Book Review

Pink Lady

Denise Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press ($20)

by George Longenecker

 

Sentimental without being saccharine, Denise Duhamel’s Pink Lady takes us through her mother’s decline and death at a nursing home in Rhode Island. While the book is a poetic memoir of sorts, Duhamel uses her mastery of craft to draw in the outer world of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election.

 

The book starts with “Prodigal Prayer,” in which the poet travels from Florida to be with her mother who is slowly declining in the same nursing home where she once worked as a nurse: “I drive her twenty-year-old Toyota to see her / in the Catholic nursing home where the priest reminds us / ‘this too shall pass.’” In “Last Picnic,” Duhamel and her sister take their mother out to a meal: “My mother’s chowder flipped in the wind and landed on her lap. / I wiped her up with a bunch of napkins. / My sister rescued the rolling bag of clam cakes.” “What My Mother Left Behind, What She Discarded,” a list poem of letting go, will surely be relatable to anyone who’s helped an aging parent clean out their home: “she’d given away the frying pans too heavy to lift / . . . / my dad’s bicentennial quarters (he collected one from every state) / . . . / the Encyclopedia Britannica . . .” Details like these are specific and touching.

 

As Pink Lady continues, Duhamel is able to weave in themes from the wider world. In “Wackadoodle,” the poet recalls when her mother had still been able to travel:

She visited me in Florida the day after

Trump won in 2016. When I’d sent her a ticket,

I thought we’d both be celebrating

the first woman president. I was baffled, sure

that the planes of the world would stop flying,

their wings too heavy with grief.

“Communique: Emails from Mount St. Rita’s” tersely describes what so many who had loved ones in hospitals or nursing homes went through during the Covid lockdowns, and “Purse” offers a sensual metaphor:

I emptied her white purse—

tissue pack and reading glasses, coupons

and address book. I once lived in a purse

inside her, my first pink home, the umbilical cord

a knotted strap. When I grew up, I took care

of my own purse, its pristine lining never stretched

or stuffed with a fetus.           

Of course, any narrative arc about death can only lead one way, as related in “Baby Mouse, July 11, 2021:” “I’d gotten up early as I’d heard / clanking. My sister found a baby / mouse in her sink . . . What did the mouse / mean, if anything?” Duhamel and her family arrive at the nursing home to find “My mom was under / a white sheet, her eyes closed . . . We whispered as though my mom / could still hear. We were quiet / as three little mice.”

 

Despite Pink Lady’s deep current of grief, the collection ultimately opens possibilities for renewal after the death of a parent, as in “Poem in Which I Banish Sorrow”:

I have my mother in my pocket—her face

on the prayer card we had printed for her wake.

I ate oatmeal with maple syrup for breakfast

so how can the front page news hurt me?

 

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

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

Portalmania

Debbie Urbanski
Simon & Schuster ($18.99)

by Alissa Hattman

 

In her essay collection Men in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt writes that “storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” While political theory or cultural criticism might seek to define, answer, or name, storytelling invites us to experience the world through implication, to wrestle with ambiguity or contradiction in an effort to activate meaning that might otherwise be hard to pin down. Arendt’s use of the word “error” underscores that sometimes the rush to define can be counterproductive, even dangerous.

 

Debbie Urbanki’s short story collection Portalmania is a case in point, as it is less interested in defining the world on the other side of a given portal and more in the portal’s potential to puncture the fabric of societal assumptions and norms. These nine stories traverse the territory of fantasy, science fiction, and the absurd, but like the portals themselves, the book seems to occupy the liminal space of the in-between. Experimental in both genre and form, Portalmania invites us to hold nuanced and sometimes contradictory versions of truth, with topics ranging from parenting and neurodiversity to partnership and sexuality, not to mention notions of storytelling itself.

 

In the first story, the existence of portals helps a girl imagine alternative ways to think about home. The girl’s obsession with finding her own portal continues into adulthood, even as her mother insists that “this place could feel like home if you tried harder.” The mother sees the portals as flights of escapism, while her daughter views their potential as self-actualizing: “It isn’t abandonment at all. . . . It’s about believing in the possibility of other worlds and finding the world where you belong.” Even as portals start to overwhelm the ailing mother, she cannot see beyond her narrow definition of home.

