Book Review

Dead Weight

Essays on Hunger and Harm

Emmeline Clein
Knopf ($30)

by Olivia Q. Pintair

When Emmeline Clein began writing her debut essay collection, Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, she originally planned to document female hysteria. Her subjects would be fictional and non-fictional women branded with that diagnosis by a misogynistic culture that pathologizes and fetishizes the pain it produces—women hallucinating into their wallpaper, sobbing in hospital hallways, and wasting away in the folds of Y2K tabloids. Her focus shifted, though, as Clein has said in interviews, when she realized how many of the figures she was researching shared struggles with disordered eating. As Clein began “to harmonize with a ghost choir” that includes medieval anorexic saints, anonymous Tumblr users, Ottessa Moshfegh protagonists, Simone Weil, Cass Elliot, Karen Carpenter, and many of us readers, the book transformed into an attempt to frame disordered eating within the context of the systems and industries that profit from it.

Tracing the cultural and medical histories of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and orthorexia, Dead Weight undoes several tricks of the light. Through investigative reporting, criticism, and prose, Clein reveals that disordered eating is not a solipsistic malady; rather, it is an integral weapon of a racist, classist, and misogynistic society that depends upon the age-old lie that sick and sad young women are crazy, unreliable narrators. To undo that lie’s prismatic refractions, Clein shows us how common and culturally incentivized disordered eating is. Meditating on the casual gore of modern womanhood, she excavates the cultural, economic, and political underbellies of an epidemic wrought by and for a capitalist world. The result is a manifesto against “dissociative feminism” and the “lethal culture” that Western beauty standards empower.

Across Dead Weight’s thirteen essays, Clein navigates the rabbit holes of Reddit feminism, the aughts-era Tumblr-verse, diagnostic hierarchies, the eating disorder recovery industry, modern wellness culture, Ozempic’s arrival to mass markets, and the unsettling allure of bimboism. Her voice is sharp and familiar, moored to a sense of solidarity with the people living and dying along the faultlines she documents. In most autobiographical accounts of eating disorders, Clein writes, “the only way to survive seems to be renouncing your suffering sisters . . . I’m trying to find out what might happen if we blame someone other than each other and ourselves for a change.”

Clein quickly dispels any expectations for the nostalgic and bone-laden accounts of eating disorders that readers may be used to. Instead, she recasts the often isolating struggle as a collective one. In one essay, Clein explores how phases of capitalism mirror disordered eating patterns:

If bulimia was the eating disorder of Reaganomics and millennial girlbossery, and anorexia was the eating disorder of aughts-era austerity, [injectable weight loss] drugs might foster an eating disorder for a new age of technocapitalism, wherein we try to recast hunger as just another inconvenience we can eliminate with an app.

Elsewhere, Clein traces the normalization of eating disorders in a culture of ubiquitous commodification. “Eating disorders are good for capital,” reads one essay, which traces “the chain of money that leads from eating disorder treatment centers, weight loss companies, CBT companies, and pharmaceutical companies back to the same pool of investment capital.”

As Clein probes statistics and anecdotes, it becomes clear that disordered eating is not a mark of girlish insanity or vapid self-interest, but an apparatus of late capitalism. Women and femmes are peddled a beauty standard that remains a thinly veiled prerequisite for financial and social success, then are pathologized for trying to reach it. “Heroin chic is back,” The New York Post announced in 2022—Ozempic makes it easy now. As most anyone on the internet could attest, social media algorithms incentivize conformity and drain our energy to rebel. We seem to lose something when we follow their rules—and also when we don’t.

“I’m trying to be honest here: I’ve always wanted to live the kind of life that ends up in a story,” Clein writes, leveling with her audience. The women who starve themselves in books or on screen, she acknowledges, are often main characters, and maybe that is what the supposed trade-off is: Submit to the role, and you could be the heroine. But as Clein continually reminds us, those stories “are fiction,” repeated enough that they have become not only a cliché but also a narrative propping up several multi-billion-dollar industries and a conglomerate of mental illnesses with one of the highest collective death rates in the world.

For Clein, writing Dead Weight was an effort to humanize suffering people who, like the Victorian women drowning in white dresses in 19th century British and American literature, are usually romanticized in media but dismissed in real life. Like Simone Weil, Clein understands the visceral way in which the question of how or whether to eat is also a question of how or whether to be; the Self, as an experience and as an imagined ideal, is her primary interest. Early on in the book, she asks readers to picture the archetype of the “skinny, sexy, sad girl” as an ideal self that floats out at sea, “purring false promises from just over the horizon line”; she then points out that like those literary women whose misogyny-induced deaths are so predictably written as romantic inevitabilities, this archetype didn’t swim out to sea of her own accord. “Someone stranded her at the vanishing point . . .” Clein writes, “and they don’t want us to reach her because then we might save her, convince her she’s been lied to like the rest of us.”

Advancing toward the menacing clarity of that realization like a chess player, Clein refuses to talk down to her readers or underestimate their agency. She is interested in a political future beyond both the commodification of pain and the avoidance of it. “I have a question for bimbos and dissociated girls alike,” she writes in the collection’s coda. “How are we shaping our bodies and behaviors to become desirable to the most powerful, according to their value system?”

