Book Review

Colour / Grammar

Greg Thomas
zimZalla

by Ross Hair

Colour / Grammar, Greg Thomas’s collection of 49 new and redesigned postcard-poems, offers an ideal introduction to the work and sensibilities of this prolific Glasgow-based poet, artist, and critic. Thomas is the author of one of the most authoritative critical studies of British concrete poetry, Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (Liverpool University Press, 2019) and more recently, with the poet and publisher Julie Johnson, has co-edited a new selection of Edwin Morgan’s poetry, Home in Space: Selected Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry (Reaktion Books, 2026). Although the poems that comprise Colour / Grammar wear this learning lightly, the concrete poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay (one of the subjects of Border Blurs) and the minimal poetry of Aram Saroyan are very much Thomas’s touchstones: “The feints and tricks I learned from Finlay’s work, but also from Saroyan’s,” Thomas claimed in a 2022 feature at the online zine SPAM, “are still probably the basis of what much of what I’m doing (in particular, the page not as an invitation to forward movement but as a visual frame).”

The influence of Saroyan is most evident in Thomas’s one-word poems, including “blissom” which conflates a prominent subject of Japanese haiku (blossom) with the sensation it elicits (bliss). However, whereas Saroyan utilized the solecism (most famously, misspelling “light” with an extra “ght”), Thomas’s one-word poems tend towards the portmanteau and neologism. The distinctive color of “blissom” also gives some indication of how, according to Thomas, the poems in Colour / Grammar explore “the possibilities of colour as grammar and grammar as colour.” In this instance, the rich plum of the word “blissom,” printed on a pale pink background, makes the ephemeral phenomena of blossom all the more tangible and vivid.

In terms of its colors and design, Colour / Grammar recalls Finlay’s Poems To Hear and See (Macmillan, 1971), a colorful collection of some of his most familiar and accessible concrete poems aimed at junior readers. In the case of Colour / Grammar, however, the page is replaced with the postcard—a simple format that suits the brevity of Thomas’s bright, playful poems. Maximizing the possibilities of simple colors and verbal configurations, the postcards never outsay their welcome and encourage being displayed and shared. Indeed, two copies of each postcard are included in the orange box that houses them, with the idea that the duplicates might be posted to friends and other sympathetic parties. It is a generous sentiment but perhaps one that is rather anachronistic, if not nostalgic, in its harkening back to a different (pre-digital) time when mail was an inexpensive means of communication and exchange.

Many of the poems in Colour / Grammar take a backward glance to evoke the heyday of concrete and visual poetry. In one such poem, for example, the word “sedge” (set in a bold Cooper Black font) is repeated to form a calligram of the grass-like plant which splays and sways against the card’s sage green stock. While this inevitably recalls Apollinaire, the result is also not dissimilar to Mary Ellen Solt’s concrete flower poems such as “Forsythia,” which manifests the titular shrub with the letters of its name. However, whereas Solt makes her shrub bloom by utilizing other methods common to concrete poetry (such as acrostics and encoded symbols), Thomas’s plant is made entirely from the consecutive repetition of “sedge,” which yields the additional words “edge” and “edges.” As a result, Thomas’s calligram makes a playful allusion to the mnemonic rhyme for identifying the plants of the Cyperaceae family: “sedges have edges.”  

Unlike the triangular stems of sedge plants, the poems in Colour / Grammar are themselves rarely “edgy.” This is something that Thomas is evidently conscious of, and a quality that he recognizes in Finlay’s work. In his SPAM feature “Greg Thomas: Ten Things,” Thomas claims he learned from Finlay’s example

that it’s not inherently problematic to make poems that are small, simple, and express a kind of emotional warmth (I find ‘edginess’ quite a facile quality in poetry). The reader or viewer can feel they understand your work, feel a gentleness and love from it, without that signifying some sort of complicity with a damaged world.

If the challenge that comes from cultivating such warmth is to keep the poem from becoming anodyne or trite, then Thomas generally avoids such pitfalls. One way in which he does so is by subtly defamiliarizing otherwise common turns of phrase, making the everyday just a bit more incongruous and strange. In “the buzzing / of instincts / in hedgerows,” for example, Thomas subverts assumptions by substituting what one would expect, “insects,” with the more idiosyncratic “instincts.” Such a feint not only deftly evokes the liveliness of summer hedgerows, but it also conveys their diverse ecologies. In a similar spirit, the satisfyingly sibilant one-word poem “restlessnest” conjures both the insatiability of a burgeoning nest and the harried parents tending it.

Several poems in Colour / Grammar are commendable for how they breathe new life into the otherwise hackneyed subject of dawn. The non-gendered personification in “the dawn / clears / its throat,” for example, deftly ensures that this evocation of the dawn chorus is not mistaken for the less salubrious guttural hacks and hawks of a human early morning riser, while in the more aphoristic “day / breaks // night / mends” and the proverb-like “the dawn / was not / born / yesterday,” Thomas strikes a perfect balance between poignancy and whimsy. While such punning and wordplay confirms the extent to which Colour / Grammar is not an “edgy” collection of poetry, it nevertheless reminds us that the optimism and joy contained in its bright orange box is perhaps something that, in these dark and difficult times, we all need a bit more of right now.