 

Allowing and accepting the imagined worlds of others isn’t without its complications. “LK-32-C” is a story about a boy named Luke, his mother Beth, and Luke’s invented exoplanet. As Luke slips further into the imagined world, the family (which also includes a father and daughter) become more concerned. Beth tries everything to help Luke—a change of diet, a calming space in the house, ear protection when his sister is noisy—but nothing works. After a series of violent incidents at school and at home, a psychiatrist recommends a therapeutic boarding school for Luke. Beth attempts to connect with Luke by asking him questions about LK-32-C, but even that becomes fraught: “His drawings made me think, My son has something worthwhile inside of him. He has an entire world inside of him. I wanted to look at the drawings instead of him. I wanted him to stay away from me.”

 

The three-part story tackles complicated questions about parenting and the dangers of alienation via the imagination. Urbanski’s formal choices add depth and dignity to the characters: The first part is written in third person where we see the whole family together, while the second and third parts are from the perspectives of mother and son, allowing them to voice their own accounts. The effect is that both characters have agency in the story, while also highlighting their separation. As Beth grapples with being a “good parent,” we get to hear what Luke wants:    

Why do people think everyone requires a mother? You did what I wanted you to do, which was to let me go. In the evening, I lie on my back and stare up at the point in the sky where I think you are. The silence around me is like a parent finally giving me what I need. The silence puts its arms around me.

Portalmania is intimately concerned with storytelling itself—who speaks and who is silent, who forces their definition or narrative onto others, who believes the story (or doesn’t), and how to tell a story in a way that people will listen. In “How to Kiss a Hojaki,” for example, Michael is experiencing his silent wife changing into someone he doesn’t recognize. He feels threatened by this and aggressively rejects his wife’s transformation, in some cases physically rewriting the boundaries she has set: 

By the end of the summer, his wife had struck their monthly night of intercourse from the calendar. She had also stopped talking. I am changing into something else! Something that cannot have sex, she wrote. “I’m your husband!” he insisted, rewriting their sex night onto the calendar. She crossed if off with a thick black marker. He wrote it on again.

As the two struggle with their marriage, the political backdrop reminiscent of the 2016 election grows tense, which only amplifies the division within the household. Michael’s inability to understand his wife, as well as the changing world, makes him confused and enraged:

“My wife is turning into something that is not human,” he had told Dr. Sabrina at their previous session. Women did not use to believe they were turning into something else. If they turned into something else, it used to be not okay. The boundaries of what was human and acceptable used to be very clear. Michael liked how things used to be. There used to be a time when, if you were born human, it was difficult—impossible?—to leave your humanness behind. “Define human,” Dr. Sabrina had challenged him, raising her eyebrows like this was a complex argument, one that would really stump Michael. “Define wife,” he had shot back. “Define husband. Define spouse. Define conjugal obligations. Define making love. Define the legal definition of a marriage.”

This terror of illegibility is so threatening to Michael’s sense of self that he is willing to commit violence to preserve his definition of marriage. While the therapist in “How to Kiss a Hojaki” asks Michael for his definitions, the therapist in “Hysteria” suggests that Rebecca use tamer words to describe her experience of marital rape: “I wonder, can we try substituting certain words here, as an experiment?” she suggests. “He says he loves you when he’s having sex with you—when he’s making love to you—when you are having intercourse with each other. When he is exercising his conjugal rights, if we wish to be old-fashioned about it. The language you choose is important here.” In suggesting gentler words, the therapist’s revision minimizes and distorts Rebecca’s reality.

 

In “The Dirty Golden Yellow House,” Urbanski makes explicit the backflips writers often do to make taboo subjects, such as domestic violence or rape, “palatable” for the general public. Throughout the story, the writer voice interjects: “I realize this is not the most fun paragraph to read but try to stick with me here” and “There are some funny jokes about r—. I am saving them for later.” The writer even offers suggestions for readers who might be surprised or disturbed by such a topic:

 

I’d like to provide you with some background and statistics on marital r— now. Please skip the next two paragraphs, resuming your reading with the phrase Later that month, if any of the following apply:

• You consider interruptions like these an affront to your personal fictional escapism.

