Book Review

Major Arcana

John Pistelli
Belt Publishing ($24.95)

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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Fiction Reviews

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

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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Fiction Reviews

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

A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet

Laura Isabela Amsel
Brick Road Poetry Press ($17.95)

by Danielle Hanson

Situated in the natural lushness of the American South and discussing a range of family dynamics, Laura Isabela Amsel’s A Brief History of Sting and Sweet delivers on both the sting and the sweet.

The core subject matter of these poems is family tumult—a cold and abusive father, cancer, raising children, the dissolution of marriage—yet there’s no hint of melodrama; instead, Amsel’s vulnerability encourages connection. Take “First Born,” a poem about becoming a mother:

Looped cord cut free, bagged, he began—
his brown eyes jaundiced moon-yellow. He’d stutter at five,
refuse to wear shoes half his life. Dressed in anything
tight, he’d cry. Sock-seams overloaded his senses. He roams now,
looking for loose, running from confines—Bulgaria, Thailand.
He wears Tevas in winter to give his toes room.

As much as family, however, the poems also writhe with nature—snakes, salamanders, butterflies, frogs, squirrels, and plants crowd the scene and frequently suggest truths about human life. “Naming Moons” explores a sweet family tradition about full moons, while “Father” details the killing and pinning of butterflies and “Owls” portrays nature as an escape: “One leads the other follows / and I forget to breathe.” Elsewhere, the scar left from a mastectomy is referred to as “tender stem,” while salamanders are “sacred” because their scarcity. In later poems, the speaker finds solace in spring:

Don’t make me beg you, April.
God knows my knees ache
enough already. See me groveling
in March mud, raving,
staving spade holes
with cold fingers, jabbing
zinnia seeds in each.

In addition to using strong imagery, Amsel excels in her playfulness with language. “Listening for Something as a Girl, 1970” is filled with short i sounds and rhymes that speed up the poem and carry the reader away:

My vigilance is visceral;
there is no freeze in me.
I am all ear-swivel
and twitch, amygdala
and head hitch, tail
switch and quick shit,
adrenaline and flinch.

A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet brings us the lovely, the terrifying, and the sad experiences of family life, but in making them all connected to the natural world, it tones down the highs and modifies the lows into something more manageable. We are all part of this world, it seems to suggest—and it’s going to be okay.

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Poetry Reviews

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

Letters to Gisèle

1951–1970

Paul Celan
Translated by Jason Kavett
NYRB Poets ($28)

by Patrick James Dunagan

The work of poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) was inherently a site of conflict between his Jewish identity, his East European heritage, and his ill-fated predicament of composing poems in the German tongue post-Holocaust, which saw his parents murdered during Nazi internment and his own detention in labor camps. There was never a chance of his recovering from the profound psychological and spiritual damage endured during his youth. While this has long been recognized, Letters to Gisèle presents an opportunity for anglophone readers to glimpse Celan’s personal tribulations within the context of his poetic calling as they played out in his relation to his wife, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, and their son, Eric.

Their correspondence is full of affectionate exchanges, especially early on, where in one instance Celan refers to Gisèle as “my darling little branch.” Celan, however, was always haunted by his past, even as he regularly traveled to Germany from Paris and enjoyed a welcome reception when he gave public readings of his work. As translator Jason Kavett notes in an introduction, “a dark thread that runs throughout the correspondence originates in the false charge first leveled in 1953 by Claire Goll, the widow of the poet Yvan Goll, that Celan had plagiarized her husband’s work—a charge that gained some traction in Germany and that was a personal catastrophe for Celan, who saw it as part of a larger anti-Semitic campaign.” This “false charge” challenging the authenticity of his work plagued Celan for the rest of his life.

Poetry for Celan was a serious matter, involving confrontation with harsh realities [(“What to say, what to say? (Poetry, an affair of abysses.)”]. In the final years leading up to his suicide, he was repeatedly hospitalized for violent acts during delusional psychotic breaks when he feared for his own security or that of Eric. On separate occasions in such states, he attacked Gisèle, stabbed himself in the chest (puncturing his lung), and while vacationing alone went after a fellow guest where he was staying. Throughout these months-long periods of institutionalization, Celan never ceased working on poetry (“two poems yesterday and one today—in all I have written fourteen since I have been here”). His self-understanding hung upon poetic activity as a necessity of existence: “As I see my state of being, I need books, a place to work, a bit of human contact, the deepening and enlarging of my work as a translator of poetry.”