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No God But Us

Bobuq Sayed
Harper ($30)

by Zara Karschay

Bobuq Sayed’s deeply compassionate debut No God But Us takes us ten years back, the tragedy of critical distance apparent on every page. Distance—of time, place, nationality, race, sexuality, and gender identity—is essential to Sayed’s protagonists. Mansur and Delbar meet by chance in Turkey at a political turning point for the country. Through the dual perspectives of these two queer Afghans—one a refugee, the other an American citizen and closeted trans woman—Sayed creates a swirling narrative of intersectionality, a vortex within which their sharply drawn characters must negotiate the world at large.

The novel opens with Delbar’s story in 2015. A recent college graduate, they are heading to a party hosted by their mother Qandul but are instead apprehended, due to a surfaced photo showing them working at a drag club (where they also hope to perform one day). To spare them the family’s judgment, Qandul’s progressive sister Yosra gets Delbar on a flight to Istanbul, where she herself works as a professor.

Mansur takes a very different journey to Turkey. His story begins in Tehran in 2013 among a shadow class of migrant laborers, a perilous journey from Kabul already behind him. Life in Iran, however, is full of social inequities, and when Mansur’s sexuality is discovered, his lover, who lives in the capital’s wealthy north, helps him flee to Istanbul. But the work Mansur finds in Turkey—on roads, in kitchens, as a rent boy—isn’t much better; as Sayed puts it, “the weaker man met the needs of the stronger one.” Refugee status makes life difficult at every turn: Dispersal policies force many to live in rural areas, making urban jobs untenable, and many on the nebulous, slippery path toward asylum have already spent years in legal limbo, waiting for their papers to be processed while they keep out of trouble—including not joining protests where they’d otherwise find community. In the novel’s most tragic story arc, an Iranian trans woman is arrested at a pride march and finds that her new criminal record has devastated any chances of her being granted asylum.

Both Delbar and Mansur strive for a dignified, free life while finding belonging and stability as refugees. Through Yosra’s contacts, Delbar is offered an internship with Leif, a German “Anderson Cooper looking dude” who runs PeaceMeals, an aid program for queer and transgender refugees. While Delbar senses a performative dimension to Leif’s allyship, they also recognize an opportunity to help those with similar experiences. Mansur, despite his memories of western aid groups exploiting people in his homeland, is drawn to the degree of protection that Leif offers, whether it be from racial profiling, case worker distrust, or other refugees’ assumptions that being from Afghanistan makes it easier for him to apply for asylum.

Leif soon adopts an underhanded manner of domination. When he and Mansur become lovers, Leif controls every aspect of their relationship, from their apartment to their sexual partners, and he expects Mansur to reject his Afghan background. But No God But Us spares us the western cliché of the “good immigrant” who shucks the trammels of their past and supplicates to their white savior, focusing on human striving and the desire to be needed instead. Mansur confronts Leif after hearing him tell another aid worker he is “modernizing” the Afghan, and he later resists cultural erasure with a quiet dignity. 

We know Delbar and Mansur must meet, and when they do, Sayed’s prose crackles with energy. Delbar describes intimate moments with phrases that seem plucked from the Persianate literary tradition, e.g., “fondling an ivory wildflower, gazing up at the same forked branches I was staring into, touching me without any point of contact.” No God But Us builds bridges between the critical distances that separate us and shows how deep the waters are that run beneath.

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What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To

Mary Lucia
University of Minnesota Press ($22.95)

by Frank Randall

A groundbreaking and widely acclaimed radio DJ in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, Mary Lucia has played a pivotal role in the development and sustained popularity of indie rock in the Midwest and beyond. Aware of her talent for “connecting with the listener,” her employers at Minnesota Public Radio built a brand around her savvy take on modern music, steeped in reverence for punk, Prince, and pugs (in this case her beloved dogs, not the band). Lucia’s first book is an impressive and attention-worthy memoir that combines a behind-the-scenes account of her unique professional journey with the harrowing story of being targeted by a deranged stalker.

Starting out as host for the eclectic REV105 (“Revolution Radio”) in the 1990s, Lucia’s success as an on-air personality was immediate. With an irreverent attitude that matched her genre-resistant approach to curating rock and roll, she was everyone’s cool friend with an ass-kicking record collection. In this enlightened realm, Jackie Wilson’s “Reet Petite” would be immediately followed by the New York Dolls blasting “Personality Crisis,” then Madonna urging everyone to “Express Yourself,” David Bowie walking the walk on “Heroes,” and Prince burning through “D.M.S.R.” By 2005, she was asked to be the central voice for MPR’s foray into the rock world with the launch of The Current. Her audience followed and the bands played on.