As Clein contextualizes her subject matter within existential questions about selfhood and solidarity, Dead Weight becomes relevant not only to those suffering from eating disorders, but to anyone trying to remain feeling and alive in a capitalist world that commodifies selfhood at the chaotic clip of a panopticonic auctioneer. The Self, Clein posits, is not an asset that should either escalate in perpetuity or submit to disappearance, but a synthesis of experience, alive insofar as it risks its own imagined stasis toward relationship and connection. Undermining narratives of our own isolation and insanity could destabilize industries that profit from them, Clein argues. “We don’t have to be solo heroines on lonely journeys; we can also be sisters and friends, side characters in someone else’s story . . . We can, maybe, even be the person who changes it.”

At the end of the book’s penultimate essay, Clein returns to consider the roots of her own suffering from disordered eating:

I watch my adolescent body get thrown like a pebble into a pond. The blame ripples out, past my therapist, another woman floating on her back in the water, into green fields of money and men. I see magazines filled with waifish models and . . . the Instagram ads . . .  offering me mental health quizzes and meditation for women apps and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix show and diet tea. I see the eating disorder memes and weight loss progress Instagram accounts and slim, smiling influencers, and wonder how I could have ended up anywhere but at the bottom of the lake.

“It can be politically mobilizing to feel the weight of that pain,” Clein said in a conversation with Rayne Fisher-Quann published in Nylon; “it makes me want to be alive in order to try to change it in what little ways I can so that maybe some younger girl doesn’t have to feel this bad.” Ultimately, Dead Weight is an offering born of Clein’s commitment to doing that—to envisioning a world in which girlhood isn’t a minefield of diet trends, where genuine human connection renders dissociation unnecessary, and where bodies are land and not property. In this world, Clein dreams, the lake might not be a place where people drown or disappear, but an expanse where we might find each other. This is a world she can see, she promises—not over a horizon line, but somewhere closer.

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

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

YOU

Rosa Alcalá
Coffee House Press ($17.95)

by Christopher Luna

Rosa Alcalá’s fourth poetry collection is a thrilling masterpiece filled with prose poems that challenge and disturb as they dig deep into the terrors that women face. Throughout, readers are also invited to contemplate the complexities of voice and perspective in literature. 

An introductory piece outlines where fear begins for women and girls and prepares readers for the unconventional approach of the text. Alcalá makes an important decision to rely upon the pronoun “you” to tell her story. At first it may seem that this allows her to remain one step removed from the painful memories she shares; “Isn’t the second person a form of hiding?” Alcalá asks. But the poems that follow fully explore the slippery magic of the pronoun “you”—how it can alternate between standing in for the reader, the author, and an ever-shifting cast of characters.

Alcalá tells us from the start that “I was trying to write a book about my mother,” but “that in the absence of her I mothered myself all over again with worry, / which is how I mother.” In this light, the “you” in every poem has the potential to be the poet, her mother, her daughter, another woman, or even womanhood itself, and sometimes more than one of these at the same time. Alcalá seeks to bear witness to the violence committed against women, but “being my own witness was itself a risk. How can / I see events unfolding when the body is completely symptomatic / of other bodies, including / its own.” She continues:

The problem with memory is that only words can re-create it for others.

Each word its own past and desire
for a future.

Each word, each sentence, a fragment. 

And how do you untangle from the telling the speaker’s motives? 

Later in the book, in “A Girl Like You,” the poet uses the second person to address both herself and a person she wrote about for her first real assignment as a journalist: a thirteen-year-old girl “whose tender body was discovered next to the Cuban bodega where your mother would send you for bread.” In the second half of the poem, the dead girl talks back, taking Alcalá to task for using the tragedy to further her career:

You want to know who did it, how it could have happened to me and not you. You want to weave it into a cross to protect the door to your daughter’s room. Or worse, for a poem. . . .  Was your first intention to make my murder elegiac? Remember when you couldn’t pronounce that word correctly, when others saw you as you were, a girl who knew so little but elbowed herself to the front to be heard. 

Nearly every poem contains horrific gut punches as well as sentences of such sublime beauty that you may temporarily forget their disturbing subject matter. Alcalá uses her fear as a map, seeking “narrative logic to order the / mess of memory” while never losing her faith in language’s potential to express the ineffable and reveal the truth about our lives. In this bold and innovative work, she has achieved her stated goal to “leave my daughter this book as manual, as heirloom; like my mother’s wedding dress in the unreachable part of my closet, both glamorous / /and warning.” Charles Olson once proclaimed that poems are “high energy constructs”; Alcalá’s YOU contains writing so powerful it may cause your heart to combust.  

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

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

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance

Diana Oropeza
Future Tense Books ($12)

by Eric Bies

In 2014, Semiotext(e) published a short posthumous work by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, an effort to circumscribe an entire universe of artistic loss in eighty breathless pages. That book, The Missing Pieces, does its darnedest, encompassing some five hundred items, from incinerated manuscripts and shredded letters to unfinished poems and vanished papyri. It’s the kind of book that will make one wonder whether, finally, more has been lost than found—whether, like the unfinished trilogy of Gogol’s Dead Souls, more shall remain destined to persist in the realm of ideas than ever come to exist.

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance, a beguiling new book by Diana Oropeza, is similarly slim, but it’s the opposite of breathless. With plenty of white space to spare, it’s a book to linger over, its relaxed arrangement calling to mind a line from Borges regarding The Book of Imaginary Beings: “Our wish would be that the curious dip into it from time to time in much the way one visits the changing forms revealed by a kaleidoscope.”