• You think marital r— in a story is stupid because why doesn’t she just get a divorce so we can stop talking about it.

• You are a marital r— expert.

The narrator then provides some statistics and goes into definitions of sexual coercion and consent, finally saying, “the boundaries of where consent ends and r— begins are still under debate and still broadening.” Urbanski’s use of metanarrative in “Dirty Little Yellow House” implicates us, the readers, as storytellers as well; it forces us to pause, to consider our preconceived expectations, and to witness these normalized abuses not just in the story but in our lives.

 

Throughout Portalmania, we see characters’ conflicting or confused definitions of love or partnership or home, but there are also significant moments in the collection where characters offer self-definition. One of the stories in which a character is being most honest with herself is “Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou (Based on Early Interactions)”:

 

I live at the intersection of a sex-repulsed asexuality and depression, the depression chronic and usually low grade but occasionally suicidal. Which came first? Did my depression lead to my asexuality? Am I depressed because I am asexual? Did both emerge simultaneously or were they always there? Questions of causation are a distraction from what’s important. I arrived at this intersection, and I stayed. The intersection looks modern enough, glass walled on the outside, all smooth reflective surfaces, but inside it smells dank, like a cellar, and the walls pulse like red alarms. I tried to want to be here.

 

Self-identifying as asexual or depressed is of course different than defining how someone else (e.g., a wife, mother, or writer) should be. While forced definitions can be oppressive and harmful, self-definition can be liberating. That’s not to say it’s easy to do, but in a very real sense it takes the story back from others’ reductive and harmful projections.  

 

Urbanski’s stories turn the world outside-in, boldly exposing the psychic core of what is unsaid and unseen in all its brilliant, hard-to-define strangeness. While Portalmania centers the silenced, the ignored, the victim, the abject, the disappeared, the lost, and the misunderstood, the collection exists within a larger ethos of courage, care, and self-autonomy.

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

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

Europe Without Borders

A History

Isaac Stanley-Becker
Princeton University Press ($35)

by Poul Houe

First impressions of this book may prove telling. The cover features a color photo of Schengen by the Moselle River—a village not only situated “near the tri-point border” between France, Germany, and Luxembourg, but the site where the 1985 treaty that became Europe’s official goodbye to its centuries-old borders was signed. Still, what makes this photo of a picturesque village divided by a river so pertinent to the text is the duplicity it signals: Because borders continue to play a key role in the continent’s cultural and political makeup, Isaac Stanley-Becker’s Europe without Borders is about an issue with no end in sight.

How intricate a matter the author, an investigative reporter for the Washington Post, seeks to unwrap is pronounced less by the length of the book—273 pages—than by its 107 pages of notes and bibliography. It is a meticulous undertaking, its occasional repetition justified by the persistent ambiguities and contradictions that continue to mark Europe’s grappling with its border issues and the shadows they cast on its very identity.  

Money and people are the simplest expression of modern Europe’s dichotomy, but soon the simplicity multiplies and becomes hard to unravel. The Schengen ambition to extend the free market to free border crossing of people as well as goods benefits European nationals only; what about migrants, human rights, transnational freedom? Can a cosmopolitan community be European only? Stanley-Becker writes: “Schengen’s pairing of freedom and exclusion became contested. . . . My aim in exploring that project is to reveal the cruel anomalies of human movement in a world where capital and commodities travel globally with far less restraint and where national citizenship is an enduring precondition for the exercise of fundamental rights.”