Celan idealized Gisèle, writing to her, “You are courageously the wife of a poet. I thank You for being that, so valiantly.” For her part, she willingly filled that role, continuing to support and encourage him during his hospitalizations: “you will see, your strength will come back, and your memory and concentration and inner calm, through work too you will live again.” Initially she committed herself to enduring his fate, stating, “Everything that happens to you, understand, affects me in the deepest part of myself and your wounds, your drama, your fate, I live through them too.” But she finally began to falter under the strain. When she announced, “I am leaving tomorrow evening, before my nerves go completely,” a footnote informs us that Celan underlined the statement, adding in the margin “Thursday!”

While Celan only wanted to ease Gisèle’s troubles (“I would like to contribute, calmly, to your calm”), his condition left him incapable of taking the necessary steps. When Gisèle found an apartment where he could live alone so they could have time apart, he resisted. Still, she continued to attempt to steer him in a positive direction, urging him “to also see the things that are not bad, they exist.” Celan was, in fact, capable of such observations himself, which can be seen in a letter to Eric from July 29, 1969: “I have come back from a long walk in Paris: wind, not too much, a light, fine rain—we could have walked together, I thought about that.” And later the next month: “Facing the snow, / a thought for / you.” Yet, behind such observations was the realization that nothing would keep the poet from his fate; Celan drowned himself in the Seine less than a year later.

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Mixed Genre Reviews

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

The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket

Kinsale Drake
University of Georgia Press ($19.95)

by Danielle Shandiin Emerson

Kinsale Drake’s debut poetry collection, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, composes a yucca-lined symphony of the lived and thriving groundwork of the Southwest, drawing on memory, music, and Diné poetics in the process. Each poem spreads honey-warm tendrils that inspire; with the feel of bare feet against damp dirt, we experience the breath of each stanza.

This collection could be summed up in one word: song. A memory song, an August song, a healing song, a southwest song, a mother song, a girlhood song, and so on. As Drake writes in the opening poem, “spangled,” “rip the sky // rush of birds spooked / from deep in our throats— // our song”—and the poems that follow demonstrate how music spreads across generations, how bodies become instruments and orchestras, and how memories of being loved and loving can be re-lived through music, can “overturn the sweet peas in the garden / . . . / the familiar orchestra / of scratched up CDs.”

The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket also paints portraits of family lineages. Some memories we ourselves might not remember, but we still feel them deeply because our loved ones have passed them on to us, for better or for worse. From the collection, we’re reminded that remembering is familial and comforting, that “the people who have known / this land / see the slickrock / still emerging.” Indigenous existence is still emerging and ongoing, as conveyed in “after Sacred Water”: “So we tell our stories Go to the water / Tend this land / & remember.”

Throughout the collection, the traditional archival experience is challenged and changed by one that centers the lived and living. “Wax Cylinder” examines the recordings of Diné elders singing. Locked in museum archives, their voices are so far from Dinétah (our homelands); in a way, these poems bring them home, even if just for a moment. It’s this love that makes our connection to further generations unbreakable and all the more beautiful.

A love letter to the southwest, Diné culture, and the inherent lyricism that storytelling bears, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket asks readers to reflect on their relationship to landscapes and histories that may not be a part of the dominant narrative. Drake extols the matrilineal, from girlhood to our masaní’s (grandmother’s) wisdom; while we heal from intergenerational trauma, we’re also shown intergenerational joy. We’re shown striking depictions of love and community, especially as it’s formed over vast rural landscapes, and how it’s thrived for generations. Contrary to colonial narratives, Native communities are places of laughter, crying, living, breathing, smiling, trusting, singing, humming, and being: “How else to know / you enter a land of monuments, not / a wasteland, loved by radio waves,” the poet offers in “Put on that KTNN.”