Like many talented performers, however, Lucia’s ease with a radio audience masked an array of personal insecurities, including bouts with anxiety and depression. When unsolicited and inarguably bizarre packages (raw meat, religious artifacts, blurry Polaroids) started to arrive addressed to her in the office mailroom, the mental alarms began sounding. For years, Lucia was the victim of a listener who targeted her with disturbing voice mails, letters professing a delusional romantic connection, and eventually visits to her home despite a restraining order.

How on earth does a person deal with a nightmarish situation like this? Thankfully, part of Lucia’s survival plan included keeping a journal, which not only helped her navigate the experience, but acted as a starting point for this unflinching narrative. Lucia bravely opens up about virtually every aspect of her journey—the professional disruption, the emotional trauma, and the ultimately ineffective legal system, which she navigates with remarkable composure. Lucia felt trapped in a dangerous situation unlike anything she had experienced before: “I was up against an unknown force of mental illness that acted fearlessly. All I could do was sink deeper into the dank hole that had burrowed inside of me.”

The unwanted effects of Lucia’s case impact every aspect of her life: Parents too wrapped up in their own emotional dilemmas to offer support; inept bosses that are not only jealous of your success but want your job as well; well-meaning but misguided help from friends and family; tone-deaf reactions from legal and mental health professionals. Lucia makes her life appear normal for as long as possible, until it becomes impossible. With survival instincts kicking in, she seeks traditional mental health and legal care, but she pivots to improvised methods of self-preservation when the traditional falls short. These lead to unforeseen setbacks and roadblocks on the path to wellness, but Lucia embraces her choices and their consequences with an emotional honesty that is supported by her unrestrained prose. “A lifetime of sticking my neck out for possible beheading is my choice,” she proclaims. “That way the failures (F.A.I.L. = First Attempt in Learning) and successes rest on my shoulders.” Throughout panic attacks, stress-induced shingles, dangerous weight loss, and years of fear for her own safety, she remains amazingly resilient in the face of circumstances beyond her control.

Lucia’s ability to find the humor in the darkest and most unfathomable situations stands out as her remarkable superpower. When she reluctantly sends out the call to her siblings for help, she has one brother (older, and yes, adult) literally swinging from the trees in her yard in a misguided attempt at branch maintenance. The other brother house sits overnight, leaving a note explaining that all was quiet, but he was swiping her vintage leather coat “as payment for standing watch.” Unafraid to portray the dysfunctional family she somehow survived through childhood and her own shortcomings as an adult, Lucia possesses the rare ability to maintain a state of jaded grace in the telling of uncomfortable events.

Lucia’s portrayal of her relationship with her mother is especially poignant—and painful: “When you’re told as a child by your mother that she can’t stand your father and you’re just like him, it does a number on your head. I get it. You don’t like me.” Despite Lucia’s efforts to help her mother deal with her own traumatic past, the adage that no good deed goes unpunished seems to be written in the stars:

     Foolishly, I put aside a lifetime of boundaries to confide in her about the daily fear I was living with. Even I couldn’t have been prepared for her callous dismissal of my current situation.
     “He’s just a fan. Lighten up.”

The editors of this bold memoir deserve special praise for not polishing every rough edge in Lucia’s intensely personal prose. The genuine anxiety, the dark humor, the appreciation for the absurd, the misplaced faith in institutions that should protect us, the awesome power of music when the written word simply can’t rise to the occasion—Lucia wraps her arms around it all and somehow manages to wrestle it to the ground. Understandably shaken, appropriately resentful, but intact. After multiple rounds of unwanted attention, courtroom trauma, and ultimately an unjustified dismissal from an unsupportive employer, she remains defiant. “The system is deeply flawed. Do I accept that? Never.”

Having battled demons in public and in private—and on multiple fronts—Lucia comes through the ordeal with her rock and roll spirit intact. She never downplays the toll it has taken on her outlook and health, but she refuses to let these events define her. “I don’t want to be the face of stalking,” she admits, fully self-aware and realistic about the challenges that still lie ahead. “My eyes are open, and if it’s a heathy dose of anger I need to feel slightly less powerless, so be it.”

What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To provides a deeply moving narrative of the multitude of negative impacts a stalker can have on the life of a victim. There is no happy ending, as any victim would attest, but Lucia has a natural gift for storytelling, and the very existence of this account is a reason for hope. If we are lucky, she will report back on her future endeavors, surrounded by friends, devoted pugs, and eccentric cats, all accompanied by a brilliant playlist.

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What God in the Kingdom of Bastards

Brian Gyamfi
University of Pittsburgh Press ($20)  

by John Bradley

“I was made in Kumasi, Ghana,” states Brian Gyamfi in What God in the Kingdom of Bastards, his stunning debut book of poetry. This is no mere autobiographical detail, for the author’s African heritage is a source that continually enriches this collection’s thirty-five poems. It’s difficult to believe that this is Gyamfi’s first book, as his work exhibits both strong confidence and an original voice.