From day one, the Treaty of Rome and organizations like Citizens’ Europe centered on “A Market Paradigm and Free Movement,” as Stanley-Becker titles his first chapter. But are these two sides of the same coin or polar opposites? How do the Rome Treaty’s humanist ideals match with its common market agenda? After the 1920s pan-European movements towards a borderless Europe—stalled by Hitler’s “cosmopolitan bastard” hostility—were resurrected after World War II, did they intertwine goods and people, as the Customs Union did, or were “human rights” and the “needs of the economy” balanced differently? In a famous lawyer’s words, “market freedoms . . . have something in common with human rights,” though the latter were not the “classical human rights.” A famous court case, assisted by this lawyer, “upheld uninterrupted commerce as the essence of European union” and compelled the free movement aspiration of Citizens’ Europe to be “enshrined” by “a market paradigm.”

The Treaty of Rome was first and foremost about money, and a “noneconomic defense of free movement [of people] did not exist in Community law.” So, boundaries waited to be crossed at Schengen in “A Treaty Signed on the Moselle River,” the title of the book’s second chapter about the waterway tracing Europe’s transition from “domain of empire” to “warring continent” to “transnational community.” A “new principle of freedom of movement”—beyond market needs and national borders—was now in writing, if only for European nationals.

A more generous form of balance, struck earlier by The Benelux Economic Union, “protected noneconomic rights while promoting cross-border market exchange.” This have-it-both-ways agenda contrasted especially with the French-German plan to harmonize national laws while resisting “supranational authority over external borders.” Schengen’s cosmopolitan and social space for market exchange would finally realize Citizens’ Europe and allow for nationals from all its countries, even those outside Schengen territory. At the same time, freedom had to be balanced with security; no aliens or “illegal immigrants” were to be admitted, and the right to residence was still not to be granted to just any border crosser. “Slowly, Schengen took shape as a system of dualisms” under no supranational authority. On the plus side of its account was still money, on the minus side free movement of people, hard to gauge because of Franco-German conflicts and several inconsistencies, such as Berlin’s “asylum tourism,” in sync with border failings worsened by growing public “sensitivity . . . to non-European immigrants.”

When European diplomats in 1990 made “A Return to the Moselle River” (as Chapter 3 is named), they aimed to emphasize Schengen’s European Union intent, to underscore security’s greater importance than freedom, and to fuse intergovernmental cooperation with national sovereignty. The treaty’s opposition to asylum seekers differed from the Council of Europe’s stance in that “Schengen’s ‘shadow’ darkened the ‘European fortress’”—or, as one treatymaker put it: “We tend to keep human rights for our own nationals.”

Chapter 4 deals with “A Problem of Sovereignty” or with cosmopolitanism versus nationalism. Might Schengen “become a laboratory for the breach of democratic principles and human rights,” as some parliamentarians worried? An illiberal, anti-foreigner’s “Fortress Europe,” or, in other words, “a violation of free movement and human rights.” Many nationalists saw Schengen as a mere cloak for “the global market’s penetration into domains of national autonomy and individual freedom” and claimed that its “pairing of free movement with security would cause unfreedom.” Charles de Gaulle’s prime minster warned his boss that this “European integration represented the ‘end of France.’” Conversely, the Constitutional Council assured nations that European “supranationalism would not preempt nationalism” and affirmed “the pairing of freedom with security.” Nonetheless, “realization of a Europe without internal borders has proved to be a lot more complex and complicated than its promoters had imagined,” and the time after the first treaty was signed only “made evident the ambiguities of all that Schengen had come to symbolize,” which one German politician interpreted as a “step into the European surveillance state.”

Schengen was not only “A Place of Risk,” as Stanley-Becker calls Chapter 5, but “a place of risk in a double sense.” Schengen land had become a site where police and computer surveillance were now replacing “the border barrier” with high-tech distinctions between insiders and outsiders, nationals and foreigners, asylum seekers and undesirables, to mention just one “racial marker.” The benefits of free movement came at a price, and Stanley-Becker dwells on the gap between supranational border-policing and true internationalism. Schengen had become “a place of risk” and its free movements questionable.