Indeed, Borges presides as a kind of patron saint over Oropeza’s book as a whole; a quotation from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a story that exemplifies the Argentine maestro’s penchant for blurring the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, serves as an epigraph. In the same way that Borges counterfeited entire bibliographies, crafting fragments from old books that never really existed while never allowing the reader to doubt his belief in their reality, Oropeza has devised a series of vanishings that might as well have happened. Some of her sixty-odd pieces of nanofiction strain while others shoot right past the limits of credulity, bleeding into surrealism here and magical realism there, but each piece’s tone is assured, sincere if not solemn.

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance is fun-loving enough to describe illusionist David Copperfield disappearing the Statue of Liberty (and obvious enough, at times, to incorporate such tired territory as the Bermuda Triangle), but at its deepest points, Oropeza’s half-page inventions are earnest invitations to bear witness to everything that slips away. Reading them might not produce laughter or tears outright, but the book’s valences—mourning, absurdity, liberation—are easy enough to detect.

Flash fiction lives and dies by a fire that has mere seconds to light up a space, so it would be a mistake to jump into this book expecting Chekhov. But the parables of Kafka, the riddles of W. S. Merwin, the microcosmic visions of Lydia Davis—these are Oropeza’s touchstones, and when she’s good, she’s as good as any of them. No one sentence does her associative and often syntactically surprising style justice, but a line like “I found myself speaking inside a poem of Akbar’s, speaking of an atomized absence, speaking of ants carrying home the names of new colors” can give you an idea. Many of Orozepa’s scenarios are so memorable, so exacting, so self-contained, it’s a wonder the author managed to pin them down at all: “As it is told, the ghost had bitten a child on the hand. The following day, the child shocked everyone by suddenly playing the piano like a master.”

That Oropeza has a flair for economy doesn’t mean the work is slight. A piece titled “Translation,” for example, all but demands to be read three times in a row. This is how it opens:

In Spanish, “ojos” are “eyes,” but my dad hears the word “ice,” which is the English word for “hielo,” which is pronounced like “yellow.” The word for yellow in Spanish is “amarillo,” which is also the name of a place in Texas, nearly 500 miles from the Mexican border. Which translates to a seven-hour drive from home, which is actually shorter than my father’s workday. At his job, he translates for the housekeepers who often don’t speak English so they often don’t speak to anyone except my father, except to say “housekeeping” before they knock on the door and “es clean,” to let the front desk know the room es clean. The hotel staff think it’s an accent causing the mispronunciation of “is” but actually “es” is Spanish for “is,” so the women are not wrong, they are translating.

Perhaps some things will always be lost in translation. Meanwhile, An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance sheds new light on loss, clarifying fresh facets of our prismatic reality even as it complicates old ones. Orozepa’s signal debut can be read in an afternoon, but it will compel you to remain in its orbit.

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

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

The Third Realm

Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translated by Martin Aitken
Penguin Press ($32)

by Sam Tiratto

In Sigrid Undset’s historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, the titular character has an apocalyptic vision while prostrate on the cold stone floor of a cathedral: Saint Olaf himself bursts forth from his shrine and raises an army of the dead to go greet the Lord in prayer; the skeletons don their original muscle and flesh and follow in Olaf’s “blood-stained footsteps” for their new and eternal life. Wracked by guilt and the exhaustion of motherhood, Kristin beseeches Saint Olaf to pray for her.

One hundred years after the publication of Undset’s famed trilogy, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the origins and the possible effects of such a vision in his latest novel, The Third Realm. The book continues the variegated story of a mysterious celestial event in modern-day Norway set forth in his two previous novels: The Morning Star ends as the mystery arrives, its story focused on the generally unconnected lives of nine ordinary Norwegians; The Wolves of Eternity digs into semi-autobiography as a young man in Cold War-era Norway uncovers a family secret that involves a Russian woman whose mother fell in love with a Norwegian man. The trumpet sounds at the end of Wolves by placing us back in the present, in awe of the frightful event that is only just beginning.

As in the medieval world of Kristin Lavransdatter, evil stalks the land in The Third Realm. The devil, black metal, nihilism, and even the unstable inner self are recurring themes as the nine characters grapple with swiftly eroding senses of security in an increasingly frightening world. Determined readers of the two preceding books may start to find payoff when some of the characters posit that the bizarre shifts in their lives—accidents, medical miracles, horrifying news stories—may be related to the celestial event. Jarle, a brain researcher obsessed with the inner lives of the comatose, seeks meaning beyond mere coincidence when he notices inexplicable electrical signals from a “brain dead” patient. So too does the detective piecing together the mystery of a grisly murder first witnessed in The Morning Star. Could the celestial event have anything to do with it? Other characters laugh at the superstition, and some are gripped by fear; one, a minister, doubts her own faith. But all are unsettled.

Knausgaard is well known for his digressive style, but unlike the six-volume autobiographical My Struggle series, where philosophical tangents come from the author directly, here his extensive references come through his characters. As the series deepens this has the effect of making the characters feel less distinct and more like varying personas of one another, or perhaps different versions of Knausgaard himself. It is fitting that one of them, Jarle, should spend a few moments musing on Pessoa, “that champion of the meaningless”—like Pessoa’s heteronyms, Knausgaard’s fractal personalities reveal more about each other the further inward into themselves they look. 

