alcalá’s fourth poetry collection is a thrilling masterpiece filled with prose poems that challenge and disturb as they dig deep into the terrors that women face. Throughout, readers are also invited to contemplate the complexities of voice and perspective in literature. 

An introductory piece outlines where fear begins for women and girls and prepares readers for the unconventional approach of the text. Alcalá makes an important decision to rely upon the pronoun “you” to tell her story. At first it may seem that this allows her to remain one step removed from the painful memories she shares; “Isn’t the second person a form of hiding?” Alcalá asks. But the poems that follow fully explore the slippery magic of the pronoun “you”—how it can alternate between standing in for the reader, the author, and an ever-shifting cast of characters.

Alcalá tells us from the start that “I was trying to write a book about my mother,” but “that in the absence of her I mothered myself all over again with worry, / which is how I mother.” In this light, the “you” in every poem has the potential to be the poet, her mother, her daughter, another woman, or even womanhood itself, and sometimes more than one of these at the same time. Alcalá seeks to bear witness to the violence committed against women, but “being my own witness was itself a risk. How can / I see events unfolding when the body is completely symptomatic / of other bodies, including / its own.” She continues:

The problem with memory is that only words can re-create it for others.

Each word its own past and desire
for a future.

Each word, each sentence, a fragment. 

And how do you untangle from the telling the speaker’s motives? 

Later in the book, in “A Girl Like You,” the poet uses the second person to address both herself and a person she wrote about for her first real assignment as a journalist: a thirteen-year-old girl “whose tender body was discovered next to the Cuban bodega where your mother would send you for bread.” In the second half of the poem, the dead girl talks back, taking Alcalá to task for using the tragedy to further her career:

You want to know who did it, how it could have happened to me and not you. You want to weave it into a cross to protect the door to your daughter’s room. Or worse, for a poem. . . .  Was your first intention to make my murder elegiac? Remember when you couldn’t pronounce that word correctly, when others saw you as you were, a girl who knew so little but elbowed herself to the front to be heard. 

Nearly every poem contains horrific gut punches as well as sentences of such sublime beauty that you may temporarily forget their disturbing subject matter. Alcalá uses her fear as a map, seeking “narrative logic to order the / mess of memory” while never losing her faith in language’s potential to express the ineffable and reveal the truth about our lives. In this bold and innovative work, she has achieved her stated goal to “leave my daughter this book as manual, as heirloom; like my mother’s wedding dress in the unreachable part of my closet, both glamorous / /and warning.” Charles Olson once proclaimed that poems are “high energy constructs”; Alcalá’s YOU contains writing so powerful it may cause your heart to combust.  

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

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance

Diana Oropeza
Future Tense Books ($12)

by Eric Bies

In 2014, Semiotext(e) published a short posthumous work by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, an effort to circumscribe an entire universe of artistic loss in eighty breathless pages. That book, The Missing Pieces, does its darnedest, encompassing some five hundred items, from incinerated manuscripts and shredded letters to unfinished poems and vanished papyri. It’s the kind of book that will make one wonder whether, finally, more has been lost than found—whether, like the unfinished trilogy of Gogol’s Dead Souls, more shall remain destined to persist in the realm of ideas than ever come to exist.

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance, a beguiling new book by Diana Oropeza, is similarly slim, but it’s the opposite of breathless. With plenty of white space to spare, it’s a book to linger over, its relaxed arrangement calling to mind a line from Borges regarding The Book of Imaginary Beings: “Our wish would be that the curious dip into it from time to time in much the way one visits the changing forms revealed by a kaleidoscope.”

Indeed, Borges presides as a kind of patron saint over Oropeza’s book as a whole; a quotation from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a story that exemplifies the Argentine maestro’s penchant for blurring the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, serves as an epigraph. In the same way that Borges counterfeited entire bibliographies, crafting fragments from old books that never really existed while never allowing the reader to doubt his belief in their reality, Oropeza has devised a series of vanishings that might as well have happened. Some of her sixty-odd pieces of nanofiction strain while others shoot right past the limits of credulity, bleeding into surrealism here and magical realism there, but each piece’s tone is assured, sincere if not solemn.