The book’s sixth and last chapter is devoted to the consequences as experienced by undocumented migrants, spelled out in the title “A Sans-papiers Claim to Free Movement as a Human Right.” These are people whom nativists saw emerging from the “shadows of illegality to seek recognition,” mobilized as a “countermovement to the animus against non-Europeans aroused by the opening of borders.” Further muddling Schengen’s history, their movement was marked by the impact of the oil crisis on guest workers, by French xenophobia, and by racist European immigration laws. Yet, “making and crossing borders has always been one of the ways in which societies are built,” as a spokesperson for the paperless put it, and so these people refuse “to return to the shadows” or to cave in to the new liberals’ adoption of colonialism. While capital may circulate freely, nationals of poor countries may not.

In Stanley-Becker’s “Epilogue” it all adds up to a verdict on Schengen’s role in Europe’s transformation into a common market and a site of human(istic) integration. The downside was a lack of model for transitioning into this “reunified Europe” within “the setting of globalization.” Open borders within Schengen turned into boundaries of exclusion surrounding the territory as “internal European freedom meant fortifying . . . external borders.” With the mass migration in 2015—about 13,000 into Germany every day—internal border control, which had been meant to disappear, only increased and deepened Schengen’s internal division. It was a backlash to free movement, and soon the borderless status was further compromised—first by Brexit, then by Covid—until internal borders literally got resurrected and controlled, if only indirectly and as an exception. Schengen “isn’t dead but broken” was the sense within the European Council, to which Stanley-Becker rightfully adds that there “was never a Europe without borders . . . Nor was it meant to be otherwise by the treatymakers.”

Rarely has the complexity of Europe’s recent border issues, and its mix of national and transnational inclinations, been as carefully documented as in Stanley-Becker’s book, from its front cover to its countless notes. Its source material contains dilemmas of such phenomenological importance that one would want to see them discussed beyond continental boundaries. They are food for rethinking borders (as John. C. Welchman called his 1996 anthology), and the outcome may well exceed the borders of both Europe and Europe without Borders.

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

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

Abundant Life

New and Selected Poems

Hank Lazer
Chax Press ($34)

by Jefferson Hansen

A profound playfulness characterizes Hank Lazer’s Abundant Life: New and Selected Poems. Ranging from formal experiments to handwritten “shape” poems, the pieces here move from one revelation to another, but they are all grounded in everyday life and firmly rooted in Lazer’s improvisatory writing practices.

Lazer’s explorations of form are often delivered in “serial heuristics,” which the author describes in his Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008 (Omnidawn, 2008) as “the developing of a particular procedure or form or set of rules for a series of poems which become . . . how I will live in poetry for that period.” The earliest collections from which Abundant Life selects contain such experiments. Days (Lavender Ink, 2002), for example, features ten-line poems that are dense with word play and seeming non-sequiturs. There is an off-beat, rhythmically knotty quality to these poems:

i sing the body
eclectic uh defective
icing the bawdy
directive rodin to young
rilke   “toujours travailler”
all words & no fray
makes yack a dull
“stable & precarious”
Rose on licorice er
icarus’ wings

Lazer here plays with Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” along with an instruction the sculptor Rodin gave to the poet Rilke—“work all the days”—which Lazer then uses as a springboard to riff on the saying “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” rhyming “fray” for “play” and changing “work” to “words” and “Jack” to “yack.” He also suggests the hesitancy of improvisation with the quasi-words “uh” and “er” and bounces between allusions (there’s Icarus, of course, but also John Dewey and Gertrude Stein toward the end) in an offbeat, herky-jerky rhythm that mimics how thinking can come fitfully.

Abundant Life switches gears with one of Lazer’s most important poems, “Deathwatch for My Father,” from Elegies and Vacations (Salt Publishing, 2004). This is a long, diary poem with dated sections that pertain to Lazer’s experience on that day as his father was dying of leukemia. He begins by asking:

                  why am i
writing  in the face of
your dying

Several pages later, after recounting his father’s gallows humor and their talk of golf, Lazer seems to have an answer, culled in part from poet George Oppen:

     he would i know
encourage me  (& perhaps has
in writing this poem)  to
test poetry in the face
of the worst events

