Book Review

Lola the Interpreter

Lyn Hejinian
Wesleyan University Press ($18.95)

by Luke Harley

Lola the Interpreter, the final work by Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024), stands as a crowning achievement of her career as an experimental poet. A sequel of sorts to Saga/Circus (Omnidawn, 2008), it continues her exploration of hybrid forms uniting poetry and prose, autobiography and fiction, and observation and citation—what Hejinian’s fellow Language poet Barrett Watten terms a “combinatorial poetics.” Structured in seven sections—each introduced by a color plate of Hejinian’s own design—the book arrives like a consoling breeze in today’s climate of political extremism. In its embrace of allegoresis, a literary strategy which Hejinian claims as a form of critique, it refuses to buckle to authoritarianism and the “technocratic takeover of reality.”

In Lola the Interpreter, the titular character is tasked with making sense of a destabilized world. First introduced in the “Circus” section of Saga/Circus as a bike-riding, book-loving child, Lola reemerges in this volume as a sharp-witted, affectionate, pragmatic adolescent—one playfully dressed in black jeans and a black Stetson, evoking the rebellious spirit of a literary cowgirl. Her transformation signals a shift from innocent observation to incisive critique as she confronts the “machinations of capitalism” and challenges a dystopian reality she deems “insufficiently artistic.” For Lola—a kind of muse for Hejinian—interpretation is resistance: her rationality and linguistic skill empower her to navigate (and subvert) the ideological structures that shape her world.

Like ours, the world that Lola inhabits is marked by “global interconnectivity, selective interconnectivity, changing urban demographics, extreme weather events, economic inequality, mass incarceration, homelessness, urban congestion, civic madness”; it is a world where eros has been “monetized” and almost every aspect of personhood is “weaponized for political ends.” Disillusioned, Lola and her friends yearn for lives of meaning and coherence. They seem to seek what Walter Benjamin, in his concept of Jetztzeit (now-time), calls the “mystical instant”—an allegorical moment that crystallizes into the “now” of historical consciousness.

For Hejinian, “allegorical thinking” offers a way out of the anxiety, fragmentation, and “dismal indifference” of contemporary life. In her essay collection Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), Hejinian champions poetic strategies such as parataxis, digression, and syntactic disruption, deploying them to challenge conventional narrative coherence and resist closure. Her “wayward poetry,” grounded in material particulars of “adamantine specificity,” opens a space for imaginative flourishing—including in Lola the Interpreter, where Hejinian conjures a self-effacing “tumult of language” that sends “waves of polysemy rolling through even the most quotidian, banal, pedestrian, and seemingly inconsequential of situations.”

Hejinian’s focus on material particulars—the “paltry objects of quotidian life”—bears some resemblance to Wordsworth’s elevation of the ordinary, yet Hejinian is certainly not a Romantic poet in the conventional sense. Her work has been shaped more by Russian Formalism, pragmatist philosophy, and critical theory than by Romanticism; if Lola the Interpreter stages a dialogue between Romantic poetry’s idealism and Language poetry’s skepticism toward narrative and lyrical unity, it is one in which the latter usually prevails.

Nevertheless, Hejinian was influenced by a foundational text that introduced many in the American avant-garde to the collaborative ethos of German Romanticism: Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s The Literary Absolute (SUNY Press, 1988). Moreover, her recent writing contains flashes of unexpected Romantic ambition, as if reviving ideas that remain relevant amid the complexities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In Saga/Circus, for instance, the “Saga” section—comprising thirty-seven nonlinear free-verse segments—invokes Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner through its metaphor of poetry as a sea-going vessel, navigating the unstable waters of perception and meaning. Similarly, her book-length poem-essay Positions of the Sun (Belladonna*, 2019) alludes to Wordsworth’s “The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement” (1789), echoing his claim that it is “not in Utopia” but only “in the very world which is the world / Of all of us” that we “find our happiness, or not at all.”