The Third Realm does spend more time with the characters’ spouses and friends, and the unnamed Norwegian town in which the novels are set is starting to feel like a symbiotic web, a neural network; each new development in the characters’ lives sends ripples through the community of the unknown. Like Undset’s Kristin, each character is fighting doggedly to maintain a grip on themselves in the face of the alienation of society—as well as the chilling realization that Satan may really, truly wander Norway’s fjords and fells. The smell of sulfur lingers.

Knausgaard invites patience and contemplation in The Third Realm, its title itself an allusion to one character’s cosmology of humans’ relationship with the divine. The book may be to some a meditation, to others a dissertation, and to others still a digression. Where The Wolves of Eternity felt laser-focused on revelations about the nature of consciousness—replete with a full-length essay concerning death and the Russian cosmist Nikolai Fyodorov—this book seems to falter (or, perhaps more generously, replies with doubt) when it is asked to provide a clear philosophy. At times some characters feel perilously close to figuring it all out before getting distracted or second-guessing themselves. This dallying makes for poor suspense, but it forces the reader to return to the difficult act of contemplation. Rather than Saint Olaf’s dead, we may be greeted with Hamlet’s father—a supernatural mystery still, but one concerned more urgently with matters of the living than those of the dead.

The Third Realm encourages readers to set aside the explanations they had in mind for the previous installments’ events and to consider new ones. The return of the dead is constantly revisited as a theme, but it passes through the perspectives of the novel’s many characters and the limited information they are given. We suspect that the dead will rise, but will it be through the return of Jesus? The rise of Satan? The mythology of Saint Olaf? The dead returning is the stuff of nightmares, but wouldn’t it also make life triumphant? Knausgaard takes a treacherous step forward into the world unpierced by human thought. We have no choice but to follow.

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

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

Poems 2016-2024

J.H. Prynne
Bloodaxe Books ($50)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Most poets deliver the proverbial “brick” of a collected works only in their final years, or else leave it to be delivered posthumously by others. Not J.H. Prynne. Since his 300-page 1982 gathering Poems, which collected all he felt worth preserving at the time, Prynne has delivered three subsequent “bricks”: 1999, 2005, and 2015, the last of which approached 700 pages. Now at eighty-eight years old, he’s added the equally colossal addendum Poems: 2016-2024. It is a magnificent, startling output during what might be the poet’s closing years of writing life.

This volume gathers thirty-six collections ranging in length from relatively brief sequences of a dozen or so pages up to the full-length Of Better Scrap (Face Press, 2019). Across this period the small yet inventive Face Press in Cambridge, England has been Prynne’s faithful publisher, responsible for originally publishing twenty-four of these titles, many of which were slim chapbooks printed on fine paper with care given to best represent the work as physical document. While these qualities are impossible to completely carry over to a larger collection, some attention has been afforded to details of the original publications. For instance, poems from Dune Quail Eggs (Face Press, 2021) appear in a larger print, centered upon the page, with extra spacing between individual words, likely similar to their chapbook appearance:

Green   foist    crust   mound
                    met
drain     plume   feast    bride
                    eye
nails    thumb    avoid    trail
                    bay
ghost    braid   prune    force
                    toy

Other variances in font and size, or decorative section numbering, have been likewise carried across with a few of the collections, along with an accompanying image from the original versions here and there. For those new to Prynne’s work, this choice offers some awareness of the poet’s initial conception.

Prynne’s penchant for pushing towards the edges of language—often to an opaque abstraction—rarely offers any familiar foothold for readers expecting common levels of coherence, as in “Or But Invaded”:

other-worldly. Even surly toasted double joint dent
scented bell air surfactant lizard, tolerant pink win
arrant count radiant immunise. Into prize, instead
fast ahead confuse at the window endowed likewise
twist, then vaporise.

This might lead unfamiliar readers to charge that Prynne sets one word after another according to some arbitrary ordering. Yet Prynne wagers that there’s depth worth exploring in “the theme of arbitrariness.” In his talk “Stars, tigers and the shape of words,” which he delivered in 1992 at Birkbeck College, London, Prynne explained:

Briefly stated, the theme of arbitrariness concerns the nature of the relation between the sense or meaning of a linguistic utterance (spoken or written) and the forms of its expression or performance. If a language is considered as an evolved set of signs or codes, do the items of its production (words, sentences, speech-sounds) bear any distinct and significant individual relation to meaning or idea; or does the relation of message to medium make sense only within the context of the system, and not at the level of individual items?  

Certainly, in a poem such as “Or But Invaded,” punctuation and sentence structure remain intact even as the individual words are often estranged from general semantics—yet the potential meaning of each word has been added to, enlarged. Associations emerge from out of the possibly arbitrary order; “tolerant pink win” might be the dawn or dusk hour at which “air surfactant lizard” emerges from their lair. It’s difficult not to associate some intention, even if exact elements remain murky.

On rare occasion, Prynne drops in an uncharacteristic acknowledgement of a poem’s circumstances, indicating, for example, by the note “34,000 ft.” that a poem was written while traveling on an airliner, perhaps on a flight to or from China as is his wont. There are also what might be taken as outright cheeky moves, like the epigraph for Memory Working: Impromptus: “Always have a point in mind / when you resolve a scale line” is attributed by citation to Pianogroove, an online piano school with the motto “the world’s best piano teachers—at your fingertips.”

