Book Review

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—

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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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Attention-Seeking Behavior

Aea Varfis-van Warmelo
Graywolf Press ($17) 

by Zara Karschay                            

The narrator of Aea Varfis-van Warmelo’s debut novel Attention-Seeking Behavior is emphatic in her account of how she once found a man dead in the snow: She was first on the scene, she tells us, but this event has left no enduring mark on her life; she even managed to eat her croissant on her journey home. She is emphatically lying, however, and she wants us to know that, because soon after the opening scene, the narrator gives another account of the body she found, only now it is entirely changed—different place, different death.

Through the eyes of this fascinating antihero, Varfis-van Warmelo explores the lure of a fictional life over lived reality. Attention-Seeking Behavior takes on “truthiness” with a sprightly wit, moving beyond the belligerent screed that facts don’t care about your feelings and towards the even bleaker premise that “facts are very often irrelevant.” The novel’s narrator gestures towards the simpering advice offered by erstwhile academics turned social media commissars and body-language absolutists to underscore her point; she holds a particular fascination for the real-life psychologist Paul Ekman (1934-2025), a divisive but nonetheless powerful figure in the study of emotions whose much-debated work came to influence U.K. and U.S. police interrogation techniques.

Outside of these preoccupations, the novel’s protagonist tries to live the “normal” life of a woman in her mid-twenties. The result is invigorating; Varfis-van Warmelo has a clear eye for parsing the exploits of the emergent creative class. Her protagonist accumulates writing and “research” jobs where she is at the mercy of opportunists making the most of a post-COVID, libertarian world in which tasks are outsourced to the lowest bidder. Interactions with others are transactional—a string of lovers who fill a need; friends in ephemeral chat groups.

Somewhere along the slip-slide of pseudo-science, zero-hour contracts, and social obligations, our protagonist finds that, at best, her lies require pristine project management to operate smoothly. At worst, though, they might dismantle her blossoming relationship with “Normal Ben,” a man she regrets having wrapped in her untruths. And yet, she pathologically keeps returning to the lies that give her life structure. All this hints at a hidden trauma on the verge of coming to light, but Varfis-van Warmelo spares us any sentimentalism either way—her protagonist is unashamedly circuitous and absolutely compelling as a result.

Attention-Seeking Behavior takes a long look at the act of detection. “You should know,” the narrator’s refrain, is a double play, suggesting a contract of confidentiality between reader and narrator while also scolding the reader for their lack of awareness. As we attempt to cobble together a version of the truth, given what we know about our shifty protagonist and the shaky girders of police interrogation, the narrator sets a clear boundary—“the lyric I is not a documentary I”—goading the reader into facing their own voyeurism and inviting the question: Are we looking for the truth or for a confession?

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

Touched by the Presence

From Blondie's Bowery and Rock and Roll to Magic and the Occult

Gary Lachman
Inner Traditions ($30)

by Luke Gilfedder              

Few musicians in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame go from earning gold records to writing biographies of Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, and Madame Blavatsky. Yet Gary “Valentine” Lachman—the former Blondie bassist who penned the hit single “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear”—has long resisted categorization. In his latest book, he turns an analytical lens on his own life story, offering wide-ranging assessments of the twentieth-century philosophers and literary thinkers who shaped his evolution from comic-book-obsessed misfit to CBGB-era rock star to serious student of the esoteric tradition.

Spanning from the early 1970s through the 1990s, Touched by the Presence is as much about the books Lachman encounters on his journey as it is about the cultural icons he meets along the way. Indeed, among his teenage anecdotes of living with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in pre-gentrification New York, the most enduring image is of Lachman freezing in Blondie’s Bowery loft on Christmas Eve, burning Jimi Hendrix posters to keep warm while reading Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.

Blondie’s meteoric rise from poverty to New Wave stardom provides a heady backdrop to Lachman’s inner odyssey: the story of how a self-styled “library cormorant” from working-class Bayonne, New Jersey—primed by Silver Age comics and Lovecraft’s cosmic horror—discovers his true calling after stumbling upon a tattered copy of Colin Wilson’s philosophical treatise The Occult, borrowed from Tommy Ramone. The memoir’s emotional crux is Lachman’s meeting with Wilson in Cornwall, which he recalls as the first time he was “ever starstruck”—no small claim from a man who has argued with David Bowie and gotten drunk with Iggy Pop.