As in earlier works such as My Life (Burning Deck, 1980) and My Life in the Nineties (Shark Books, 2003), Hejinian is aligning herself with a tradition that locates moral clarity and fulfillment in lived experience rather than abstract ideals. Her engagement with Romanticism represents a sustained inquiry into the nature of human connection amid social fragmentation. Poetry, described in Lola the Interpreter as the “skeptic’s philosophy,” becomes a site of collective reflection and shared experience.

This anti-narcissistic ethos is conveyed through the rich intertextuality of Lola the Interpreter, where an eclectic ensemble of thinkers—among them Horace, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sextus Empiricus, Charles Baudelaire, Fred Moten, Michel Foucault, Clark Coolidge, Christa Wolf, Henry James, George Eliot, Albert Camus, Stan Brakhage, Sigmund Freud, Carla Harryman, William Blake, Louis Zukofsky, and Etel Adnan—are drawn into dialogue. Their presence evokes the “symphilosophizing” impulse of German Romanticism, inviting readers to become “lovers of linkage”: those who uncover unexpected connections and embrace a collaborative, expansive mode of inquiry. Through this polyphonic exchange, Hejinian celebrates the generative potential of shared thought, associative movement, and collective imagination.

Hejinian dedicated Lola the Interpreter—as she had nearly five decades earlier with A Mask of Motion (Burning Deck, 1977)—to her husband and fellow activist, avant-garde saxophonist Larry Ochs. The book’s architecture emulates the improvisational logic of Ochs’s music, particularly his long-standing work with the Rova Saxophone Quartet. Its open-ended sections engage themes such as skepticism, freedom, reason, beauty, time, memory, and dreams, unfolding them with the fluidity and unpredictability of a jazz composition. This improvisatory structure resonates with Benjamin’s concept of constellation, where meaning emerges through the relational configuration of fragments; much like Benjamin’s montage technique in The Arcades Project, Hejinian’s paratactic text resists narrative continuity, inviting readers to traverse “nodal singularities” that generate meaning through proximity, disjunction, and imaginative association.

In the book’s final section, Hejinian’s brief references to Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Susan Howe’s Frame Structures set the stage for a striking intertextual gesture: a quotation from “Mode Z,” the opening poem in Barrett Watten’s 1–10 (This Press, 1980), written for Rae Armantrout when she left the Bay Area for San Diego in 1978. In this poem, Watten calls for the erasure of society’s “imperious frames”: “Could we have those trees cleared out of the way? / And the houses, volcanoes, empires?”

Watten’s call to dismantle inherited structures evokes Marx’s philosophical imperative for a “ruthless criticism of all that exists,” suggesting a poetic and cultural tabula rasa from which the world might be reimagined. “Mode Z” thus initiates a kind of permanent revolution, confronting entrenched personal and collective mythologies and urging a break from received narratives. Hejinian echoes this impulse in the seventh section of Lola the Interpreter, offering a bold refutation of rising American conservatism: Conceptual frameworks are not immutable. Drawing on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,” she writes: “Are you grieving over the unleaving of the trees? They will fall.”

While Hejinian acknowledges profound grief over “the bigotry, the greed, the voluntary, willed stupidity, the passion for fascism” in today’s American conservative movement, she insists that sorrow must be transformed into critical engagement and imaginative resistance. Near the end of Lola the Interpreter, she returns to the theme of skepticism introduced in the opening section, and in a “precipitously disturbed” mood, she adopts an ambivalent stance: Skepticism may “KEEP YOU FREE,” but it can also lead to “hopelessness, impossibility,” offering “nothing but dead ends and fatigue.”

In the book’s closing moments, however, Hejinian strikes a more upbeat note, befitting the defiant utopianism that runs throughout her oeuvre. Drawing on Brad Giggs’s reading of Hume’s motivational skepticism, and writing in a present-tense voice reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s “continuous present,” Hejinian calls on readers to recommit to activist inquiry—to remain critically attuned, imaginatively open, and politically responsive, even in the face of despair: “Skepticism requires refocusing, repurposing, reconnaissance, resistance, utilizing thought’s ‘capacity to be mobilized toward different ends.’”