The very title of the book reflects this originality. While most poetry collections feature a title drawn from a poem in the book, nowhere in these pages will the reader find Gyamfi’s titular phrase. The poem “Kingdom” comes closest, and it does deal with religious matters, though in surprising ways: “It is said, Jesus killed fleas to save his dog. / Even a boy must perform acts of sadism.” The leap between those lines is thought-provoking to say the least. Later in the poem, the speaker tells us, “I once shoved wind into my brother’s mouth, / whispered in his ear, ‘the kingdom of God is a wild animal.’” There’s nothing cliched or reassuring about religion in this book.

Though Gyamfi’s poems are often visionary, they are not romantic, as can be seen, ironically, in “Our Romantics.”  In this playful poem, “The earth shivers and a crowd of poodles / urinate by the streetlight.” Note how the initially cute image of the poodles is undone in the next line. Other unromantic images populate the poem—a cat chasing beetles, someone swallowing a sword—yet a woman in the poem “blooms as a daylily.” Paradoxes abound in Gyamfi’s work.

In “The Tree Carries Water,” set in New Mexico, we hear of a boy rescued from a river. The action is ambiguous but always evocative:

—I write this to understand the sorcerer in Benin:

the breaker of mountains, a heavy voice
in the story of a gardener fetching a boy from the river,

his hand under the heavy current, a beetle climbing a tree

Benin, a West African country not far from Ghana, is known as the birthplace of voodoo, and the poem has the hallucinatory quality often associated with that religion: The relationships between the sorcerer in Benin, the gardener in New Mexico, the voice, the beetle, all seem to shift as the rushing water threatens the boy’s life.  Later in the poem, another layer of complexity is added: “in my thoughts, the sorcerer in Benin is the river.” Rather than confuse, however, the ambiguity adds depth and mystery.

Gyamfi is unafraid to challenge the reader.  The longest poem in the book at twelve pages, “Praxis of Being,” uses a form that resembles a notebook, with entries separated by a dash, and it continually evokes Nobel-Prize-winning Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, not only in an epigraph but in direct references throughout, such as: “Soyinka’s words dictate anger is not a pomposity for justice, you / say, fidgeting.” You should know Soyinka’s work, Gyamfi implies. 

While allusive, “Praxis of Being” is also highly personal. Some of the most moving lines in the book can be found in this poem: “In 2013, I detangled mother’s braids, brushed them out gently / and braided them again. I kissed her long fingers.” The tenderness of this recollection follows the news that “mother will soon lose her memory.” Gyamfi’s most devastating observation, though, might be this double-barreled one near the end of the piece: “We are all just lonely. That’s a quiet sentence.”

Gyamfi’s many Ghanian cultural references can be confusing at first for readers not already familiar—in “New World,” for example, we hear, “The word petrichor does not exist in our language. / There’s no equivalent in Ewe or Ga”—but the poet’s multilingual engagement with sense and meaning making ultimately pays off. “I am a person in many languages,” Gyamfi reminds us later in the book. Like Whitman, his poetic identity is expansive, and his poetry is affecting not despite its complexities, but often because of them. What God in the Kingdom of Bastards introduces an exciting new voice in American poetry, with the promise of more ground-breaking work to come.

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Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department

Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis
Penguin Press ($32)

by Robert Zaller

The original Congress Building of the United States was destroyed by British forces during the War of 1812. It was threatened by a Confederate army during the Civil War. And it was stormed and partially sacked on January 6, 2021, with attendant loss of life and wounded limb, while Congress was seated to confirm the newly elected president and vice president of the country. The attack was instigated by the sitting president, Donald J. Trump, who thus became the nation’s first chief officer to attempt the overthrow of the government he led.

While working on the story of January 6, two investigative reporters for another now-imperiled institution, The Washington Post, realized how America’s prime instrument of law enforcement, the Department of Justice, had been turned into a mockery of itself by its failure to initiate a timely response to the insurrection. This larger story, the saga of the failure of one presidency and the corruption of another, would bring us to the crisis of American democracy we face today. Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis relate that story in Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department.

The immediate response to January 6 was that of Congress. While Trump still sat in office, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi pushed a bill of impeachment through a divided House. Since only a week remained of Trump’s term, the trial in the Senate could only take place after he had left office, and the only punishment available would-be disbarment from future office. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell argued that Citizen Trump would soon be subject to more sweeping action in civil courts, rendering Congressional judgment superfluous, and the impeachment failed.

Further federal action fell to the Justice Department, whose new Attorney General, Merrick Garland, was a seasoned prosecutor and judge. As Leonnig and Davis point out, Garland made a category error from the beginning: While trying and convicting more than 1,500 of those who breached the Capitol on crimes ranging from criminal violence and conspiracy to simple trespass, he left the principal actor untouched. It may fairly be said that this was the greatest misprision of justice in the country’s history, and Leonnig and Davis do say it in crushingly mustered detail. The fault lies, they assert, with Garland himself and his employer, President Joseph R. Biden. Biden’s mistake lay in thinking that, with the country shaken by a lawless regime capped by attempted rebellion and its worst pandemic in a century, the public longed for what a predecessor in not dissimilar times (Warren G. Harding in 1920) had called a “return to normalcy.” But Biden hadn’t reckoned with the political resilience of Donald Trump, who had escaped two impeachments and would now evade punishment at the hands of the state he had nearly overthrown.