As the collection reaches its end, readers are embraced with active hope and healing. In “BLACKLIST ME,” Drake writes: “all the NDNs / dusting themselves off / and laughing at the smolder, / and the little wheel spin and spin / the little wheel spin.” Indeed, the world and we, as Native peoples—as Diné—will keep spinning and spinning, existing and living, in an old beauty.

Nizhóní, it is beautiful.

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Poetry Reviews

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

Wave of Blood

Ariana Reines
Divided Publishing ($16)

by Robert Eric Shoemaker

Ariana Reines’s intention for her journal-like book, Wave of Blood, was to document the period between the Libra and Aries eclipses of October 2023 and April 2024, a time during which she toured Europe for her loudly acclaimed previous title, A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019). She wanted to recollect and reckon with our current era of sociopolitical grief and struggle, as well as to wrestle with the “mind of war” that overtakes us all. As she explains, “I gave myself very little time to write this book. I gave myself only enough time to come up to the very edge of the violence and shame I have known within myself.”

Reines as narrator is thus split, writing “sentences [that] hardly understood themselves.” There’s a palpable mistrust of the self and a feeling of shared guilt for existence: “It is not that I don’t see the evil of the settler-colonial project. It’s that I have no reason to trust ‘us.’” The war in Palestine is central to this book, and Reines criticizes institutions’ self-preserving repression of anti-war movements, asking: “can one be ‘against’ war while sober about the procedures of statecraft and realpolitik, without merely proclaiming oneself a pacifist, as if one lived in a vacuum, or a religious zealot, or a coddled intellectual skilled in the weaponization of extreme language while living a life of bourgeois comfort?”

The horror of war, too, is a result of the mechanistic approach we take at our peril, the “apocalypse of machines they’ve been selling us.” Human and animal life is treated as inferior to the machine: “Our technocrats are obsessed with the idea we will be subjugated by superior machines. They have slave minds.” Production, not life, is the end goal of capitalism while everything around the narrator says, “I am in pain . . . / Don’t leave me alone.” Reines’s critique and the reality she describes are harsh, but her answer is warm; she suggests we can look for wisdom and medicine, plead for punishment, redemption, and release.

Formally and stylistically innovative, Wave of Blood moves between prose and poetry with a captivating hybridity, mostly using a candid direct address that feels distinct from the voice in A Sand Book. This book is addressed to a trusted reader, a member of the Invisible College (the mystically inclined study society Reines began during the COVID-19 pandemic). The Invisible College itself is also an addressee, and we are becoming or are already a part of it. This approach allows the reader to feel like a confidant or an initiate of a sacred order. This book would see an unknowable and awesome divine in defense of the human heart.

At one point late in the book, Reines describes a dream she’d had of sex with no release, pain held inside and unexpressed and growing. She also dreams her refusal to fight the pain and suffering in the world, her complicity with it. This deeply felt journal of impossible internal pain certainly captures how the world’s suffering can be unbearable. But Wave of Blood exists on behalf of and as a plea for humanity. “Your poetry is required here,” Reines implores. Meanwhile, her poetry is both a heart and a healer.

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Mixed Genre Reviews

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

Strangers in the Land

Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America

Michael Luo
Doubleday ($35)

by Sarah Moorhouse

In October 2016, an “Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China” appeared on the front page of The New York Times. Its author was Michael Luo, an American-born journalist of Chinese descent. In this letter, he expressed his amazement when, as his family was waiting outside a Korean restaurant in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a passer-by, frustrated at having her way obstructed, screamed at them, “Go back to your fucking country.” Luo’s seven-year-old daughter was confused. “Why did she say ‘Go back to China?’,” she asked her parents. “We’re not from China.”

In Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, Luo attempts to answer his daughter’s question. He offers a history of anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S. that chronicles the persistence of the disorientating demand “to go back to where we came from.” The book, which Luo presents as “the biography of a people,” focuses on the stories of individuals. It’s a compelling approach, and one which was evidently not without its challenges: Luo acknowledges that archival evidence detailing the specific stories of Chinese arrivals is limited. By combing primary sources and drawing on existing historical studies, however, Luo accomplishes an impressive feat. Arranged chronologically, his stories reveal how successive generations of Chinese immigrants sought belonging in America despite programs of systematic exclusion.