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance is fun-loving enough to describe illusionist David Copperfield disappearing the Statue of Liberty (and obvious enough, at times, to incorporate such tired territory as the Bermuda Triangle), but at its deepest points, Oropeza’s half-page inventions are earnest invitations to bear witness to everything that slips away. Reading them might not produce laughter or tears outright, but the book’s valences—mourning, absurdity, liberation—are easy enough to detect.

Flash fiction lives and dies by a fire that has mere seconds to light up a space, so it would be a mistake to jump into this book expecting Chekhov. But the parables of Kafka, the riddles of W. S. Merwin, the microcosmic visions of Lydia Davis—these are Oropeza’s touchstones, and when she’s good, she’s as good as any of them. No one sentence does her associative and often syntactically surprising style justice, but a line like “I found myself speaking inside a poem of Akbar’s, speaking of an atomized absence, speaking of ants carrying home the names of new colors” can give you an idea. Many of Orozepa’s scenarios are so memorable, so exacting, so self-contained, it’s a wonder the author managed to pin them down at all: “As it is told, the ghost had bitten a child on the hand. The following day, the child shocked everyone by suddenly playing the piano like a master.”

That Oropeza has a flair for economy doesn’t mean the work is slight. A piece titled “Translation,” for example, all but demands to be read three times in a row. This is how it opens:

In Spanish, “ojos” are “eyes,” but my dad hears the word “ice,” which is the English word for “hielo,” which is pronounced like “yellow.” The word for yellow in Spanish is “amarillo,” which is also the name of a place in Texas, nearly 500 miles from the Mexican border. Which translates to a seven-hour drive from home, which is actually shorter than my father’s workday. At his job, he translates for the housekeepers who often don’t speak English so they often don’t speak to anyone except my father, except to say “housekeeping” before they knock on the door and “es clean,” to let the front desk know the room es clean. The hotel staff think it’s an accent causing the mispronunciation of “is” but actually “es” is Spanish for “is,” so the women are not wrong, they are translating.

Perhaps some things will always be lost in translation. Meanwhile, An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance sheds new light on loss, clarifying fresh facets of our prismatic reality even as it complicates old ones. Orozepa’s signal debut can be read in an afternoon, but it will compel you to remain in its orbit.

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

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

The Third Realm

Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translated by Martin Aitken
Penguin Press ($32)

by Sam Tiratto

In Sigrid Undset’s historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, the titular character has an apocalyptic vision while prostrate on the cold stone floor of a cathedral: Saint Olaf himself bursts forth from his shrine and raises an army of the dead to go greet the Lord in prayer; the skeletons don their original muscle and flesh and follow in Olaf’s “blood-stained footsteps” for their new and eternal life. Wracked by guilt and the exhaustion of motherhood, Kristin beseeches Saint Olaf to pray for her.

One hundred years after the publication of Undset’s famed trilogy, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the origins and the possible effects of such a vision in his latest novel, The Third Realm. The book continues the variegated story of a mysterious celestial event in modern-day Norway set forth in his two previous novels: The Morning Star ends as the mystery arrives, its story focused on the generally unconnected lives of nine ordinary Norwegians; The Wolves of Eternity digs into semi-autobiography as a young man in Cold War-era Norway uncovers a family secret that involves a Russian woman whose mother fell in love with a Norwegian man. The trumpet sounds at the end of Wolves by placing us back in the present, in awe of the frightful event that is only just beginning.

As in the medieval world of Kristin Lavransdatter, evil stalks the land in The Third Realm. The devil, black metal, nihilism, and even the unstable inner self are recurring themes as the nine characters grapple with swiftly eroding senses of security in an increasingly frightening world. Determined readers of the two preceding books may start to find payoff when some of the characters posit that the bizarre shifts in their lives—accidents, medical miracles, horrifying news stories—may be related to the celestial event. Jarle, a brain researcher obsessed with the inner lives of the comatose, seeks meaning beyond mere coincidence when he notices inexplicable electrical signals from a “brain dead” patient. So too does the detective piecing together the mystery of a grisly murder first witnessed in The Morning Star. Could the celestial event have anything to do with it? Other characters laugh at the superstition, and some are gripped by fear; one, a minister, doubts her own faith. But all are unsettled.

