Mixed Genre Reviews

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

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

The Mundus

N. H. Pritchard
Primary Information ($20)

by Richard Kostelanetz

When I reviewed in these pages the reprinting, fifty years later, of two books of N. H. Pritchard’s highly innovative poetry, I assumed that no more books would appear by this Jamaican American author, who died in 1996. I was wrong. Primary Information, which had previously reissued his 1970 collection The Matrix, has published his manuscript of The Mundus, which I would characterize as the first masterpiece of typographic abstract “graphic” fiction. I emphasize abstract because it differs from Emmett Williams’s Sweethearts (1967), likewise a typographic fiction and likewise a masterpiece (composed only with words made from the seven letters in its title), but explicitly about love. Considering himself to be a spiritual “transreal” artist, Pritchard regarded aesthetic abstraction as superior to, say, representational portrayals of religious themes.

While the publisher presents The Mundus as a single continuous text, it may also be read as a sequence of shorter narratives, each with its own typographic signature that changes visually from page to page, thus suggesting narrative, before skipping onto a different typographic signature. If this book is “a novel with voices,” as Pritchard reportedly suggested, then it could be read as monologues by several visually distinct visual “voices,” some of whom speak words and pseudo-words, others just certain letters. For instance, the book opens with over forty pages of the letter O—just the letter O—both upper case and lower case, distributed over the page’s entire field, occasionally with the addition of a few short words. Another voice says “sh” in a single horizonal line without spaces continuously over eighteen pages.

As innovative as Pritchard’s narratives still are, what marks this book as belonging to the 20th century, rather than the 21st, is that all the letters are roughly the same size, because they were produced on a typewriter. Had Pritchard survived into this century, he surely would have exploited the enormous typographic opportunities now offered the visual poet composing on a home computer.

This new edition of Pritchard’s magnum opus includes a short afterword by Paul Stephens, a young but already distinguished scholar of avant-garde literature. And now that The Mundus has (re)appeared, one wonders if other extant Pritchard material—work only published in magazines and anthologies or previously unpublished—might be collected and released. Until then, The Mundus must be seen to be read, let alone believed.

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

Autobiography of a Book

Glenn Ingersoll
AC Books ($24)

by Mike Bove

How does a book become a book? Do authors have actual creative agency, or are they instruments of unseen forces, translators of an unspoken language? These questions are the beating heart of Glenn Ingersoll’s Autobiography of a Book, an inventive, fun, and wildly philosophical reading experience.

In the Romantic era, artists and writers rediscovered an ancient musical instrument played by invisible currents: the Aeolian harp. Named for the Greek god of wind, it’s essentially a set of strings fixed to a long hollow box placed before an open window or on a flat surface outdoors; the strings convert wind energy into sound, haunting and ethereal. The Romantics loved the Aeolian harp as a metaphor for how the artist is simply a tool of nature, a way for natural forces to make themselves known.

Autobiography of a Book begins with a question followed immediately by an answer: “When does life begin? Life begins with an utterance. A word.” It is not the first nor the last question the book asks its reader, and gradually it becomes clear that Book itself, the protagonist and narrative voice, is asking because it really wants to know: What does it mean to exist, and how is life lived? “When did you know you existed? Does a cat know it exists? Does an elephant? What about a monk or a nun?”

This investigation of existence is often playful, framed with disarming humor and wit. It might be tempting to dismiss Book’s continual self-questioning as naive navel-gazing, but to do so would be to miss Ingersoll’s ability to echo the unconscious questioning that takes place in the human mind at any given moment. We are constantly at play with questions, seeking answers we may never get: How did I get here, what do I do next, what am I for? Book’s voice pivots from sarcasm to humility and authority and back again, proclaiming, “Reality is whatever I say it is.” We can’t deny that in so many ways our reality is a construct of our bouncy, confused minds, constantly filtering stimuli and making sounds out of the breeze.

Fun isn’t always part of the process of being. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, as Book freely admits: “I don’t want to be written right now. If you are reading me, that’s okay, I guess. You are just looking. But being written—it feels too much. It feels as though I am being wrenched from the spiritual to the . . . to the mortal.” One of Ingersoll’s primary narrative devices is Book’s vacillation. In one section, Book might be resentful of the reader, of being thrust into existence; in the next, Book might fawn over the reader’s benevolence: “it is only due to your unexpected mercy, it is only because of your infinite compassion, the grace you grant with a blink of your eye. It is for you I live. Without you I am nothing. Nothing!”