Lola the Interpreter exemplifies Hejinian’s “late style” in Edward Saïd’s sense of the term—a “mature subjectivity” marked not by passive decline or neat closure, but by “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” That Hejinian completed this formally daring and conceptually rich book while battling cancer speaks to her extraordinary resilience and creative force. Lola the Interpreter, in the end, is an affirmation and a continuation of Hejinian’s belief in language as a tool for reimagining the world. 

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

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

Archive of Desire

A Poem in Four Parts for C. P. Cavafy

Robin Coste Lewis
Alfred A. Knopf ($27) 

by John Ngoc Nguyen

Robin Coste Lewis’s lustrous Archive of Desire hinges on a word it does not contain: “excuse.” The National Book Award–winning author’s third lyric performance opens with a handkerchief, an homage to that vital, charged piece of cloth from a poem of queer desire by C. P. Cavafy, “He Asked About the Quality.” In it, Cavafy’s speaker and a shopworker ostensibly make conversation about the handkerchiefs on display, “their only aim: the touching of their hands / over the handkerchiefs”—an excuse to do what is only natural.

Lewis revises these characters. Her autobiographical speaker stops by a clothing store, where skirts are on discount “(polyester, cheap),” and beholds the girl of her dreams on shift. Her “whispery voice breaking open // with desire,” the speaker pretends to be “looking // for embroidered handkerchiefs,” which she and the “shop-girl” go back and forth over, beneath their talk and burgeoning heat “a psalm of consent.”

In Lewis’s hands, the pocket-sized handkerchief experiences two sublime transformations. The speaker observes “a boat so casually navigating / the rough sea. // Its sail is / your unfolded, opened / handkerchief,” which is also, stanzas later, “a kite soaring // within my sky.” The handkerchief navigates land and water and air, not unlike the chorus Lewis summons: “We are the Goddess’s words— / Her bracelets, Her rings, // We are Her / intense and infinite wanderings.” As in her second book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (Knopf, 2022), Lewis nods to the courage of ancestral, diasporic Blackness, adding her own precious stones, patiently cabochoned and faceted by her verse-thinking, to this begemmed birthright.

For all its epic making, Lewis’s book is about undoing, unlearning, being unapologetically unrepentant:

All the fallen
and broken
statues inside

my heart

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I am no longer afraid.
I will never again allow myself
to be afraid to be loved. Or to love you.

Cavafy, Lewis says in the lesbian bildungsroman that serves, too, as her epilogue, “was a god for Black, Brown, Red, Yellow, and all of that mixed together, for baby Queers . . . We were elegant in his lines.” She looks on her upbringing: formative was Ms. Paddington’s high-school debate class in Los Angeles. Wide open during lunch period, the classroom became a gathering place for “all the freaks, of which I was proudly one.”

Freakishness offers pain, pride, and—above all—humor, of which there is a trove in Lewis’s collection, an Ellisonian extravagance of laughter. “My father asked me one afternoon, affectionately and nonchalantly, ‘So, Baby, you a bulldagger?’ . . . And I laughed because he imbibed a word that was traditionally vulgar with such affection.” Lewis and her sister regularly accompanied their father to the garage, where he “constantly put tools in our hands . . . Soldering guns, the monkey wrench, tape measures, spackling.”

Lewis’s sweeping eye marries this “low” hardware with the “high” objects of her acropolis, which from the Greek translates to high city. A glass perfume bottle, small terra-cotta altars, the bones of a piglet, a hare-shaped baby rattle: these objects from the museum of Lewis’s acropolis, which doubles as a self-portrait, are “happily lost so that in the future—now—they can be regained. . . . Each of us broken, each of us emanating an earlier glory. A procession of winged selves parading constantly throughout our cells.”      

