Book Review

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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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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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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Thank You for Staying with Me

Bailey Gaylin Moore
University of Nebraska Press ($21.95)

by Nick Hilbourn

An essay collection both poignant and plainspoken, Bailey Gaylin Moore’s Thank You for Staying with Me is concerned with forgetfulness: how she is pushed to forget and re-remember traumatic events in her past.  As Moore writes in a foreword: “For a long time, I wished I had possessed some kind of step-by-step how-to guide for Being and navigating this world, but I guess the point of all this existential dogshit is to make our own blueprints.” This “blueprint” motif carries over into several chapters with titles drawn from instruction manuals (“How to Hold a Baby,” “How to Be a Daughter,” etc.), however Moore’s instructions are not guidance for the reader but rather a record of her method of detangling, bit-by-bit, a discombobulated knot of time—one that opens to reveal the absence at its center, which the author claims and renames on her own terms.

“Count The Beats” elaborates how absence haunts the Missouri countryside where Moore grew up: “The back roads here smell like forgotten slaughterhouses, where piglets cry for their long-gone mother and a father they never knew.” Hushed tones and cryptic language disguise the violence Moore witnessed. Ashamed of the attention that her own developing body could draw, she wants to become invisible in middle school: “I’d play the role of a jock, hiding underneath loose T-shirts as I inevitably became the woman I always thought I wanted to be.”

Later, as teenagers in a church youth group confess to sins such as smoking or drinking, Moore will say, “I lost my virginity, but I didn’t mean to,” unaware of how to communicate the starker truth: “A man raped me.” She wraps the trauma of rape in the facade of “sin,” something digestible to those around her with a fully understood “center”—and something resolvable by way of forgiveness. However, she is missing from her “confession,” both figuratively and literally: “I wasn’t there for my own testimony. I couldn’t stand to hear those words spoken by a pastor who, days prior, had edited my version to look like a call for forgiveness, a lesson of obedience and chastity.”

For Moore, being a woman often meant erasing herself and putting a self already prepared for her in its place: “I don’t remember much from this time, so there’s a hole in the narrative—a noticeable jump in time. Even in my thirties, I will still be working on forgiving this past self, trying to fill in the gaps.” These gaps may result from a societal assumption that a woman’s story belongs not to her but to the misogynistic forces which determine the dominant narrative (for example, the idea that her rapist was “just being a boy”).  The incomplete narrative of self that results is characterized by, as Marcel Proust writes in The Fugitive (as translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff), a “fragmentary, irregular interpolation in my memory—like a thick fog at sea which obliterates all landmarks.” Yet as this fog forces its way in and tries to occlude certain details of her life, Moore pushes back:

When I wrote about being assaulted at fourteen, I imagined it was more uncomfortable for the reader because of my inclination toward impassivity. Or: I thought it was more uncomfortable for the reader until an essay about my rape was published. The overwhelming accessibility of what happened to me at fourteen forced me to tear down a partition I constructed between myself and the world, as well as the wall I built between myself and self.

Here Moore gets at a key struggle in these essays: whether to allow herself to be defined by the exterior world or to engage her interiority in a dialectic with it. The latter choice requires that “uncomfortable” details be shared when discussing traumatic events, and generally, people want to feel comfortable, accepted, at home; however, rather than defining home as the tautological end of a journey, Moore imagines home in terms of moving toward something—not a topographical destination but an opening onto an already existing reality, or the untying of a knot to reveal an absence. While attempting to escape from trauma is understandable, Moore implies we should consider moving toward the past as a way to eventually overcome it:

“Hegel doesn’t want to reject or forget the past,” your philosophy professor said. . . . “We’re only capable of growth if we know what we are growing from.”

This looks like a spiral, this preservation being raised, inflated, and he drew a long seashell on the board, the lines twisting together as he reached the top.

One could visualize Thank You for Staying with Me in the shape of a seashell, too, moving simultaneously toward and away from a center while Moore transforms the gaps in her memory from nodes of panic to active spaces of re-creation. As Moore’s son says to her at one point, “We’re not dead, Mom. We’re just lost.” Her essays, which rawly address subjects like motherhood, assault, and sexism but also include reveries on the cosmos, vignettes on nature, and appreciative moments of common humanity, encourage readers to spend less time trying to bring everything to a center and pay attention instead to life’s continuous surprises.