Knausgaard is well known for his digressive style, but unlike the six-volume autobiographical My Struggle series, where philosophical tangents come from the author directly, here his extensive references come through his characters. As the series deepens this has the effect of making the characters feel less distinct and more like varying personas of one another, or perhaps different versions of Knausgaard himself. It is fitting that one of them, Jarle, should spend a few moments musing on Pessoa, “that champion of the meaningless”—like Pessoa’s heteronyms, Knausgaard’s fractal personalities reveal more about each other the further inward into themselves they look. 

The Third Realm does spend more time with the characters’ spouses and friends, and the unnamed Norwegian town in which the novels are set is starting to feel like a symbiotic web, a neural network; each new development in the characters’ lives sends ripples through the community of the unknown. Like Undset’s Kristin, each character is fighting doggedly to maintain a grip on themselves in the face of the alienation of society—as well as the chilling realization that Satan may really, truly wander Norway’s fjords and fells. The smell of sulfur lingers.

Knausgaard invites patience and contemplation in The Third Realm, its title itself an allusion to one character’s cosmology of humans’ relationship with the divine. The book may be to some a meditation, to others a dissertation, and to others still a digression. Where The Wolves of Eternity felt laser-focused on revelations about the nature of consciousness—replete with a full-length essay concerning death and the Russian cosmist Nikolai Fyodorov—this book seems to falter (or, perhaps more generously, replies with doubt) when it is asked to provide a clear philosophy. At times some characters feel perilously close to figuring it all out before getting distracted or second-guessing themselves. This dallying makes for poor suspense, but it forces the reader to return to the difficult act of contemplation. Rather than Saint Olaf’s dead, we may be greeted with Hamlet’s father—a supernatural mystery still, but one concerned more urgently with matters of the living than those of the dead.

The Third Realm encourages readers to set aside the explanations they had in mind for the previous installments’ events and to consider new ones. The return of the dead is constantly revisited as a theme, but it passes through the perspectives of the novel’s many characters and the limited information they are given. We suspect that the dead will rise, but will it be through the return of Jesus? The rise of Satan? The mythology of Saint Olaf? The dead returning is the stuff of nightmares, but wouldn’t it also make life triumphant? Knausgaard takes a treacherous step forward into the world unpierced by human thought. We have no choice but to follow.

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

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Poems 2016-2024

J.H. Prynne
Bloodaxe Books ($50)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Most poets deliver the proverbial “brick” of a collected works only in their final years, or else leave it to be delivered posthumously by others. Not J.H. Prynne. Since his 300-page 1982 gathering Poems, which collected all he felt worth preserving at the time, Prynne has delivered three subsequent “bricks”: 1999, 2005, and 2015, the last of which approached 700 pages. Now at eighty-eight years old, he’s added the equally colossal addendum Poems: 2016-2024. It is a magnificent, startling output during what might be the poet’s closing years of writing life.

This volume gathers thirty-six collections ranging in length from relatively brief sequences of a dozen or so pages up to the full-length Of Better Scrap (Face Press, 2019). Across this period the small yet inventive Face Press in Cambridge, England has been Prynne’s faithful publisher, responsible for originally publishing twenty-four of these titles, many of which were slim chapbooks printed on fine paper with care given to best represent the work as physical document. While these qualities are impossible to completely carry over to a larger collection, some attention has been afforded to details of the original publications. For instance, poems from Dune Quail Eggs (Face Press, 2021) appear in a larger print, centered upon the page, with extra spacing between individual words, likely similar to their chapbook appearance:

Green   foist    crust   mound
                    met
drain     plume   feast    bride
                    eye
nails    thumb    avoid    trail
                    bay
ghost    braid   prune    force
                    toy

Other variances in font and size, or decorative section numbering, have been likewise carried across with a few of the collections, along with an accompanying image from the original versions here and there. For those new to Prynne’s work, this choice offers some awareness of the poet’s initial conception.