The visual design of the book also deserves attention. Autobiography of a Book begins with bright white type on black pages that slowly lighten to gray, mirroring the darkness of non-existence from which Book gradually emerges. About halfway through, the pages are light enough to warrant a shift from white type to black. Appropriately enough, Book’s first works in black type are “I am alive.” From here the pages continue to lighten, and by the time the book concludes, they are fully white, signaling Book’s achievement of existence, total and complete.

Just as the Romantics saw themselves as Aeolian harps, translating the vibrations of nature into poems and paintings, so too does Ingersoll harness the invisible forces residing within an author. The result is Book, who cajoles the reader into offering it life—for just as music needs a listener to hear it, so too does Book need a reader to read it. With Autobiography of a Book, Ingersoll invites the reader into a truly collaborative thought exercise and makes it both fulfilling and fun.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

The Thinking Root

The Poetry of Earliest Greek Philosophy

Translated by Dan Beachy-Quick
Milkweed Editions ($18)

by John Bradley

There’s something about the writing of the ancient Greeks that calls out to the present like a mythical siren; Kenneth Rexroth, Dudley Fitts, Mary Barnard, and Anne Carson are a few of the translators who have heard this siren call. Dan Beachy-Quick is another, as shown by his recent translations of Sappho (Wind-Mountain-Oak, Tupelo Press, 2023) and sixth-century BCE Greek poets (Stone-Garland, Milkweed Editions, 2020). Now, with The Thinking Root, he offers skillful translations of some early Greek philosophers: Heraclitus, Thales, Empedocles, and five others.

Beachy-Quick’s sensitive translations use fresh language to cast new light on the words of these early thinkers. Before discussing his translations, though, it’s necessary to consider his approach to these texts, which he shares in an introduction:

The hope of this small volume of translations is to offer some experience of what it might be to think as these thinkers thought. To do so means the translation takes an unusual path. Sensing that the standard scholarly presentation that cites the sources in which the texts are found acts mostly as a scaffolding that traces a thinking while also obscuring it, I decided to see what would happen if these attributions were removed, if we had to encounter these words as one might find a broken shard in a field, and then another, and again, knowing somehow they fit together into a vessel entire, but not knowing how to assemble it, not knowing if all the parts have been found, or even if all the shards belong to the same pot.

While the translation of Greek fragments is a challenge for any translator, Beachy-Quick’s approach seeks to heighten the intensity of this challenge rather than tame it with scholarly “scaffolding.” Here are some texts by Anaxagoras that possibly gain by Beachy-Quick’s approach, where we encounter the writing as isolated shards. Note how strange and at the same time familiar they sound, as if the pre-Socratic philosopher were also a quantum physicist and Zen master rolled into one:

What you see is a vision of what cannot be seen.

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

Of the small there is no smallest, but smaller yet always exists (for what is is not not to be).

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

All other things share some inner portion, but the Mind is boundless and self-ruling and joined to no other substance, but only it is alone—alone in itself.

Many early Greek philosophers often wrote in an aphoristic style, perhaps to better express the paradoxical nature of the universe. Heraclitus in particular enjoyed the abrupt energy of the aphorism:

The road up and the road down are one road.

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

In hell souls smell.

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


Asses prefer shit mixed with straw to gold.

Empedocles could sound like a doctor who writes poetry on the side:

The heart, nurtured in the blood’s echoing ocean,
is where in humans what is best called thought is—
for the blood around the human heart is thought.

Some Greek thinkers favored the question and response, that most basic form of conveying complex thought. This exchange by Thales could be a passage from one of the famous Taoist thinkers, Lao-Tzu or Chuang-Tzu:

“Death,” he said, “is no different than life.” “If so,” someone said, “why don’t you die?” “Because there is no difference,” he said.

Perhaps the most enigmatic text in The Thinking Root comes from Heraclitus and consists of only three words: “I sought myself.” In his introduction to Heraclitus, Beachy-Quick tells us that this phrase could be translated as “I searched myself. I searched for myself. I searched through myself.” What a rich and mysterious statement. Beachy-Quick goes on to note how this complexity of seeking bears on his approach to translation: “What each translation reveals isn’t a fact but a thoughtful suspicion.” No wonder he’s such a good translator—there’s humility and honesty expressed here.

One hopes that Beachy-Quick will offer more of his “thoughtful suspicions” of ancient Greek texts in future, as The Thinking Root offers so much to ponder and savor. Here’s one last offering, this one by Empedocles: “Blessed, who gains the gold mine of a mind god-given— / wretched, who cares most for dark doctrines about the gods.” A gold mine is an apt metaphor for how Beachy-Quick treats the writing of these early Greek philosophers, and his sense of wonder and respect for it is contagious.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024