These relics join the company of possessions from Lewis’s matriarchal family, her mother and grandmothers and aunts and female cousins, their “most gorgeous” bodies intimated by the garments and accessories they used as methods for beauty on earth: “Their handsewn frocks. Their holy rage. . . . Their rhinestone-studded pocketbooks and their mother-of-pearl pocketknives, the latter hidden inside the former—like their own interior weapons.” These last mementos call back to Cavafy’s vest pocket, where his handkerchief lies snug.

Lewis recasts Cavafy’s images via fragments and erasure in her lyric offering to the altar of multigenerational Blackness: an ebony divan, candles ticking off the years. Though the poet would “rather look / at things than speak // about them,” she describes them profoundly, her beloveds using “pearly combs to groom / our raven-black hair.”

Lewis’s poetics is balanced with the passion and play of youth, her development as artist, intellectual, lover. As a second grader, she was Cupid-struck for a peer, Bridget, whom Lewis, a precocious flirt and practitioner of mutual aid, would spare some change for lunch money. “Other girls had crushes on very cute but very stupid boys. Why should I not fall in love with the smartest person in Mrs. Larson’s class?”

Later, fleeing their racist public school system, a 16-year-old Lewis and her girlfriend would drive to Sisterhood Bookstore, their go-to: “It was here—among the ‘Sisterhood is Powerful!’ buttons, and the volumes of Our Bodies, Ourselves greeting us at the front door, as well as The Joy of Lesbian Sex (which made me blush hard), and Audre Lorde’s Zami—that I found a volume by the remarkable Greek poet Constantine Cavafy.” So marks the dawning of Lewis’s ardor.

To be a freak, to have membership in the freakdom, brings up Cavafy’s famous barbarians, so named by ethnocentrists of yore whose ideas are not unfamiliar, with Lewis writing her book against the backdrop of “my countrymen’s absurdity.” “[T]he barbarians? We are / their children.” Bestowing on each child the title of “Great ancestral palace,” Archive of Desire exalts “the little girls—all the brown little girls—whose bodies we buried in the Great Pit . . . the moment we looked to the horizon—the second we saw them coming,” in-groups and out-groups re-envisioned to indict power and its literally crushing notions of whiteness.

“The Earth and Sky still like to make love,” she writes. “They still give birth to giants.” Chiseling from life, history, and metaphysics another indelible work, Lewis is our lyric giantess.

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

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

Here Comes the Sun

A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization

Bill McKibben
W.W. Norton & Company ($29.99)

by John Abbotts

In the preface to our co-authored book The Menace of Atomic Energy (W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), Ralph Nader describes a 1974 discussion with Dr. Alvin Weinberg, former director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and “the person most identified with nuclear reactor development in this country.” When solar energy was suggested, Nader writes, “his response was unexpected. If solar electric could be brought down to a cost not exceeding 2.5 times that of nuclear,” then “he would favor solar” over atomic fission.

Even before a 1976 article by Rocky Mountain Institute co-founder Amory Lovins urged a “soft path” for a future energy system based on energy efficiency as the most economical alternative then, along with renewables over the long-term, nonprofit organizations were making similar recommendations.

Yet other scenarios are now in play. In Chelan County, Washington, east of Seattle and straddling the Cascade Mountain Range, the company Helion Energy is constructing for the Chelan Public Utility District a 50-megawatt atomic fusion power plant whose output will be dedicated to Microsoft data centers. Will it work? I have my doubts. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a “breakthrough” in research on atomic fusion. At the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, an experiment delivered 3.15 megajoules of energy output from a 2.05 megajoules input, but the 192 lasers that produced that input required 300 megajoules of energy. As the organization Beyond Nuclear International noted, experts have always predicted that commercial fusion power is decades away; with that new data, this remains true for federal research.

In contrast, Bill McKibben reports that now, “We live on an earth where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. The second-cheapest way is to let the breeze created by the sun’s heating turn the blade of a wind turbine. Beginning about the middle of 2023, we entered the really steep part of this growth curve that could define our future,” with installation across the planet of a gigawatt of solar panels every day. By the fall of 2024, that gigawatt of panels was being installed every eighteen hours. In comparison to the 50-megawatt uncertain hope for fusion power, a gigawatt is 1000 megawatts; yet the hype for fusion obscures the solar reality across the globe.  