In some poems, Prynne hits a decidedly different tonal note: “To catch slant sunlight as cat prowling, in earth warming from cold in browning tints, twigs in fashion with new glints to show upswelled. Light wind in morning, to activate a day aloud, ahead already remembered, chill now but soon declared and voluntary.” Such clearly descriptive lines of beauty are reminiscent more of a passage from Emily Dickinson’s Letters than what’s expected from Prynne. In addition, there are the koan-like “Travellers’ Tales” (note the plural possessive) at the end of Memory Working, which present riddling allegories explicitly set in a natural setting, à la fairy tales.  

Then there is the hilarity of Snooty Tipoffs (Face Press, 2021) with jagged rhymes (“Music in the ice-box, music by the sea, / music at the rice-bowl, for you as well as me”) found throughout its five sections, in each of fifty-six parts except for the final section, which ends on:

      57
For you I’d do
    the whole thing through
below, above
    for now, for love.

The expanse of Prynne’s output during these last eight years is astounding. Poems: 2016-2024 shows an unparalleled poet holding forth at the height of his powers, from the sheer jubilance of titles (such as Passing Grass Parnassus (Face Press, 2020), with its epigram “Sing different songs on different mountains”) to the final sentence of “Penance at Cost” from Foremost Wayleave (Face Press, 2023):

Compunction ructions burnous turnabout riotous break 
pressure gauge caramel kerbside far and wide intertidal angled 
stairway apple crumble cinnamon evenly cloven down to earth.

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

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

I Don’t Want to Be Understood

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Alice James Books ($24.95)

by Oscar Ivins

In Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s collection I Don’t Want to Be Understood, anti-trans sentiment is both structural and structuring; the atmospheric quality of transphobia affects what and how the poems’ speaker dreams, dreads, desires. A hauntingly intimate portrait spanning a life from childhood to today, the collection is deeply attuned to both the harsh and harmonious pitches that accompany experiences of transition in a society that is hostile to trans happiness. 

The collection is inwardly panoramic. As the speaker, “a light in the form of a girl,” travels through courthouses, airports, and a menswear outlet in Hollywood, we are beamed into the neglected—and sometimes purposefully avoided—corners of her mind. 

The opening poem, “Airport Ritual,” offers a science fiction twist on the anxiety-riddled experience of going through airport security while transgender. An epigraph stating “The following is a true story” conjures the paradox of security scans: Your body is intimately scrutinized while you’re told it’s not personal. “An anomaly is spotted. A woman is taken aside.” Then a TSA agent informs the traveler that she will need to touch her. When the traveler shares that she is transgender—“unsure if she means this an a warning or an apology”—the poem shifts register into absurdism: “the thing in her pants that set the sensors off suddenly expands” and keeps expanding to fill the terminal, the airport, the city of Irvine, until the military is called in. 

By invoking facticity before bursting into the mythic, Espinoza teases and subverts cisgender expectations of what a trans narrative should do. The poem’s epigraph signals a common complaint made by trans people about trans literature: As transgender writers gain relative prominence, often the books that sell the best are the ones that cater to a cisgender audience. Whether that means work that flattens transition into an “it gets better” narrative or work that is overly expository to the point of redundancy, it is a reality of the publishing industry: Sometimes the only way to achieve a modicum of financial success is to fit one’s work into a preexisting box, one constructed by the institutions of cisness. 

Reading “Airport Ritual” as a trans person, I feel deeply the truthfulness of this story—the dread and anxiety that arise from this kind of interface with the state. In the poem, while pundits discuss the benefits of forcing trans people into detention facilities, 

            The woman at the center of the plasma or whatever-the-fuck-it-is
            just wants someone to say one thing to her
            that doesn’t feel like kite string wrapped around an open wound
            in a warm, strong wind. But it doesn’t happen.

Through this play between literalness and absurdism, Espinoza flips the cultural script that says trans people are delusional and transition is science fiction, instead casting the cisgender state as the true site of hysteria. While cis society turns up the dial on fascism, the woman at the center of the poem is simply trying to live. 

One of the most compelling aspects of the collection is the way it portrays transition as transcendently positive at the same time as it is traumatizing. A common trope of trans cultural production is the idea of transition as linear. In this formation, one’s life before transition is rife with confusion and anguish but through transitioning the pain of daily existence is relieved; one becomes stronger, life becomes better. This is not untrue, and Espinoza’s work highlights how transitioning is a way of getting off autopilot and pursuing embodiment on one’s own terms. In “The Present,” Espinoza describes the dissociation of closeted life:

For a lifetime, sensation was
a single thread
in my wardrobe of pain.

It is a metaphor more easily grasped in the reverse: pain as a single thread in the wardrobe of sensation. Through this inversion Espinoza deftly shows how dysphoria can warp and narrow experience and lead to self-alienation. As the poems in this collection express, to transition is to leap into feeling more.

Yet as Espinoza’s speaker becomes more connected to herself and to her life, she also registers the pain that has surrounded her—she can no longer dissociate through it. Espinoza’s attention to the family as a site of violence is particularly affecting. In “To My Parents,” she writes, “I was the mantle above the fireplace, the one that held our portrait. // I was the frame around the photograph, but not the photograph.” Being a closeted trans person can feel like being the one holding it all together while living as a background fixture in your own life. The speaker’s religiously inflected childhood trauma, her youth spent hiding and self-numbing, shape the psychic landscape years after she has left home, come out, and her mother’s gotten a “trans ally tattoo.” In this way, transition can make life feel harder when you are experiencing the pain your mind has protected you from—as Espinoza writes in the resplendent “Return to Light,” trauma “reminds you to forget its presence.” I Don’t Want to Be Understood posits that through this remembering and daily survival, we can do more than find ourselves: If we are lucky, we can create ourselves.