Prynne’s penchant for pushing towards the edges of language—often to an opaque abstraction—rarely offers any familiar foothold for readers expecting common levels of coherence, as in “Or But Invaded”:

other-worldly. Even surly toasted double joint dent
scented bell air surfactant lizard, tolerant pink win
arrant count radiant immunise. Into prize, instead
fast ahead confuse at the window endowed likewise
twist, then vaporise.

This might lead unfamiliar readers to charge that Prynne sets one word after another according to some arbitrary ordering. Yet Prynne wagers that there’s depth worth exploring in “the theme of arbitrariness.” In his talk “Stars, tigers and the shape of words,” which he delivered in 1992 at Birkbeck College, London, Prynne explained:

Briefly stated, the theme of arbitrariness concerns the nature of the relation between the sense or meaning of a linguistic utterance (spoken or written) and the forms of its expression or performance. If a language is considered as an evolved set of signs or codes, do the items of its production (words, sentences, speech-sounds) bear any distinct and significant individual relation to meaning or idea; or does the relation of message to medium make sense only within the context of the system, and not at the level of individual items?  

Certainly, in a poem such as “Or But Invaded,” punctuation and sentence structure remain intact even as the individual words are often estranged from general semantics—yet the potential meaning of each word has been added to, enlarged. Associations emerge from out of the possibly arbitrary order; “tolerant pink win” might be the dawn or dusk hour at which “air surfactant lizard” emerges from their lair. It’s difficult not to associate some intention, even if exact elements remain murky.

On rare occasion, Prynne drops in an uncharacteristic acknowledgement of a poem’s circumstances, indicating, for example, by the note “34,000 ft.” that a poem was written while traveling on an airliner, perhaps on a flight to or from China as is his wont. There are also what might be taken as outright cheeky moves, like the epigraph for Memory Working: Impromptus: “Always have a point in mind / when you resolve a scale line” is attributed by citation to Pianogroove, an online piano school with the motto “the world’s best piano teachers—at your fingertips.”

In some poems, Prynne hits a decidedly different tonal note: “To catch slant sunlight as cat prowling, in earth warming from cold in browning tints, twigs in fashion with new glints to show upswelled. Light wind in morning, to activate a day aloud, ahead already remembered, chill now but soon declared and voluntary.” Such clearly descriptive lines of beauty are reminiscent more of a passage from Emily Dickinson’s Letters than what’s expected from Prynne. In addition, there are the koan-like “Travellers’ Tales” (note the plural possessive) at the end of Memory Working, which present riddling allegories explicitly set in a natural setting, à la fairy tales.  

Then there is the hilarity of Snooty Tipoffs (Face Press, 2021) with jagged rhymes (“Music in the ice-box, music by the sea, / music at the rice-bowl, for you as well as me”) found throughout its five sections, in each of fifty-six parts except for the final section, which ends on:

      57
For you I’d do
    the whole thing through
below, above
    for now, for love.

The expanse of Prynne’s output during these last eight years is astounding. Poems: 2016-2024 shows an unparalleled poet holding forth at the height of his powers, from the sheer jubilance of titles (such as Passing Grass Parnassus (Face Press, 2020), with its epigram “Sing different songs on different mountains”) to the final sentence of “Penance at Cost” from Foremost Wayleave (Face Press, 2023):

Compunction ructions burnous turnabout riotous break 
pressure gauge caramel kerbside far and wide intertidal angled 
stairway apple crumble cinnamon evenly cloven down to earth.

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

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

I Don’t Want to Be Understood

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Alice James Books ($24.95)

by Oscar Ivins

In Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s collection I Don’t Want to Be Understood, anti-trans sentiment is both structural and structuring; the atmospheric quality of transphobia affects what and how the poems’ speaker dreams, dreads, desires. A hauntingly intimate portrait spanning a life from childhood to today, the collection is deeply attuned to both the harsh and harmonious pitches that accompany experiences of transition in a society that is hostile to trans happiness. 