This did not mean that Biden and Garland paid no attention to Trump. The bipartisan House Select Committee on January 6, set up at the urging of Pelosi, received much material gathered by the FBI to begin its own investigation. But the Committee had no judicial authority, nor any effective power to compel testimony. What it did do, however, was rivet the public’s attention as no Congressional committee had since the Watergate hearings some fifty years before—which left Biden no choice but to respond to it. Biden also could not ignore the growing pressure both within and outside the Justice Department to deal directly with Trump. When asked whether it should tax those who had defied the Committee’s subpoenas, he answered affirmatively. Less than two hours later, Garland shot back the reply that the Department would make all charging decisions on its own. The lid on Trump had been clamped shut again, and with it, as it turned out, all efforts at holding him to account for January 6.

Garland’s response was predicated on his understanding with Biden that the Justice Department would, after its politicization under the Trump administration, act independently of any outside influence, including the White House. But to have crossed the President in such a manner at the same time challenged Biden’s own responsibility to enforce the laws of the land. His own blunder in speaking publicly was compounded by Garland’s intemperate response. Each man had tied the other’s hands. By the time Garland finally appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to investigate Trump, the clock was already timed to run out, and Biden’s forced withdrawal from his reelection race opened the door to Trump’s return to power.

Leonnig and Davis trace in rich detail the systematic evisceration of the Justice Department during the first year of the second Trump administration. Smith, having finally assembled his case against Trump, was forced to scuttle it. All pending state actions against Trump were dismissed or rendered moot. On Trump’s first new day in office, the convicted January 6 rioters were summarily pardoned—and from that point, the general dismantling of democratic practices and institutions that has undermined the republic was under way.

Injustice is told with novelistic speed and at times breathless complexity, marred only by the occasional colloquialism. So many figures are introduced that a chart of dramatis personae would have been useful. The grit and courage of many within the Justice Department who resisted the travesty it has become deserve chronicling, however, and point to the hope of its eventual restoration.

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I Have Not Considered Consequences

Sherrie Flick
Autumn House Press ($19.95) 

by Wes Blake

As co-editor of the anthology Flash Fiction America (Norton, 2023) and author of two previous short (sometimes very short) story collections, Sherrie Flick has distinguished herself as one of the foremost voices in flash fiction. Flick’s latest collection, I Have Not Considered Consequences, may be her most powerful work yet. The lead story, “Breaking,” opens with a startling image—“The bear holds his heart in his paws”—that resonates throughout. In the stories that follow, Flick chronicles the lives of restless characters, from bears questioning their life path to humans navigating the responsibilities and relationships of middle age amid family rifts and a pandemic—all haunted by a wild moment from their past.

Past and present collide in fascinating ways throughout I Have Not Considered Consequences. “Chlorophyll and Oxidation” revisits the opening story, allowing the characters to reflect on their histories (as well as the book’s key trope):

I’m in my kitchen, but also in Italy, 1991. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
     Now I call up one of the men I traveled with all those years ago . . . We reminisce about it all. The mistakes we made. Our disregard for the future, for consequences. We should have lived together forever, we both say. Single and happy in a city, we say. “But I was feral then,” I say. “I was a bear then, remember?” . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
     We both laugh.
     Eventually, we both cry a little.       

Another tale of maturation, “Lost in Time,” features Matt and Trudy, a Generation X couple navigating pandemic boredom while trying to reconcile who they’ve been with who they are. To break up the monotony, they go on a date night to a new arcade in town: “The building smelled like electronics, the same smell that once wafted out of the arcade in Trudy’s hometown mall. It made her heart pitter-patter. She loved the grease and the wires behind it all. The mechanics. It was so much better than AI or code. Fuck Zoom, she thought.” As they walk home through misty rain holding hands, Trudy recalls the one gig her band (“The Lickers”) played in London: “You didn’t know me in the ‘90s,” she says; “I never cried then.” Rejuvenated by the nostalgia their date provokes, and feeling a renewed sense of connection, they each consider a wilder version of themselves from the past—as well as what they’ve lost and gained by settling down.

Flick’s stories masterfully mine both past and present to recover what has been lost, but the outcome isn’t always rosy: In “Progress,” for example, Martha attempts to quell family dysfunction while circling around the uncomfortable truth that for her and her brother, the present is marred by the hurt in their past. And alas, even bears can lose touch with the feral parts of themselves. In “Arnie and the Bear Think About Risk,” a middle-aged corporate manager bear gives his employee Arnold an extended leave of absence so that he can recover his mojo; he has “become a Ringo kind of guy,” as Arnie himself tells us, “but back then, man, I was Lennon. Lennon!” This causes the manager bear to reflect on his own life and whether he wants to pursue his dream of becoming a piano sensation. Conventional wisdom prevails, however, and the bear admits with a sense of defeat that “there are only so many changes one can make in a lifetime.”