From Gold Rush-era San Francisco of the 1850s to the present-day streets of New York, Luo argues, Chinese immigrants have been made to feel like “strangers in the land.” He explains at the outset that one of the founding principles of America was the intention to celebrate the “multiplicity of difference,” yet hostility towards the Chinese has often been directed precisely at their difference—the language, mannerisms, customs and dress that mark their distinct heritage. A recurring detail in the book is the queue (the braid required to be worn by male subjects of China’s Qing dynasty), and how many arrivals cut it off to approximate a more American appearance. It rarely helped. In 1889, defending the upholding of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Justice Stephen Field described the Chinese as “impossible to assimilate with our people.”

The most interesting chapters of Strangers in the Land home in on a particular group of Chinese immigrants and then explore, through the stories of individuals, the friction that developed between them and native citizens. A chapter entitled “Lewd and Immoral Purposes” reveals the challenges faced by Chinese women arriving in the mid to late nineteenth-century. Until this time, the vast majority of Chinese arrivals to the U.S. were men seeking employment as laborers on the railroads and in Californian Gold Rush towns. Many of these men had wives and family in China to whom they intended to return after making their fortune. As Chinese communities became more established, however, women started to arrive.

Chinese women were met, Luo tells us, with “near-universal opprobrium,” and for one reason in particular: The bachelor demographic of Chinese quarters made prostitution a lucrative enterprise. Ah Toy, a woman from Canton who arrived in America at twenty years old, was an early adopter of the profession in San Francisco’s Chinese quarter; setting up shop in “a shanty in an alley off Clay Street,” she offered men “a chance to ‘gaze on her countenance’” in return for an ounce of gold dust. She began employing other female arrivals and opened brothels in at least two locations. Trouble began to brew as rival tongs (the secret societies that vied for influence in the Chinese immigrant community) sought to seize control of the burgeoning sex trade. City officials, meanwhile, delighted in finding a pretext to indict the Chinese community as “an alien, heathen people,” then collaborated with Protestant missionaries to push for an outright ban on the arrival of women from Asia. They all but succeeded: In 1870, a state law was passed that forbade Asian women from entering without proof of “correct habits and good character.”

Luo’s book makes clear that legislation which systematically excludes Chinese immigrants has been a recurring event. It reached its apex in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, a U.S. federal law that prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers for a period of ten years and denied naturalization rights to Chinese residents. This was the first time that the United States barred a people from immigrating based on their race. Luo makes the reader feel afresh just how shocking this is by highlighting the zeal with which white Americans sought to oust Chinese people from their communities. Homes were burned, shops looted, men violently attacked. If the Exclusion Act did not exactly sanction such activity, it emerged from a similar underlying attitude.

Strangers in the Land is an important book, not least because it resonates uncomfortably with current headlines. The deportation of immigrants to penal colonies in El Salvador is just one instance of the alarming persistence of hostility and even violence as a strategy for reckoning with “difference.” As Luo puts it, his book is “not just the story of the Chinese in America; it’s the story of any number of immigrant groups who have been treated as strangers. It’s the story of our diverse democracy. It’s the story of us.” Belonging, Luo shows us, is a fragile thing, and it depends on respect and dignity. He dedicates his book to his daughters, hoping that they may find the belonging that continues to elude him. We’re left lamenting, however, how far there is still to go.

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Nonfiction Reviews

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

Crumb

A Cartoonist's Life

Dan Nadel
Scribner ($35)

by Paul Buhle

So much time has passed since the brief golden age of underground comix that younger readers can be forgiven for not recognizing the word “comix” as an emblem of the late 1960s. Likewise they may not know much about the most significant American artist of the movement, Robert Crumb, who is more readily identified in France (where he has lived since 1991) than in the U.S. During the 1990s, the release of the documentary film Crumb stirred interest but also renewed old grievances. In 2009, Crumb’s masterful long form The Book of Genesis appeared, looking to many veteran fans of the cartoonist as an apotheosis (and indeed, given that the artist is now in his eighties, it is likely his final major work).