This is perhaps the most self-referential reflection in the poem, which insists on the dailiness of facing the anguish of a dying loved one. Lazer describes fighting tears as he goes golfing alone to honor his and his father’s love of the sport. Even amidst anguish, however, Lazer finds room for playfulness; in a kind of mid-line acrostic, he spells his father’s name:

                               not one prinCipally given to words
                                  but works Hard these
                                                  lAst days
                                            to wRite a series of thank you notes
the one to warren worries him a Lot
                                                  hE can’t get it right
                                  with the noSe

Lazer turns to religion as a subject matter around 2005. Never devotional or dogmatic, he is interested in profound religious experience, not the institutions and their sometimes-numbing rituals. He describes himself as a Jewish Buddhist agnostic; in his recently published (and self-deprecatingly titled) What Were You Thinking: Essays 2006–2024 (Lavender Ink, 2025) he asserts that religious experience is “analogous to the reading experience of innovative poetry—an enigmatic encounter that requires patience, open-mindedness (in Zen terminology, the beginner’s mind), and the development of an ability (negative capability?) to live in uncertainty and with an ethical humility that suggests the incompleteness of our understandings.” For him, religious practice and innovative poetry both offer contemplative opportunities to keep the world fresh, open, and complicated.

In the 2010s Lazer developed a new form of writing: shape poems. This work is handwritten in cursive, with lines that roam freely about; sometimes the writing is even upside down, forcing the reader to rotate the page. These poems also include short quotations from philosophers Martin Heidegger, Emmanual Levinas, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the last of this series of books, Slowly Becoming Awake (Dos Madres Press, 2019), integrates quotations from the 13th-century Zen Buddhist monk Eihei Dogen (e.g., “Do not treasure or belittle what is far away, but be intimate with it. Do not treasure or belittle what is near, but be intimate with it”). As with his other books that use quotation, Lazer chooses passages that are free from jargon and have meaning for readers unfamiliar with the thinker, and Slowly Becoming Awake uses about five different colors of ink, adding to its visual playfulness.

After his spate of shape poems, Lazer perhaps cheekily titled his next collection Poems That Look Just Like Poems (Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2019). Sure enough, these are left-justified typewritten poems with short lines. The first of them, “As If,” reads:

i begin
each day
(which is already
a false statement)
attending to my
study & the yard
the bird feeders
the weather
certain that this
simplified world
exceeds my under
standing of it

With its immediate parenthetical disclaimer, “As If” gets at the rich complexity Lazer senses in “this / simplified world.” Immediacy is a value for Lazer; he tells us in What Were You Thinking that he rarely revises his poems, preferring them to be “of the moment,” and this momentariness consistently honors the specificity of the writing act as it occurred amid moods, attentional foci, obsessions, and sensible facts. For Lazer, everything is always different than it was. In its generalizing tendencies, language can give the lie to this abundance, but poetry can run counter to this tendency, reminding the writer and the reader of how specific, and precious, an individual moment is.

Lazer has continued his lean into life’s abundance in the current decade. In Covid 19 Sutras (Lavender Ink, 2020), he uses a variety of forms—centered four-line stanzas, serially indented four-line stanzas, long-lined free verse—to capture the grinding fear and dread during the pandemic, as in a poem about his elderly mother’s hospitalization:

     i think
   you are
 on your way
& it pains me

      that i
  that no one
    can be
   with you

In Pieces (BlazeVox, 2022), which lifts its title from a Robert Creeley book, Lazer pays homage to a “brown dog / actively sniffing / everywhere” and to a beloved uncle, a Biblical scholar who talked to God on his porch in the mornings, concluding that “anything seen / in an enlightened manner / becomes revelatory.” One could hardly put it more economically than that, but Lazer fleshes out his spiritual aesthetics in What Were You Thinking when he writes,

at the heart of spiritual experience is gratitude for consciousness, and some means of reflecting upon both that gratitude and the nature and possibilities of consciousness . . . If spiritual experience is in some way centered in the fact and experiencing of consciousness, no wonder then the intimacy of spiritual experience and language. And thus no wonder the intimacy and inter-dependency of spiritual experience and poetry.