The passage of time is a formidable foil throughout I Have Not Considered Consequences, but there are moments when Flick suggests it can be transcended. “Trench Coat” illuminates such a moment, as a middle-aged woman named Natalie finds a long-lost favorite piece of clothing (the titular coat) and thinks back on when she last wore it. Back then, in the prime of her high school experience, she is oblivious to what the future holds: “this night she’s here to support her friend Christie and to feel, she doesn’t know, a kind of freedom. Just leaving her home and clicking her seatbelt and driving to the school, making that decision. Natalie feels amazing.” Flick deftly writes the entire story in present tense, collapsing the distance between the adult and teen versions of Natalie.

Whether readers wince with recognition or fondly remember the people they have been is largely up to them, but one thing is certain: I Have Not Considered Consequences will have readers pondering how the actions of their own lives have led them to the present moment.

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Fuel

Rosie Stockton
Nightboat Books ($17.95) 

by Walter Holland

Fuel, the second collection by Rosie Stockton, presents a complex poetry of disruptive and transformative language culminating in a strange lyric beauty. Central to this book is a queer love for a “you,” be it an aspect of the speaker, a lover, the Earth, or the creational force which made our world and still drives it forward. Their poems often emerge in cascading columns, outpourings fraught with evolutionary images from natural history, but always tied to the ache of human desire and love. Stockton’s style is an adept process of collage and décollage, taking strips of writings from visionary poets who sought to explain the mysteries of our world and the perplexing nature of love and combining them into an unstable accretion of oddly colliding imagery, an admirable and unsettling bric-a-brac. Stockton offers us their own creation story for our fragmented world, and how it is fueled, why we are driven and continue living. Is it by desire, by love? They do not offer easy answers.

The notes section reveals the collection’s ambition and lineage, explaining that “This book reverbs with the words of others” mentioning Ovid’s, Metamorphoses, Bernadette Mayer’s Soule Serman, Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations and other texts including Jacques Lacan’s Desire and its Interpretation. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written in 8 CE by the Roman poet, defied easy classification and alluded to “transformations” such as those from animals to humans, inanimate objects to humans, one sex to another sex, representing gender as mutable. In this sense Metamorphoses has recently been seen as a queer text, one that posits transsexuality and non-binary gender as inherent, and, that the entire world is mutable and shape-shifting, epicurean and materialistic, made of atoms ever reconfigured as Lucretius described.

A broad genre-defying poem of mythology and literature, Ovid’s poem addressed the myths of transformation, and the recurring theme of love, both personal love and love personified by the gods and nature. Stockton nods to this mythic slant in the collection’s “Pumpjack” section. There, Stockton takes us from “layers of dead sea creatures” through “mud and plankton” to “landing on air” to “shale rock” and “oil fields,” “Roman fascism” to “global big block stores.” Stockton moves through evolutionary, geologic, and human time. There are interesting flashes as well of Rimbaud’s symbolist and fin de siècle surreal imagery, illustrating the illusory world of transformations, synesthesia, and changes in perception. They speak of

          velvet corpses, polluted, unassimilable each unit
our aromas muzzled together
                  a Luddite tactic too heavy to lift
lulling tariffed cargo with uninsured joints
           murderous orators in ecstasy

As with Ovid’s transformations, often metatextual and embedded within funny and absurd grammatical and narrative constructions, Stockton creates with Fuel their own metamorphoses, perhaps drawing on their perspective of a non-binary life, a life that understands the absurd transformational shifts in gender, the upturning of those myths, and the resulting disruption to our present-day creation myths and varied beliefs on human behavior.

In fact their poems seethe with ongoing internal and external shifts, doubts, social critiques, guilt, anguish, and ceaseless revolt against itself, which Stockton alludes to in the book’s epigraph from Frank Bidart’s “Guilty of Dust”: “Whether you love what you love//or live in divided ceaseless revolt against it//what you love is your fate.”

In “Dispersal,” Stockton writes:

            I finger a bur
            I want to be nothing
            but of things

            & if I am more me
            next to you
            it’s because relation
            made me this way

like light, you hit me
when I ask you to

I let flood emboss me
I dress up straw men
just to find new ways
to love all I extravagantly
destroy

braced for fire season
all that makes us
possible, before our candle
swallows the wick
and that summer darkness drenches us
           here, I feel the story so many ways
           I have to lay down

Fuel is not within the Language school of poetry or adjacent elliptical styles of previous decades per se; rather, it responds to and moves into Stockton’s own hybrid language for the current world of streaming and the fragmented flow of news and information, where verbs are often mismatched to nouns, metaphors are always mixed, pronouns are transferred fluidly, and synesthesia holds sway. Stockton exhibits wildly inventive phrases such as “I let flood emboss me” and “summer darkness drenches us,” capturing with virtuosity the new argot of our impatient texting world, with its autofill distortions, purposeful interruptions, opposing images taken from advertising and capitalistic speech, all of it joined or turned around. But in this sonic disjoint there is the address to a “you,” a “you” which may be the speaker, a facet of the speaker, or a beloved other. This makes for rare and wonderous images, mashups of verbs and nouns and adjectives in a viscous emulsion.