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Major Arcana

John Pistelli
Belt Publishing ($24.95)

by Andy Hartzell

It starts with a bang: A gunshot to the head, on a university campus, in Middle America, live-streamed. This action sets up Major Arcana as a story about “today,” the kind that would come with the tagline “ripped from the tabloids” if tabloids were still a thing. But as author John Pistelli plunges into the novel’s root question—why would an intelligent and seemingly happy college boy take his own life in such a public fashion?—its tendrils spread to encompass more characters, more mysteries, and more decades, until the story becomes a sort of secret history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. “Today” is gradually revealed to be weirder than we thought it was.

The various plot trajectories revolve around a common center of gravity called Overman 3000, “Overman” being a thinly-veiled analog of Superman. It’s an artifact of the ’90s, when DC Comics editors boldly greenlit “transgressive” reboots of beloved golden-age franchises and magazine editors breathlessly declared comics not just for kids anymore. The fictional comic is written by Simon Magnus, an anarchic visionary with occult leanings who, while not quite a thinly-veiled analog of Alan Moore, borrows from that writer’s stock of colorful attributes.

Overman 3000 takes the familiar tropes of the Man of Steel myth—alien origin, secret identity, girl reporter love interest, bald billionaire nemesis—and pushes them to their limit and beyond, to the literal end of time. Its grand climax, which pits the superhero as the avatar of pure spirit against a villain transmogrified into the personification of meatspace, is a kind of latter-day gnostic scripture, a lurid orgy of cosmic destruction and rebirth. This story-within-a-story both reflects and influences the slightly-less melodramatic character arcs of the “real” characters in the novel.

In its mixture of literary ambition and old-fashioned showmanship, Major Arcana is a throwback to the efflorescence of popular literary fiction in the mid-late 20th century. It bears some superficial similarities to one of the hallmark works of that period, Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy. That saga also starts with the seemingly inexplicable suicide of a Golden Boy, then spirals outward to follow a cast of eccentric characters, whose various destinies diverge wildly before converging again at the finale. Like Pistelli, Davies was a student of hermetic lore; both works are studded with esoteric references. But Davies’s work now reads like a relic from a lost world, a storybook world; a single history connects his novels back to those of Dickens and Hugo. Pistelli is writing after the end of history, and he knows it.

Life in the digital age is fragmented, discontinuous. How do you tell a coherent story in an incoherent age? It’s no wonder that many new novels forego the epic in favor of the miniature: the precision portrait of a particular subgroup, or the shifting lens of the author’s own subjective awareness. But Pistelli is out to prove that it’s still possible to paint on a big canvas. Major Arcana’s nine major characters represent a diverse set of identities, encompassing three generations and an unspecified number of genders. They share in common the experience of growing up after all the rules and expectations about growing up have been discarded. These are characters who must construct themselves out of the materials at hand: books, chance encounters, and various bits of cultural detritus. The personalities that emerge are complex, unstable, and a bit artificial, heightened-for-effect.

This operatic quality comes through especially in the book’s climactic sequences. Here, Pistelli piles on the sturm-und-drang without restraint—lightning even crackles on the horizon as characters launch into their aria-like monologues and fates are sealed. Though it begins in the neighborhood of realism, the novel ultimately lands somewhere in the realm of fantasy, though the segue is so subtle that one might not realize it until well after-the-fact, if at all.

Does each character represent a figure in the titular Arcana? It’s easy enough to identify Simon Magnus, the comic book writer, as “The Magician.” This is the arcana of action-without-effort, and Magnus refuses to be pinned down. “The Empress,” which is the arcana of sacred magic, might equate to the young manifestation coach Ash Del Greco. And the elusive Jacob Morrow, whose death kicks off the plot, is surely “The Fool.”

These three characters are in desperate search of transcendence, impatient to shake off all forms of constraint—not just the authority of parents, bosses, and priests, but that of nature: the body, and time itself. Other characters serve as counterweights, making the argument for living and dealing with the world as it is. The most eloquent case for fleshly existence is realized in the character of Diane del Greco, Ash’s mother, a woman of artistic and intellectual talents who consciously embraces the life of a suburban vulgarian and un-lapsed Catholic. Every major character is rendered empathetically, and we get a window into every point of view. But Pistelli’s sympathy seems to lie with the Devils, if only because he gives them the best speeches.