For Lazer, poetry is akin to spiritual experience because both cause us to appreciate the countless particulars around us. Life is always more than we think it is, and Lazer’s entire poetic career has been reminding us of this plenty. An Abundant Life indeed.

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

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

Chronicle of Drifting

Yuki Tanaka
Copper Canyon Press ($17)

by John Bradley

Although Surrealism is among the most important artistic movements of the past hundred years, the adjective “surreal” has largely lost its connection to the unconscious and the marvelous. Merriam-Webster, for example, defines “surreal” as “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream,” which is adequate, if lackluster. To witness the power of the surreal to startle and delight, readers should open Yuki Tanaka’s debut poetry collection Chronicle of Drifting, which demonstrates that Surrealism is very much alive.

The title poem consists of sixteen prose poems, all quietly surreal. Here’s the eighth, typical of the series:

A stray cat in an alley in Yotsuya. I had no food but I made a gesture of food inviting the cat but she didn’t come. The locksmith there was wonderful, taught me how to fix my apartment key, which had been bent when it got too close to a kerosene stove at the train station. He reheated it with a burner, until the key glowed in front of us, and he used pliers to unbend it, like setting a broken tail straight. The cat in my head cried in pain, but I patted her to be quiet. Went home with a bag of strawberries, lettuce, oysters, but my head was full of dry things. Someone walking outside. Voice of a sweet-potato seller with a shy trumpet. I can’t make music, not being a piano. But as a child, I kicked sand into the ferns, making the sound of light rain.

There’s a dream-like narrative here, as in the other prose poems in this series, with surprising turns, from a cat to a locksmith to “someone walking outside”; at times associative patterns can be seen, as in the closing lines that move from “shy trumpet” to “not being a piano” to kicking up “the sound of light rain.” The delightful ease and sense of whimsy Tanaka conjures reinforce the playful transformations of self that “Chronicle of Drifting” so expansively relates.

Although this is Tanaka’s first book, he has also translated, with poet Mary Jo Bang, a selection of poems by the Japanese Surrealist Shuzo Takiguichi (1903-1979); in their introduction to A Kiss for the Absolute (Princeton University Press, 2024), Bang and Tanaka say of Takiguchi that his “I” is “a constructed poetic entity—an impish shape-shifter who dashes quickly through a world overflowing with associative imagery.” The same could be said of Tanaka’s own work. In the opening of “Like One Who Has Mingled Freely with the World,” the speaker is imitating a bird: “Surrounded by children, I leap up / with a huge silk scarf around my shoulders // to look like a crane.” But in the very next line, everything changes: “They laugh and laugh / and push me into a rabbit skin and watch.” Just like that, our narrator is now a rabbit “with long ears” who hopes “they’ll let me in”—and it’s only the third stanza of a nine-stanza poem! The speaker then tells us of an earlier mingling, when a “girl in a wedding kimono / . . . screamed when I popped up from the rice paddy // like a big frog.” Near the end of the poem, the speaker holds an umbrella “up against the clear sky,” sounding rather human, at least temporarily.

While Tanaka’s roots can be traced to classic Surrealism, the worlds he creates are unlike any other. In “Prognosis at Midnight,” the speaker reads about a “grandmother” who “fell down the stairs and broke her hip.” This triggers a fantasy where the speaker has his chauffer take him to this woman to “comfort her”:

                                         I’d say, I read about you, I’m terribly sorry,
            this is my cockatoo, he’s twelve and loves carrots.
            We’d share her hospital dinner and be happy.
            Other sick people gather around us, admiring my cockatoo,
            who looks proud in his cage, unfurling his light-pink wings,
            like stage curtains, and I’m his assistant.

The fantasy continues, no longer feeling like a daydream but like an actual narrative, albeit a fantastical one. Here, as in most of the collection, there’s a casual ease, an effortlessness to the poem’s movement. The only poems that feel strained are in the section “Discourse on Vanishing”; a note in the back of the book explains that these are erasures of Tanaka’s doctoral dissertation. No wonder they feel enervated.