Fuel is full of humor, but like in Old English there is provocative and active physical roughness:

           the verification system we annihilate
the shackled fantasy of aching feet, adrenal shame
           and lip liner in the cozy hour molding fantasy of intimacy
how oil money rots virile our pleasure leaking to the front-end strike
                  and back-end theft slipping through power. . .

Also from “Dispersal:”

we are the only people
today shrugging stunning
how the stolen Snake River
confronts stone
volcanic battery life
surges hungry snacks
litter my lining
strained for you
this is loving. I walk so
fast wanting water
eddies to ghost, wanting
to point myself out
to you, there, there
and there

Stockton’s poems move us through a world littered with units of free-floating language, from “Chevron’s unliberated future scenarios” to “eddies of ghost”; they show us how human desire and love always seek expression, always point toward the mysterious soul “there, there/ and there.” Perhaps most importantly, they show us transformation is possible and has been the basis of all creation since the dawn of time.

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Elegies of the Earth

Selected Poems

Ahmad Shamlou
Translated by Niloufar Talebi
World Poetry ($24)

by Patrick James Dunagan

The poetry of Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000) towers over 20th-century Iranian literature, but has been too little appreciated outside the Middle East. Fortunately, Niloufar Talebi’s translations in Elegies of the Earth offer the most comprehensive selection of his poems yet to appear in English. Shamlou, who never earned a high school diploma and was imprisoned several times, found in poetry a venue for expressing the inexplicable. He eschewed traditional Persian poetic forms, writing free verse that blended the richness of Persian visual tropes and surrealist leaning metaphors with a stylized self-scrutiny. As Talebi describes in an introduction, Shamlou’s poems “synthesize East and West, the classical with the contemporary, the high and low to invent language that propelled Persian poetry into the pulse of a rapidly evolving Iran. . . . Without sacrificing its depth, he democratized his literary mode, giving voice to the ‘everyman’ in a range of registers.”

The clarity and immediacy of Shamlou’s work is indeed striking. What exactly a poem is “about” may not be entirely clear, but the imagery and associated feeling are always animated; as well, there’s an easy-going dreamlike fluidity to his descriptions of abstruse scenes, though they are nevertheless loaded with emotional heft. Take these lines from “I Can’t Help But Be Beautiful”:

 in my world
 blood
           is never the spirit laid bare
 and the fear of lead
                                doesn’t deter the partridge
from its strut

Talebi knew Shamlou personally, and she attests to his magnetism, saying, “he was the sun around which everyone at my parents’ secret literary salons in Tehran gathered. I recall him abruptly retreating from our bustling living room, where he was holding court, into a bedroom because a poem had seized him, demanding immediate transcription.” Even if enigmatic at times, his poems are deeply personal; in Shamlou’s own words, “My work is my complete autobiography. Poetry isn’t just an interpretation of life—it’s life itself.” He embeds weighted depth into mundane existence, as in “Still Life”:

An obscure book and
a burnt-to-ashes cigarette next to the forgotten cup of tea.

A forbidden thought
on the mind.

While Talebi’s selection of poems, drawn from the full range of Shamlou’s oeuvre, succeeds in delivering some sense of his poetic purview, one might wish for more commentary upon his life and the poems themselves. Talebi supplies footnotes for many of the poems, but they leave much unsaid. For instance, Shamlou has a number of poems scattered throughout volumes across the years with an overarching title of “Nocturnal,” which would seem to indicate some specific reference linking these poems together for him (a disrupted poem-series coming in fits and starts over an extended period of time)—yet Talebi supplies no information in this regard. As if in expectation of such grousing, she offers this short explanation: “I had prepared a lengthy introduction filled with biography and analysis, drawn from my previous writings about Shamlou. But let’s just get straight to the poems.”

Given ongoing current developments within Iran—where the people are in a perpetual state of peril under the brutality of the regime, thousands have been gunned down in the streets for daring to rise up and express discontent, and war with the United States continues—Shamlou’s poetry is a welcome demonstration of the vibrant cultural and imaginative resources of the Persian people and a dependable bulwark to lean against whatever the future holds. Let’s let him have the last word with these lines from “Nocturnal (Among the Eternal Suns)”:

Your gaze
    is the fall of tyranny—
a gaze that dressed
                               my bare soul
                                                     in love
so fully that now
                            the darkest night of never
feels like nothing but a comedy of ironies.