2024 was also a significant year for the state of California: For most days of the year, renewable sources produced more electricity than the state needed; at night, batteries that had stored energy during the day often became the biggest source of electrical supply to the world’s fifth-largest economy. By the spring of 2025, California used forty-four percent less natural gas to provide electricity than it had consumed just two years earlier. Moreover, McKibben reports, “in February 2025 the energy analysts at the Rocky Mountain Institute reported that renewable energy was growing twice as fast in the developing world of the Global South as in the developed world of the Global North.”

Back in January 1978, in an article for Solar Age titled “Letting the Sun Shine,” Nader noted that “Solar energy has the inherently democratic capability of bypassing energy companies and electric utilities, going directly to consumers.” But he also noted that powerful commercial interests were threatened by renewable energy, and were erecting obstacles to its advancement.

Of course, thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court of former corporate lawyers and right-wing operatives that designated money as “speech,” we now have a political system run by legalized bribery. Moreover, President Donald Trump, an electoral loser installed through vote suppression, only exacerbates the power of moneyed interests against renewable energy, calling global warming/climate chaos a “hoax” while promoting uneconomical energy “losers” such as coal and atomic power; demolishing federal agencies that monitor greenhouse gases, and revoking grants for green energy projects that Congress authorized during the Biden-Harris administration, among other crimes of corruption. 

McKibben recognizes these forces of regression and repression, noting that “the addiction to fossil fuels and all its accomplices” runs deeper in the U.S. “than anyplace else; it will be a fight to turn the American page.” Yet he is ready for that fight—he has worked with other activists to organize Sun Day 2025, a day of action on the autumn equinox to promote clean energy—and offers hope that “Our species, at what feels like a very dark moment, can take a giant leap into the light. Of the sun.”

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

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

Heart Lamp

Banu Mushtaq
Translated by Deepa Bhasthi
And Other Stories ($19.95)

by Damhuri Muhammad

Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp: Selected Stories draws from six collections of fiction published in India since the 1990s; the first book by the Kannada-language writer to be published in English translation, it netted Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi the International Booker Prize in 2025. Mushtaq has worked as a lawyer and journalist, and the stories reflect a lifetime of working for social justice.

The title story, a poignant narrative about a Kannada Muslim woman obscured by shadows of sufferings endured in her life as a housewife, suggests a darkening perspective. Mehrun, a mother of five, expresses grievances to her family about her husband’s cheating, but nearly all of her family members side with the husband. (Her brother tells her: “He is a man, and he has stamped on some slush, but he will wash it off where there is water and then come back inside. There is no stain that will stick to him.”) Instead of expressing concern for the suffering she endured, her brothers returns Mehrun to her husband’s house in the city. Inayat threatens that, if Mehrun’s resistance were to push him to declare a divorce (talaq), then “In one single breath—one, two, three times—I’ll say it and finish this off, tell her. And tell her that after her talaq, see if she is able to get her younger sisters and her daughters married off.” One evening, as Mehrun switched on the lights in her home, a lamp that had consistently lit up the space in her heart was now dimmed. With this soul-sustaining light extinguished, Mehrun contemplates ending her bleak existence by igniting herself. She soaks her body in kerosene, but her daughter intervenes.

Tolerance of the unjust treatment of women is also a prominent theme in “Black Cobras.” In this story, however, the basis isn’t familial pride, but Islamic religion. Aashraf has repeatedly petitioned the Mosque to request financial responsibility for her husband, Yakub, who has engaged in polygamy. The Mutawalli—a religious authority responsible for addressing local Muslim family issues—consistently defend Yakub’s decision, even citing the Quran: “Do you know that there is a Sharia law that says he can get married to four women? Why are you getting jealous of that?” Aashraf endured Yakub’s insults regarding her role as mother of three daughters while he abandoned his responsibilities and enjoyed himself with his new wife, but her struggle to assert her rights as Yakub’s first wife conclude in a more tragic way than Mehrun’s. Her husband also deprived another wife, Amina, of the right to undergo a procedure to prevent childbirth. “I am the mutawalli; if people get to know that I got the operation done for a woman in my own house, I will have to be answerable to them,” he reasoned.