The collection is inwardly panoramic. As the speaker, “a light in the form of a girl,” travels through courthouses, airports, and a menswear outlet in Hollywood, we are beamed into the neglected—and sometimes purposefully avoided—corners of her mind. 

The opening poem, “Airport Ritual,” offers a science fiction twist on the anxiety-riddled experience of going through airport security while transgender. An epigraph stating “The following is a true story” conjures the paradox of security scans: Your body is intimately scrutinized while you’re told it’s not personal. “An anomaly is spotted. A woman is taken aside.” Then a TSA agent informs the traveler that she will need to touch her. When the traveler shares that she is transgender—“unsure if she means this an a warning or an apology”—the poem shifts register into absurdism: “the thing in her pants that set the sensors off suddenly expands” and keeps expanding to fill the terminal, the airport, the city of Irvine, until the military is called in. 

By invoking facticity before bursting into the mythic, Espinoza teases and subverts cisgender expectations of what a trans narrative should do. The poem’s epigraph signals a common complaint made by trans people about trans literature: As transgender writers gain relative prominence, often the books that sell the best are the ones that cater to a cisgender audience. Whether that means work that flattens transition into an “it gets better” narrative or work that is overly expository to the point of redundancy, it is a reality of the publishing industry: Sometimes the only way to achieve a modicum of financial success is to fit one’s work into a preexisting box, one constructed by the institutions of cisness. 

Reading “Airport Ritual” as a trans person, I feel deeply the truthfulness of this story—the dread and anxiety that arise from this kind of interface with the state. In the poem, while pundits discuss the benefits of forcing trans people into detention facilities, 

            The woman at the center of the plasma or whatever-the-fuck-it-is
            just wants someone to say one thing to her
            that doesn’t feel like kite string wrapped around an open wound
            in a warm, strong wind. But it doesn’t happen.

Through this play between literalness and absurdism, Espinoza flips the cultural script that says trans people are delusional and transition is science fiction, instead casting the cisgender state as the true site of hysteria. While cis society turns up the dial on fascism, the woman at the center of the poem is simply trying to live. 

One of the most compelling aspects of the collection is the way it portrays transition as transcendently positive at the same time as it is traumatizing. A common trope of trans cultural production is the idea of transition as linear. In this formation, one’s life before transition is rife with confusion and anguish but through transitioning the pain of daily existence is relieved; one becomes stronger, life becomes better. This is not untrue, and Espinoza’s work highlights how transitioning is a way of getting off autopilot and pursuing embodiment on one’s own terms. In “The Present,” Espinoza describes the dissociation of closeted life:

For a lifetime, sensation was
a single thread
in my wardrobe of pain.

It is a metaphor more easily grasped in the reverse: pain as a single thread in the wardrobe of sensation. Through this inversion Espinoza deftly shows how dysphoria can warp and narrow experience and lead to self-alienation. As the poems in this collection express, to transition is to leap into feeling more.

Yet as Espinoza’s speaker becomes more connected to herself and to her life, she also registers the pain that has surrounded her—she can no longer dissociate through it. Espinoza’s attention to the family as a site of violence is particularly affecting. In “To My Parents,” she writes, “I was the mantle above the fireplace, the one that held our portrait. // I was the frame around the photograph, but not the photograph.” Being a closeted trans person can feel like being the one holding it all together while living as a background fixture in your own life. The speaker’s religiously inflected childhood trauma, her youth spent hiding and self-numbing, shape the psychic landscape years after she has left home, come out, and her mother’s gotten a “trans ally tattoo.” In this way, transition can make life feel harder when you are experiencing the pain your mind has protected you from—as Espinoza writes in the resplendent “Return to Light,” trauma “reminds you to forget its presence.” I Don’t Want to Be Understood posits that through this remembering and daily survival, we can do more than find ourselves: If we are lucky, we can create ourselves.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025