Your eyes told me
tomorrow
      is a new day—

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

Erato's Inbox

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
Xanadu Press ($28)

by Kieron Murphy     

Erato has always been a busy girl. One of the Nine Muses of ancient Greek lore, she ruled over lyric poetry and inspired lovers to pen countless romantic songs. These days, she keeps up with the times, managing her overflowing text feed by replying to supplicants with words befitting a legendary cypherpunk with a cryptocurrency all her own. She was born from the union of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, who granted speech to humans—so she knows a thing or two about being an influencer. 

In Erato’s Inbox, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright tells us in a preface that he wanted to “write from her viewpoint, as opposed to writing about her.” He also notes that we have precious few fragments from ancient texts, such as those of Sappho, on which to base our understanding of what Erato meant to the “ghostly voices” of antiquity. But these bits and pieces are enough for him to offer “a negative space or vacuum” to bring this muse’s messages through the centuries. “Erato herself is timeless,” states Wright.

The book is constructed as a series of imagined inquiries, over the course of one week, by Erato’s many admirers—male and female, ancient and modern. These suitors anachronistically express their “affection and everlasting lust”; she replies to her would-be lovers in extraordinarily rich fragments, her words “especially loose-lipped and bawdy” (she’s related to Eros, after all). Under the username ’Muser, she spits out innuendos such as, “Use me, Mister, as your inside guide. We can make each other come alive.” She doubles down on ribald double-entendre whenever possible. Although she’s the queen of odes, she’s nobody’s strophe wife. 

We get the word “lyrical” from the musical instrument Erato mastered; most refer to it as a lyre, but its proper name is a kithara, and it’s the instrument from which all guitars emerged. So, she’s also the first rock star. And Wright makes sure we know that her tastes run more alternative these days than any other genre, placing her squarely in the Downtown Scene with cultural references from Tompkins Square to the Howl! poetry club. 

Erato’s replies come in punchy bunches, saturated with signifiers. In “Reply All” she begins, “Dear Lovers, ‘Cross star strewn stretches of time: I open for your eyes, my inbox—and my outbox—to share with you my musings,” before the floodgates open further:

I am a contranym from way back, e.g., sanction.
Wind up. Bolt. Buckle. Cleave.
I can be your counter threshold sieve.

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

I offer a remnant of the permanent
to whoever pens a pennant on love’s imminence.

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

My lover’s tongue is a tonic
whose lyrics are a potion.

This picaresque romp through the ages is wonderfully choreographed by Barbara Rosenthal, using AI-generated artwork that combines surrealism with bright humor. The collaborators used the DALL-E engine from OpenAI to create images for every page, using prompts such as: “Guitar fingers nailing the light in a garden of violets.” The combination of talents produces a book that is as fun as it is heroic.

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Wake Now in the Fire

A Story of Censorship, Action, Love, and Hope

Jarrett Dapier and AJ Dungo
Ten Speed Graphic ($24.99)

By Hank Kennedy

Censorship, Robert Heinlein once remarked, is “like demanding grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.” Nevertheless, there have long been those who want to ban books. Comics have often been a prime target for censors, from the 1950s anti-comics crusade that resulted in congressional hearings to current challenges at schools and public libraries.

Jarrett Dapier and AJ Dungo’s Wake Now in the Fire fictionalizes the real-life banning of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis from Chicago Public Schools in 2013. Offering a comic book counterblast to CPS’s stance, this well-wrought graphic novel showcases the folly of censorship and the power students can have when they actively defend their freedom to learn and read.

Dapier, a real-life librarian, was inspired to write the book by research he did while in graduate school. That he conducted interviews with participants in the protests and sent Freedom of Information Act requests gives his fictional events the air of authenticity. Chicago’s political and social issues are depicted clearly in this context: for example, in the book, CPS claims the ban “sounds like something made up by the teachers union,” which scans as accurate considering that Chicago’s teachers had just gone on strike the previous year. Clearly, there were still bitter feelings.

The students are active in asserting their rights to read: They organize a demonstration, a read-in, and a mass meeting, and the school newspaper’s sleuths try to get to the bottom of who ordered Persepolis’s banning. To humanize the main characters, the creators weave the struggle against the book ban with more conventional YA drama: Aoife’s father is an alcoholic in denial; Weston’s cousin is missing; Didi worries about fulfilling the educational aspirations of her parents. This gives the story variety and prevents it from getting too one-note. Dapier and Dungo never lose sight of the fact that these are kids, going through the process of maturing into adults.  

There are multiple sequences showing the unintended consequences of censorship. By banning Persepolis, the school administrators have created a forbidden fruit: When the book is returned to the school’s libraries, students clamor for it, wanting to see what all the fuss is about. The same has happened with more recent book bans, as when schools in McMinn County, Tennessee banned Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, only to see the book top sales charts decades after its release.

Despite the heroic example set by Chicago students, there have been further attempts to ban Persepolis from other school districts; California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas have all been sites of challenges to the book. Perhaps the release of Wake Now in the Fire will discourage further bans. It’s also possible that this title may end up banned itself, given its language and challenges to authority. If that happens, it will be in good company. The protest sign used by one of the story’s students will then find new life: “Give me books or give me death.”

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