A similar refusal is expressed by Iftikhar to his wife in the collection’s opening story, “Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal,” but Iftikhar’s decision is rooted in his understanding of a husband’s financial obligations. “Why are you worried?” he says to Shaista. “Thanks to God’s grace, I earn enough to look after all of them well.” In fact, with no one available to babysit their six children, he makes his teenage daughter, Asifa, leave school to look after her younger siblings and handle all the house chores. “I made her stop studying because girls do not need much education. A high school certificate is enough. There is no need for her to roam around in Mysuru for college. We can get her married off next year,” Iftikhar reasons.

Heart Lamp: Selected Stories exemplifies India’s progressive literary movement Bandaya Sahitya (“rebellion literature”), which seeks to address injustices arising from caste and gender hierarchies; Dalit writers such as Mushtaq who have been marginalized by the caste system are reshaping the Kannada literary landscape by incorporating a spirit of resistance and protest into their literary tradition. In story after story, Mushtaq vividly illustrates how the social disparities caused by caste systems and religious puritanism lead to injustice, particularly for women. Here’s hoping we get to read the author’s novel, poetry, essays, and other short fiction in English translation before too long.

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

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

Sixties Surreal

Edited by Dan Nadel, Laura Phipps, Scott Rothkopf, and Elisabeth Sussman
Whitney Museum of American Art ($50)

by Paul Buhle

Originally a product of France, Surrealism spawned adherents around the globe—including, here in the Midwest, the Chicago Surrealist Group, formed in 1966. Yet just as it grew to transcend geographical borders, surrealism as an art movement with a small “s” expanded beyond its original visual identity. The art in the pages of Sixties Surreal may thus be unfamiliar to many viewers, but as its three editors argue, it demonstrates a different logic of surrealism’s meanings, roles, and influences within the world of American art as it evolved in the postwar U.S.

In the Foreword, Scott Rothkopf suggests that the “generative” influence of surrealism had already helped shape the work of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollack, among others, by 1950—but the trend (if it was a trend) was abandoned in favor of a narrow abstractionism, only to be rediscovered in the middle 1960s. By that time a “radical escape hatch” for artistic young outsiders, surrealism notably included gay and lesbian artists (at least in the U.S.); new influences from the art world itself further widened the aperture as versions of surrealism advanced via Pop Art and minimalism.

When art critic and political radical Lucy Lippard entered the picture, she foregrounded the centrality of a “sexual charge” in the newly emerging art, without the polemical “narcissism” of the classic European surrealists. That is to say, rather than being confined to those artists accepted in official circles—essentially those blessed by founder Andre Breton—the surrealist influence now manifested itself amidst the social and cultural turbulence of the times. Rothkopf concludes that this was “the most fulsome animating impulse of American art in the 1960s and the most perspicacious mirror of its era.”

A few pages later, in an Introduction titled “Feelings are Things: a Sixties Surreal,” the three editors provocatively and usefully ask, “What if Surrealism, not Cubism, had emerged as the dominant force to shape the course of postwar art in America,” (xiii) which translates remarkably as “What if it were subject matter, not form, that had been primary to artists in those crucial Atomic years in the United States?” (xiii) What a thought! They go on to suggest how Surrealism, attacked in art criticism by Clement Greenberg and other purists, might have had a different trajectory in the art world. 