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

Tap Dancing on Everest

A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Mimi Zieman
Falcon Guides ($22.95)

by Sandra Hager Eliason

Mimi Zieman wasn’t sure why she stuffed her dancing shoes into the bag she was packing for her trip to Mount Everest, but when the team was stuck at base camp with another delay, she pulled the shoes out to do dance routines on a flat rock, lifting everyone’s spirits. Zieman’s memoir, Tap Dancing on Everest, describes her time as a medic for a team attempting to scale the east face of Everest without oxygen or sherpa support. The book chronicles the dangerous expedition, beginning as the support teams’ binoculars search the heights for any trace of missing climbers and ending with a harrowing trip down the mountain; between, Zieman explains how her life path led her to this adventure.

Dance gave Zieman strength in her early life, and her job as a field researcher in the Rocky Mountains later drew her to continue exploring the mountains. She booked a flight to Nepal the day she was accepted to medical school. Zieman knew it normally took years to get a climbing permit—she would be a doctor by then—but when the expedition leader obtained one earlier than expected, she got permission to leave in the middle of her medical training, with the intent to conduct a research project on high altitude medicine (which she studied while also completing her regular medical school curriculum).

Nature lovers will appreciate Zieman’s vivid descriptions of scenery:

As spectators, we watched the natural elements sing and dance in a dramatic showcase. . . . Act One was the changing cones and shafts of sunrise, the lifting veil of night revealing pink and orange and yellow spotlights. Act Two was the main act of the day . . . showering us with the brightness of whites . . . until the swift fall of shadows enveloped us in the chill of twilight. . . .

Act Three, the finale, shined with the twinkle and swoosh of star and moon. . . . the waning sun spraying golden on the peaks, the white caps shimmering under a final dust of blue before black.

As the expedition encounters delay after delay, Zieman expertly conveys the climbers’ frustration and urgency. Zieman also offers detailed insight into the Everest expedition process—needed equipment, support, food, and the creation of camps set up at increasing altitudes to support the climbers.

The only woman on her trip, Zieman describes the discomfort of being around so much testosterone-fueled energy, but she does not wallow: When a mountain climber brags “I know I can make the top . . . I’m going to come back. Plan my own Everest expedition,” she blurts, “Well, if you need a doctor for your next expedition, call me.”

Overall, Tap Dancing on Everest is an enjoyable memoir with something to offer readers of travel, nature, medicine, or science writing—as well as anyone who appreciates a compelling, real-life adventure tale.

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

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

The Rent Collectors

Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA

Jesse Katz
Astra House ($28)

by Nic Cavell

A phenomenal work of sociology and anthropology, Jesse Katz’s The Rent Collectors focuses on Giovanni Macedo, who botched a gang hit which resulted in the death of an infant and called down a hit on himself that was itself botched. Macedo, who was eighteen years old when he committed the crime, became the center of a nationwide manhunt and ultimately turned himself in, then assisted local and federal cases against the Columbia Lil Cycos. Many words in The Rent Collectors are devoted to the machinations of the gang’s higher-ups whose orders Macedo was assigned to carry out. But though Macedo’s narrative is harrowing and Katz’s presentation of it is powerfully critical, this book works its strongest magic in the evocation of the undocumented lives of immigrants in MacArthur Park, who repurpose the neighborhood into a vibrant site of street vending even as they are shaken down by both a police force empowered to levy exorbitant fines and the Columbia Lil Cycos, who charge for vending on their turf—two sets of “rent collectors.”

Katz first documented MacArthur Park and its vendors for the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s. When his son left for college in 2011, Katz moved to the neighborhood and became further fascinated by the local economy. In this book, he has excavated the lineage of the park, describing changes in storefront businesses and the make-up of the mostly undocumented vendors who have used the public space across generations. Here is USA Donuts, with its “La Vida Loca” mural by 18th Streeters artfully and ominously announcing their territory with paintings of sub-machine guns and a “snake-wrapped woman”; there is the Video Mania, where Macedo and his handlers stopped to gather their wits just before embarking on their crime. We meet old stalwarts of the neighborhood such as the Matiases, whose daughter Shorty walks the line between friendship and informant with both police and gang members, eventually becoming a key witness for the District Attorney’s office; we also meet newcomers like Francisco Clemente, an undocumented worker who began vending in the evenings as a side hustle from his day job operating an auto repair shop. Clemente arrived in 2007 after the Columbia Lil Cycos had instituted a tax on all vendors on their turf, but he chafed against their authority and fought a mostly solitary battle against the extortion along with two women: Jessica Guzman, a fellow vendor he began a relationship with, and Daniela Garcia, Jessica’s friend who was pregnant by another man and for whom Clemente felt responsible.

And of course there is Macedo, who we learn is a miracle—he survived being throttled with a rope and tossed off a cliff along a hazardous roadway in Mexico. Despite his cooperation with authorities after the fact, he acted for the Columbia Lil Cycos, and on September 15, 2007, he was given a weapon and asked to gun down Clemente for his obstinance. Clemente took four bullets—one is still embedded in his jaw and another lodged near his spine—but survived. Garcia, whose baby had only been born twenty-three days prior, grabbed the infant as soon as the shots rang out, only to discover that he was foaming blood at the mouth; there was little doubt in her mind that whoever killed him was a monster.