The book’s perspective on gender avoids collapsing into any predictable political take. Its two pivotal characters are both transgender, but what they’re ultimately seeking to trans isn’t merely gender, but materiality. Whether this is good or bad is left for the reader to decide. While it’s possible to read both characters as monsters, it’s equally possible to see them as heroes. Pistelli reserves his satirical judgment for those more minor characters who seek to put the rebel angels into politically conventional boxes; placing the transhumanist enterprise within the centuries-long context of Western expressive individualism, he lets us see them in a cosmic frame, as they see themselves.

The novel is liberally seasoned with allusions to writers of transcendental yearning: Dostoyevsky, Melville, and especially that great-granddaddy of the graphic novel, William Blake. More than two hundred years ago, at a time when Enlightenment rationalism claimed to have settled all the great questions, Blake proclaimed the idea that human nature could never be defined—that human beings would always strain toward the infinite. His prophetic works ultimately helped usher in the Romantic counterrevolution. Major Arcana hints that we might be living through a similar moment: The metanarratives may have all been deconstructed, but metaphysical desire lives on. The kids will pick up the pieces and make something mind-blowing. Might the lockdown generation, algorithmically sorted and managed as it is, even now be gearing up to risk everything for love? Stranger things have happened.

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Red Dog Farm

Nathaniel Ian Miller
Little, Brown and Company ($28)

by Sara Maurer

Perhaps no author looms larger in Icelandic literature than Halldór Laxness, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955. In writing a book set on a far-flung Icelandic farm—as is Laxness’s 1934 novel Independent People, widely considered his masterpiece—Nathaniel Ian Miller faces the challenge of situating Red Dog Farm in the context of Iceland’s foremost literary figure’s foremost book. He approaches this task in the same way one of his characters, Víðir, comes “out from under his father’s heavy shadow”—by defining himself in opposition to him.

While the narrator of Red Dog Farm is a young man named Orri, it’s through his father, Víðir, that Miller engages the specter of Laxness. At first, Víðir and the hero of Independent People, Bjartur of Summerhouses, seem of a piece: They’re decidedly cantankerous, both farmers, poets, husbands, and fathers. Defiance and stubbornness seem to guide each man’s every move (Bjartur’s first line of dialogue in Independent People is a solitary “No”). Ostensibly, Laxness’s protagonist is driven by a desire for financial independence—a home, land, and livestock owned outright—yet as his story unfolds, he seems less driven by this ideal than by brutality. He refuses to improve his home or adequately feed and clothe his family, and he seems to value his sheep above human life.

Víðir, too, lives in opposition to the people around him, rejecting his neighbors’ old ways of doing things. He rides a motorcycle instead of a horse, raises beef cows instead of sheep, and has an Australian kelpie instead of an Icelandic sheepdog. Unlike the relentlessly independent Bjartur, though, Víðir relies completely on his wife’s college professor salary and his physician mother-in-law’s generosity. Where Bjartur treats his wife and children little better than livestock, Víðir coddles Orri, demands nothing of him. He loves his wife and “would’ve claimed all her time if he could justify it.” Shortly after she leaves him, Víðir reveals to Orri that he has been writing poetry: “I guess you’d call it free verse? Prose poems? I’m not sure.” You can almost hear Bjartur, who found comfort in “the old measures of the 18th century ballads and had always despised the writing of hymns in newfangled lyrics,” scoffing.

Toward the ends of their books, Bjartur and Víðir find themselves quite alone. As a result of his unrelenting pursuit of self-sufficiency, both of Bjartur’s wives are dead and most of his children have died or fled; only his son Gvendur remains. Víðir’s wife, similarly fed up with his reticence and discontent, has accepted a new position at a university in Reykjavik; Orri remains on the farm but is planning to move to Reykjavik as well. Each faces the question that farmers have faced since humans began farming: What will happen to the farm? It will come as no surprise that the sons choose opposite paths: One takes over his father’s farm while the other leaves both farming and father behind.

Rather than shying away from comparisons to Laxness’s classic, Miller leans into them: “To hell with Bjartur!” Víðir says at one point. Víðir’s rejection of the old ways reveals him as a new symbol for Icelandic masculinity. In casting off Bjartur’s heavy shadow, Miller challenges long-held cultural ideals of independence, perseverance, and stoicism, and offers readers a 21st-century hero—one who relinquishes power and embraces flexibility and tenderness.

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