There is something missing here, of course. Greenberg and his erstwhile allies at the once-radical Partisan Review had set themselves upon the Cold War (the PR itself would take on a new sponsor, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose bills were paid by the Central Intelligence Agency). On the other hand, as the Soviet Union became a principal sponsor of liberation projects in the Global South, Communist aesthetics remained relentlessly realist—with remarkable exceptions to come, notably Cuban revolutionary art—even if artists long associated with the Popular Front, like Charles White, continued to take their own paths.

In short, improbability argues against the thesis. But so what? Throughout Sixties Surreal, we see artists experimenting, playing with “processes that included found-object assemblage, dismantling and reimagining bodies, and picturing altered consciousness through surreal forms.” Still, the argument comes to a rather stark conclusion: As the “Sixties” of both reality and lore came to an end, aesthetic diversity among artists across the country gave way to a formalism in Manhattan, the center of the booming art market. Everything else, everywhere else, became “regional,” with obvious and gloomy implications.

The 1958-1972 framework of Sixties Surreal further explains the scope, with a sudden, unexpected art rebellion mirroring the wider social and cultural unrest. Lucy Lippard noted in 1966 that for most people, the surreal suggested “anything odd, suspicious, impolite, unfamiliar, threatening, obscene or just plain unfamiliar.” Not that the term “Surrealism” would be uncontested even among its most prominent and best-organized devotees. An extraordinary 1968 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, “Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage,” included more than 300 art objects; it also inspired the rage of the aforementioned Chicago Surrealist Group, which considered art that was experimental but not particularly political (and thus undangerous) unrevolutionary.

Outside New York, the “Hairy Who” exhibits of 1966-’69 actually made a huge splash, not only on the fine art scene but on several future underground comic artists. This group of Chicago artists, however, seemed to pass by the Chicago Surrealist Group entirely, proving that different worlds did not communicate with each other even in the same city. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, whose lecturers prompted students from the late 1950s onward to think about surrealism, had been pointing toward something larger—perhaps that elusive synthesis of radical art and politics—but the connection was somehow never made. Perhaps the rebellious moods of the 1960s ran out of time.

Never mind: There is a lot to find in Sixties Surreal. Artists like Claus Oldenburg and Louise Bourgeois will be familiar to readers, but how about Jay DeFeo? A proto-feminist artist working in San Francisco in the late 1950s, DeFeo is best remembered for The Rose, a painting so large that it could not be removed from her apartment by any normal means (she died of the toxic substances in the paint), but she also collaborated with artist Wallace Berman to create images depicting her body, semi-nude, as part of a dialogue with her artwork. This was the kind of art that unsettled critics of the time—what Lippard called the “abstractly sensuous object.” DeFeo’s work spoke for many but seemed to leave no successors. Or would Judy Chicago offer the realization, within and beyond the art world, of a radical political vision? Kenneth Anger? Yayoi Kusama? Robert Crumb?

All these and nearly 100 other artists are featured in Sixties Surreal. If it is an exhibition catalog that illustrates a giant disconnect amidst its winding historical paths, it is also, and more importantly, one that will bring any interested reader pleasure, provocation, and insight.

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

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

Library of Artistic Print on Demand

Post-Digital Publishing in Times of Platform Capitalism

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

by Richard Kostelanetz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Old Man by the Sea

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

by Rick Henry

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Werthless

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

by Hank Kennedy

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Pink Lady

Denise Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press ($20)

by George Longenecker

 

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

 

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

 

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

She visited me in Florida the day after

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

I thought we’d both be celebrating

the first woman president. I was baffled, sure

that the planes of the world would stop flying,

their wings too heavy with grief.

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

I emptied her white purse—

tissue pack and reading glasses, coupons

and address book. I once lived in a purse

inside her, my first pink home, the umbilical cord

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

of my own purse, its pristine lining never stretched

or stuffed with a fetus.           

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

 

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

I have my mother in my pocket—her face

on the prayer card we had printed for her wake.

I ate oatmeal with maple syrup for breakfast

so how can the front page news hurt me?

 

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

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

Portalmania

Debbie Urbanski
Simon & Schuster ($18.99)

by Alissa Hattman

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

• You are a marital r— expert.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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