Macedo, who didn’t know Clemente, the two women, or the infant before he pulled the trigger, was immediately hit with remorse, although in prison he had an uphill battle imagining the full scale of his crime, knowing so little about the lives of those most closely affected. When he pleaded guilty, he was sentenced to fifty-one years and four months for voluntary manslaughter and three counts of attempted murder, plus gang and gun enhancements. But in the years since the sentencing a new view of justice embracing second chances has taken hold in California: It has been shown that in offenders under the age of twenty-five, the brain and its impulse control centers are not yet fully formed. As such, Macedo, who committed his crime at age eighteen, may have the opportunity to take decades off his sentence, along with around 16,000 other California inmates.

For most of MacArthur Park’s history street vending has been illegal, and with or without the gangs, sellers have been hassled by the police. When Trump was elected in 2016 and the rhetoric against undocumented immigrants turned especially venomous, there was finally political will to make immigrants’ lives easier by decriminalizing their vending. But what began as goodwill toward the undocumented community quickly became onerous; rules about how far off the street, how far away from storefronts, and how far away from streetlights and other vendors didn’t take into account crowded MacArthur Park realities. Fines were again instituted for vending in any way that deviated from the new rules, and just like before, they were of a size that would negate a significant chunk of profits, crippling the immigrants’ enterprise. Despite a wave of new Latino politicians in the city’s firmament, the undocumented community continued to be treated as a blemish on the urban landscape.

Clemente and Guzman got a break when one of the LAPD detectives who worked their case decided to sponsor Clemente for a green card, navigating the channels of an opaque legal system; the couple now have four children. Garcia slipped through the cracks and into the criminal justice system for theft and drug offenses. The shot-callers Macedo helped put behind bars are serving lengthy sentences. After surviving two RICO cases, the Columbia Lil Cycos are as strong as ever in MacArthur Park, with new personnel earning the chance to work for the Mexican Mafia, the godfathers of Latino gangs who operate from within facilities like the federal “supermax” prison in Colorado. And the immigrant vendors continue to suffer slings and arrows in the shadow of government neglect and reprisal. In The Rent Collectors, Katz tells all their stories with aplomb.

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

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

Jonah and His Daughter

Ioana Pârvulescu
Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth
Istrosbooks ($16.99)

by Rick Henry

Ioana Pârvulescu’s Jonah and His Daughter is the latest in what might be considered a genre of its own: reimagined versions of works featuring women in the Old Testament. Pârvulescu delivers a new spin on this, taking as her starting point one of the shortest books in the Old Testament: the fable that recounts how the prophet Jonah comes to understand that God’s compassion extends to all. Pârvulescu builds a novel from that Biblical fable, adding characters, expanding dramatic events, and humanizing the main character by exploring his faults as he works through the conflicts that build to his ultimate crisis.

She could have left it at that, and have given us a perfectly fine novel. Pârvulescu, however, gives contemporary readers a second story—that of the story itself as it evolves in its passing from grandmother and mother to daughter (each daughter hears the story twice) through nearly one hundred generations. While names and property are passed father to son, storytelling becomes the province of mothers and daughters; free to interrupt Jonah’s story at will, Pârvulescu’s women offer their revisions, comment on the function of fiction, and rehearse the matriarchal line that undermines the dominant narrative of the patriarchy. With its explicit argument for the power of storytelling, Jonah and His Daughter invites us to read this Old Testament fable as something that deepens through time.

The story of Jonah begins as Jonah suffers the charge from God: Save the city of Ninevah from its depravity; let them know how bad they are and give them forty days to repent. But in Pârvulescu’s telling, we quickly find ourselves with Jonah’s daughter, Esther. Her grandfather, who has recently died, was everything to her, and her mother, who died giving birth to her, is long gone. She is left with Jonah, who “didn’t trouble himself at all about me.”

While the story builds to the storm and Jonah’s famed encounter with the whale, and eventually details how he overcomes the world view that only the anointed can be saved by getting depraved Ninevah to repent, it is important to note that it’s Esther who initiates the enduring story of her father—despite her difficulties with him, she feels compelled to ensure his legacy. Over the succeeding centuries, and despite being officially written down for the Bible, Jonah’s story maintains its oral foundation and susceptibility to change as the women continue its telling.

Pârvulescu’s hermeneutic transformations of the tale are impressive. Dalila relates the story of Jonah to her granddaughter Phoebe, but casts doubt on details, including the actual swallowing of Jonah by the monster. This, she argues, was embroidered by storytellers over the years “so that they could fill their children with awe and see their mouths agape”; Jonah might have been in a giant fish’s mouth or under its fin, but the point of the encounter, says Dalila, is to mark the moment when Jonah “regained his power of speech.” By the time Phoebe’s great-great-granddaughter hears the story, the purpose of storytelling has changed: now it is to bring joy and use the imagination to help find clarity in the world (a form of Aristotle’s “edify and delight”).

By the time of Cervantes, the story has become a fairy tale; should there be a “gap or something unbelievable, I’ll fill it in from my imagination, because otherwise, if everything has to be given a rational explanation, what’s the good of telling stories?” By the time of De Sade, the ability to describe debaucheries with abandon perhaps suggests why God directed Jonah to go to Ninevah in the first place. Science enters the story with detailed descriptions of childbirth and anatomy. And so it goes, to the Parisian art world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the era of Hollywood, and the age of Internet.