The latter half of the memoir follows Lachman’s immersion in Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way” movement, Crowley’s O.T.O., and his work at Los Angeles’s iconic metaphysical bookshop, Bodhi Tree. A well-written life is as rare as a well-spent one, and it is to Lachman’s credit that these maturer years read no less compellingly than his early punk adventures. His portrayal of embracing dual identities like the comic-book heroes of his youth—philosophy student by day, New Age bookseller by night—is particularly effective in capturing the book’s central tension between intellectual skepticism and spiritual hunger.

The memoir concludes on the eve of Lachman’s flight to London to become a full-time writer, twenty years on from that freezing Christmas in the Bowery—a satisfying first-act close that leaves both author and reader poised on the brink of what comes next. As much an intellectual bildungsroman as a memoir, Touched by the Presence is a characteristically idiosyncratic contribution to the otherwise generic annals of rock autobiography—erudite, irreverent, and refreshingly learned.

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Ecstasy

Alex Dimitrov
Alfred A. Knopf ($29)

by Walter Holland              

Alex Dimitrov, a clear and artful descendent of Frank O’Hara, richly appropriates the heady musings of the 1980s and 1990s, when Nan Goldin photoshoots in despondent shadowy doorways and bathroom stalls documented a version of New York City that has all but disappeared. Take “Another Party,” an early poem in his new collection Ecstasy, which begins:

            An orange streak in the sky!
            Before I go in I smoke
            with the roses on Fifth.
            They’re drenched from the rain
            and perfectly dressed.
            The party is beautiful.
            The windows are French.
            The windows are open
            although it’s not time
            to jump out of them yet!

Here, Dimitrov mimics the whimsy and sarcasm of O’Hara’s blithe conversational banter and “Personism,” adding a nice dose of Dorothy Parker’s flippant bite. Skilled at capturing the camp cadences of the past, Dimitrov takes us through the lonely quotidian of 1980’s and ‘90’s East Village bohemianism; he can speak the dark New York chic of Capote as he name-drops designer labels, makes cocktail banter, and pines away with belabored sexual longing in his favored Manhattan restaurant. His range of settings roams from trendy bar to trendier eatery, always pitch-perfectly capturing the despairing intonations (laced with shots of acidic self-pity) that attend the sophisticate poet. The collection’s queer urban voice feels generally authentic, though at moments a bit posed and heavy on the world-weariness.

Boredom in the midst of privilege and American materialistic decadence seems just one of Dimitrov’s fallback themes. “Gold Amex,” for example, glows with cynicism:

The city glitters like a gold Amex.
A guy lifts his shirt and shows you his scar.
You lose your ID. The palms rustle.
Someone asks if it’s Tuesday . . .

Dimitrov is fascinated with the disillusioned cadences of American writers who wallowed in the wake of New York’s heyday, but the East Village of queer criminals and dissident bad boys no longer exists as he conceives it; his jaded cosmopolitanism is almost now a genre in itself in American literature. Though at times repetitive or nostalgic, his soliloquies are magnificently melancholy, and his flickers of international settings serve the poems nicely, as in “Paris”:

                                            I drank holy water
            from the church on Rue du Temple.
            I couldn’t remember names
            and I couldn’t remember hours
            especially after ten, after sunset
            after everything I thought I wanted
            was here and not mine anymore.

Here, Dimitrov mixes Weltschmertz with just the right accord of wit, humor, and vulnerability. One senses a lonely reach for mid-century drugs-sex-rock-and-roll nihilism and the desire for a new entourage of rebel co-conspirators—though he may have to settle for the less glamorous company of jaded millennials.

Despite my sense of his manqué poetic voice, Dimitrov is a poet of effete aesthetic savvy and emotional truth who understands lacerations of spirit. There is something of Fitzgerald in him, a tragic sensibility; his urbane ennui has the bored auteur spirit of Andy Warhol in his diaries (in fact the cover image is taken from Warhol’s 1964 film Blow Job, a fitting bit of kitsch), as well as the raw, desolate view of David Wojnarowicz. He’s good at reflecting a past of elitist boredom, educated solipsism, and melancholy, but if he’d step out of the shadows and address the hard realities of now with that deeper voice he conceals within, he would better help us to feel the currency of the new and the present.            

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