When comic historian Dan Nadel asked Crumb about writing a biography, Crumb not only agreed but made available an extensive archive, one that helps illuminate how a life journey so full of adventure can add up to something greater. The richness of detail and personal insights, including reverse-image self-insights of a near-confessional nature, in Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life offer a deeper and more nuanced view than even the artist’s most devoted fans could have guessed.

Many of us who have met Crumb, corresponded with him, or wrote about his work—my own first review of Crumb appeared in 1968—somehow lost sight of his uniqueness by the 1980s. We probably never understood a few key basics of his intentions, both artistic and personal: his dedication to music, for instance, and his anti-career ferocity in that world. Crumb learned to play several stringed instruments, and the Cheap Suit Serenaders that he formed played in California and beyond for more than a decade. He adamantly refused what other band members clearly wanted, which was to make the big time—he was escaping the big time, actually, in the way he knew best.

Crumb’s lifetime effort to deepen and improve his art offers another insight into how he is a more-than-modern artist. Imagine him in his adopted village in Southern France, abandoning larger reputation-securing works for individual pieces that would sell at a good price to collectors—very much in the mode of artists centuries ago. In that same village, he pitched into rebuilding historic houses for newly arrived friends to live in, and cleared paths to the nearby mountain so that they more resembled the same paths used by shepherds for centuries. Meanwhile he sketched away, finding for himself new details in the many ways to create.

We still have the familiar Crumb, of course, and every good reason to thank Nadel for giving us a close (and at times appropriately unforgiving) view of his world. Crumb’s family, for instance: his doomed brothers and his sister, all of whom he sometimes sought to help decades after they had left home; his father, a military veteran who slapped and insulted the boys, but ended up with a career of sorts, if never satisfactorily reconciled to his former wife and his children; his mother, divorced and daffy in old age, the strange and pathetic figure in the documentary film. In sobering ways, his family is a mirror of R. Crumb and vice-versa, but unlike his brothers in particular, he survives more or less intact. Nadel covers the mostly uncomfortable family territory assiduously and sympathetically.

Perhaps Crumb was not really, as was sometimes assumed, on the verge of suicide when he hopped on a bus from Delaware to Cleveland in the early 1960s, there finding a fast friend in another comics legend-to-be, Harvey Pekar. Perhaps he did not dive hopelessly into a bad marriage but rather stumbled into a relationship that lasted a fairly long time and only ended badly, with Dana Crumb broke as well as morbidly obese. As a good biographer should, Nadel unpeels one layer of contradiction after another. From Cleveland and a promising (if hackish) job drawing “funny” greeting cards, Crumb made his way up the artistic ladder just as the counter-culture era blossomed. LSD had a big effect on his work, especially in his recuperating of vintage vernacular images of American life earlier in the century—the budding artist indeed seemed to intuit the direction he was traveling. His comics, in mature form, still resemble the amateur efforts created with his brothers when they were kids together, crudely published and sold or given away.

Crumb moved to San Francisco in 1967 and remained in Northern California for over two decades; in Nadel’s telling, these years are full of little surprises. Amidst the dope smoking and love-ins, he and Dana deftly blend in by selling comics from a baby buggy; amidst the rush of assertive, sexually liberated women at that place and time, he also proves to be hopelessly adulterous, so much so that “adultery” does not begin to cover the subject. Still smarting from the brushoffs of his gangly puberty years, he both craves the offerings of women and feels resentful toward them; happily and also unhappily, he takes his solace and his revenge in his comic art. With the id uncensored and increasingly unleashed in his work, the world of underground comix becomes so tied up with Crumb that his comics would sell in excess of a half-million copies, ten times that of his most successful counterparts.