At that point the story of Jonah is completed, but Pârvulescu offers one final transformation in an Epilogue, situated in the twenty-first century. Here the storyteller assumes prominence and Jonah’s story becomes her story, the book we now hold: Jonah and His Daughter. Embedded in that is yet another manifesto of sorts, one ultimately resting in literature as play.

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

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

American Precariat

Parables of Exclusion

Edited by Zeke Caligiuri, Fong Lee, B. Batchelor, C. Fausto Cabrera, Will Anderson, Warren Bronson, David Janisch, Kennedy Amenya Gisege, Mark “Red” Altenhofen, Ronald L. Greer II, Jeff Young, and Lavon Johnson
Coffee House Press ($19.95)

by Sara Dovre Wudali

The essay anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion works to “polish the world” into a better version of itself. The twelve editors are a team of incarcerated artists and writers from Minnesota who offer a unique perspective as culture bearers from society’s most hidden corner. Jennifer Bowen, who facilitated editorial meetings through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, explains in an introductory note that incarcerated populations feel societal changes deeply, though their perspectives on those changes are “invisible by design.” To make the people behind this curation effort visible, the book includes transcriptions of editorial conversations after each essay; these transcriptions crack open the process of building an anthology and clarify that the editors see their role as a quest. Who, after all, understands power and class better than those whose very freedom has been ruptured by it? Or, as editor Kennedy Gisege puts it, “In prison, we see precarity in a totally different way than maybe somebody [who has] gone to the University of Minnesota or Harvard. You know, we’ve survived. We’ve lived the experience, so we identify easily with other fellow human beings who have suffered.”

Each essay tells a personal story, and many function also as treatises or manifestos written from within what British economist Guy Standing identified as the fast-growing “precariat” class, defined by its shared exposure to risk. The editors have chosen to include texts about living in the United States from within positions of vulnerability and instability by a mix of well-known authors (Eula Biss, Kiese Laymon, Kao Kalia Yang, Steve Almond) and newer voices as well. The topics range across the most difficult issues we face as a nation: poverty, mental health, homelessness, climate change, immigration, racism, mass incarceration, LGBTQ rights, and more.

Members of the precariat are, Michael Torres writes, “unsafe and (un)seen.” In his essay about surviving higher education as a Mexican American, Torres weaves a personal story of isolation and surveillance, and the editorial conversation that follows ranges across broader discussions of migration, citizenship, cultural identity, code-switching, shame, and assimilation. “White people,” editor Chris Cabrera says, “have the option to reject homogeny and to identify as simply human . . . White people get to choose the cultural conflicts with which to engage, whereas to be racialized as anything else, is to be drafted into a conflict by virtue of the color of your skin.”

Alice Paige also writes of isolation and surveillance, but from a transgender perspective: “The isolation feels like death,” she writes, and “everyone is watching me, judging how I perform femininity.” The hard-hitting tone of Paige’s lyric essay echoes the punk rock she uses to celebrate being alive: “I trade a violent home life for a violent homeless life. . . . I go across and beyond myself. I leave myself behind.” Tension builds as she and other trans friends navigate trauma, homelessness, and infuriating waits for medical care. When she learns that every forty-five seconds a queer youth commits suicide, every minute of survival becomes one to celebrate. The editorial discussion after this piece digs into rage and gender in punk rock, the politics of gender identity, and how language can be a tool to prevent suicide.

There’s a sense of a ticking clock in many of the works in this anthology; after all, as editor Zeke Caligiuri writes in his foreword, “Time, in the life of a writer, or a prisoner, is an emergency.” Time is a resource continually in crisis, measured in long years of exile and marked by sudden uncontrollable changes in circumstances. TM “Redd” Warren plays expertly with chronology in his personal essay about life with a cellmate and the deliberate care they take with their creations: their baking, paintings, friendship. In Sarith Peou’s essay, “The Promised Land,” both the author and the subject of his story lost years to untreated mental illness; now prison holds them both. Lauren Markham’s essay “Can We Move Our Forests in Time to Save Them?” reveals a Hail Mary plan to avert one catastrophic outcome of the climate crisis. Kristen Collier relates how the debt her mother incurred on her behalf grows exponentially out of control; using masterful metaphors, Collier describes how it consumes her future.

The cumulative effect of these essays, each from a different slice of society, makes clear that the American precariat is enormous and its issues are enormously complex. The editors discuss the “American fallacy” of bootstrapping our way out of precarity, which additional rights should be included in the Constitution, and how and whether outrage can be shifted into action: “You wake up and you have a fucking knee on your neck. And you inherit that shit. Just like people inherit comfort.” They also discuss their own darknesses, rage, and despair, and question whether their paths to prison were inevitable—but camaraderie and hope shine into the discussions too. Many of these editors have known each other for years, and their discussions reflect mutual respect and knowledge of each other’s quirks and interests, such as when they good-naturedly clear the way during one discussion for editor David Janisch’s monologue on the three reasons trees should have rights.

From the very first pages of the foreword, Caligiuri warns the reader that American Precariat is a dangerous project: Society’s decision-makers know “the threat that artists and poets pose to the ideas of the captivity business.” In a place made to break people down, a community built by artists and writers becomes a cultural force resisting not just the disassembly of their own humanity, but that of all American society. After all, as Janisch says in the last words of the book, “when following the news, you can get really numb to it. The news doesn’t make a difference. But this essay? All these essays . . . That is one thing that’s really cool about paying attention to the world—it’s just one big story.”

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

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