Attacked for good reason by up-and-coming women cartoonists creating their own feminist comix—Trina Robbins and Sharon Rudahl in the lead—Crumb lashed back at them repeatedly, sometimes first apologizing and then digging himself in further. Whether or not his desire to “ride” women with large posteriors pseudo-sexually is misogyny or not is debatable (his female defenders claim they find it sex-positive), but it is hardly any version of normality. In the ’70s, Crumb marries fellow artist, Aline Kominsky, who delivers him from much of his personal hell and into the melting pot of Jewish American culture. He does not learn Yiddish (let alone Hebrew) and feels no vibes for Israel (nor does Aline), but together they explore the contradictions of their shared life, often in humorous collaborative works; their union continues until Kominsky-Crumb’s death in 2022.

The strength of Nadel’s biography rests in no small part on an understanding of what Mad Comics and its creator Harvey Kurtzman meant to Crumb. In a 1977 interview, I asked Crumb how Kurtzman had influenced him and he responded that this is simply how art works: a young artist emulates a master although he feels it is impossible (or at least unlikely) to reach the latter’s level of genius. In the early 1950s Kurtzman and Mad Comics, assaulting Joseph McCarthy amidst the Army Hearings, ridiculed a wide spectrum of mass cultural developments as well as the cliches of mainstream comic art; Mad Magazine, the toned-down version that appeared from 1956 onward, was already something different, less intense, more appropriate for younger readers, and far less dangerous. Crumb wanted to become more dangerous, and he did: Snatch Comics, a 1968 anthology of super-pornographic stories edited by Crumb and including his work as well as that of cartooning comrades such as S. Clay Wilson and Victor Moscoso, assaulted almost every propriety, with Crumb going as far as his imagination could take him.

Weirdo, the magazine Crumb launched in the 1980s, helps mark the shift from the underground comix era to the “alternative comics” paradigm that succeeds it; it had no aim at financial success or particular artistic merit. Instead, it offered a lot of what would come to be known as outsider art, including some comics that could hardly be considered comics. His own gag pages recuperated one of the oddest features of old joke magazines, showing photographs of him engaged in a kind of 1940s pop culture ballet with women in leotards—no real violence, no real sex, yet everybody seemed to have a good time.

After the heyday of the San Francisco years, Crumb lived in Winters, California, in the woods away from the college town of Davis; there he and Aline raised a daughter and produced enough art to keep the family budget intact. Crumb’s work with the ecology-minded newspaper Winds of Change seemed to reflect his larger vision, but his splendid hatred of the rich, their luxuries, and their culture had nowhere to go in Reagan’s America. Making the move to France in 1991 was the final step in Crumb’s journey. Although Aline had the stronger impulse to live in a more beautiful and just society than consumerist USA (new housing “developments” had already grown closer to their home in Winters by 1981), it worked out perfectly for him—he finally got away from the fan-boys and fan-girls, successfully escaping as many of us might also have wished to do. It wasn’t a bad endgame for such a wild trajectory, an arc well summarized and honored in Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life.

Editor’s Note: Paul Buhle’s review of Existential Comics: Selected Stories 1979-2004 by R. Crumb, selected and with an introduction by Dan Nadel, appears in the Summer 2025 print issue of Rain Taxi.

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Nonfiction Reviews

An Image Not a Book

Kylan Rice
Parlor Press ($16.95)

by Jami Macarty

Kylan Rice’s poetry collection An Image Not a Book takes its title from a line in Yeats’s 1917 dialogue poem “Ego Dominus Tuus” (which translates to “I am your Lord”), a phrase originating in turn from Dante’s La Vita Nuova. Rice’s poems craft a “branching opening” conversation with Yeats, Dante, and the reader, boldly asserting, “I am here to try to tell you / what I love.”

What better place to begin such a conversation than a wedding. Opening with “Epithalamium,” the collection introduces the marital scene and offers the first image to the reader’s eye: “a banquet in a field.” The following poem, “Garland,” presents ten intertwined portraits described as “[a garland of souls].” Together, these two poems chronicle the “strain / of assembly” and cue up the collection’s themes of eros—intimacy, promise, betrayal, abandonment, and apology. Throughout this exploration, Rice artfully holds “in tension” the observer and the observed, reminding us that “looking / in” does not equate to truly participating.

The reasons behind the poet’s sense of separation seem to relate to the concept of the “book” more than to that of “image,” suggesting a struggle with the very nature of his art form. Rice yearns for an image of “fidelity” intertwined with “levity” to soothe the restlessness accompanying his quest for connection amidst disconnection. His poems pulse with this tension, enacting a “bent-thorn syntax” and often evoking a feeling of wading through water “to the thigh” or “hip-high.” After being “loosened by a wound,” the poet craves fidelity to self and others, yet he grapples with the fear of losing sight of the line between realism and idealism, caught between “the object in the image” and “my desire for it.”

Ultimately, Rice’s poems wade deeply into the anxiety of the search and wrestle with the haunting fear of not finding the elusive ideal image. Striving for “something less / / than groundedness,” Rice beckons readers to join him in a quest for love amidst the paradox of existence as it “speaks its alternating oath of late / and soon.”

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Poetry Reviews

The Matrix and Eecchhooeess

The Matrix
N. H. Pritchard
Primary Information ($20)

Eecchhooeess
N. H. Pritchard
DABA ($24)

by Richard Kostelanetz

N. H. Pritchard (1939-1996) was a New York-based artist and writer whose The Matrix Poems 1960-1970, originally published by Doubleday, has the significant distinction of remaining the most innovative one-author collection of poetry ever released by a commercial house in the U.S. It was groundbreaking at the time not only for its typographical and verbal departures, but for its author’s race, as fifty years ago, in the wake of Civil Rights protests in 1968, our commercial publishers became more open to Black authors than they had been before. It is only appropriate that his innovation be honored now in our current time with new reprints of his two major works.

The Matrix’s cover had a knockout black and white photograph of its author with half of his face in shadows, wearing a collared shirt with a tie and jacket. Pritchard looked elegant, much as Ralph Ellison was elegant—but whereas Ellison emerged from a fatherless family, Pritchard’s father was a physician who immigrated to New York City from “the Antilles,” as his son so elegantly put it. Whereas Ellison didn’t finish Tuskegee, Pritchard went to prep schools before taking his B.A. with honors from NYU and continuing with graduate school in art history.

When I first met Pritchard in the early 1970s, soon after The Matrix was published, he greeted me in his darkened studio apartment on Park Avenue. Though only a year older than me, he seemed not just more sophisticated, but unique in all the ways that a creative person can be. Pritchard’s personal letters resembled the illuminated manuscripts of William Blake; to my copies of his books he added not just a personal inscription but a handmade enhancement of colors and lines that I treasure.

The poems in The Matrix appeared in several formats that still look alternative today. Words were crushed together; some were printed upside down. Weighty phrases were repeated within the page. Words both familiar and unfamiliar had extra spaces between the letters. While some pages had just a large single letter, on other pages the print ran to the outside edges, suggesting that it might well have continued beyond it. The Matrix challenged how a writer’s Collected Poems should look.

As for the texts themselves, they approached the limits of semantic comprehension, as Pritchard’s ideal was what he called the “transreal,” a reflection of his awareness of mystical, supernatural modernism in the visual arts. On an opening recto page was this epigraph for himself: “Words are ancillary to content.” Later in the book, the fourth page of “Gyre’s Galax” repeats the phrase “above beneath” from top to bottom, sometimes amended by the words “it” and “in.” Pritchard wanted to take poetry into a domain previously unknown, one that was indeed above beneath.

In 1971 a second Pritchard collection, Eecchhooeess, appeared from New York University Press; it is perhaps the most radical one-author poetry volume ever to appear from an American university press. Repeating many of the same challenges posed by The Matrix, Eecchhooeess is no less brilliant; its eerie sounds and typographical innovations chimed right in with the Black Arts movement of the day (Pritchard was affiliated with the literary collective Umbra).

The most unusual quality of these new reprints of Pritchard’s books is that they appear intact, with their original front covers duplicated, each totally devoid of any new preface or afterword. Not even Pritchard’s biographical note is updated; only the title and copyright pages are different. While contemporary readers might wish for more background on this utterly unique writer, to get such authentic reprinting a whole half-century later is a treat for fans of groundbreaking poetry indeed.

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