This is a minor issue, however, in a wondrous debut book. Only in Chronicle of Drifting could a reader hear “Tonight, after rain / I’d like you to fly through these irises, // your blue mustache, blue cheeks / infected with sky.”

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

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

Will Eisner: A Comics Biography

Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur
NBM ($29.99)

by Paul Buhle

It is perhaps not so surprising to learn that the real story of a hugely popular 20th-century comic art form has slipped into a seemingly distant past, even as a densely theoretical, university-based comics scholarship emerges. Even now, the medium’s foremost artists are mostly viewed as visual entertainers; their real-life stories, from their studios to their private lives, gather little of the attention given to artists by the museum world.

Will Eisner is surely a case in point. Creator of “The Spirit,” Eisner reset the visual standard with his cinematic innovations and snappy plot lines. An innovator who ran his own studio, he founded a unique comic-within-the-newspaper that reached millions of news-hungry readers of the 1940s—among them young Jules Feiffer and Wally Wood, employees of Eisner’s studio and future comic stars in their own right. Eisner was a businessman and an artist; he had no real successors in the press or the comic book industry.

As rendered by the writer-artist team of Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur, Will Eisner: A Comics Biography seeks to wrap this story around the life of a fanatically hard-working youngster who evolves with the times. Much of the wider context of comics, as both an art and a business, has been squeezed down in the telling, but we see here at close range the real misery of the comic artist, fighting poverty sans respect or sentimentalization of the historic suffering-artist kind. The book closes with an older Eisner making a startling comics comeback, evidently shifting from a dog-eat-dog individualism toward a better understanding of the world.

To return to the beginnings: Eisner’s immigrant father, a sometime set-designer in pre-World War II Europe, is shown to experience all the frustrations of life in the impoverished Bronx and Brooklyn of the 1920s and ’30s. Hounded by unemployment and ethnic prejudice, the family moves repeatedly. By 1927, ten-year-old Will is already thinking about comics as a way to make a living and escape the household where the patriarch is a demoralizing failure.

Newspaper comics, created for semi-literate urban audiences of the 1890s and full of humorous one-liners, had become a family-oriented genre by the 1920s. Pulp magazines, with lurid fiction leaning toward pornography, offered a different angle on popular culture, and from this seemingly unlikely quarter, the comic book publishing world emerged. From the first glimpses of Superman, created by two Cleveland counterparts to Eisner, boys across the country raced to the newsstands with dimes for vicarious fulfillment. Meanwhile, Eisner’s acquaintance and rival Bob Kane was in the process of inventing a less-supernatural, visually darker hero: Batman.

Some of the most agonized pages of Will Eisner reflect the artist’s desperate effort to make a living at the lowest level of comics, pulling all-nighters to write and draw strips himself to fulfill pulp production quotas. In the process, we are shown the creation/production process, and reminded that still-young Will invented “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle”—she has never quite left popular culture—as a result. He is already managing a team of creators at the age of twenty-three when he comes up with The Spirit.

Obviously handsome, dashing, and a modern hero, The Spirit wears an eye-covering mask; he has a secret identity. But the important thing is the comic page-and-panel world that he moves through. Arguably, Eisner’s creation changed what is often called the “visual vocabulary” of comics by shifting the perspective of the viewer from page to page, relying heavily upon suspense, slapstick humor, and an occasional serving of cheesecake in the long and shapely legs of dames who turn out, often enough, to be spies or criminal accomplices. In ways that neither comic books nor comic strips could manage, Eisner’s micro-comic, inserted into Saturday newspapers, told a coherent and entertaining story to an audience more grown-up than the newsstand buyers, and The Spirit was a hit.

Eisner was drafted when the war came, and during his service, he created educational comics within the Army, unknowingly preparing for his post-Spirit days. Meanwhile, the insert continued; by 1945, he had learned to turn over more and more of the weekly grind to his staff. Beyond comics, noir films filled movie screens between 1946 and 1950; Eisner, a patriot and mostly humorous anti-Russian Cold Warrior, would not have guessed how many of the best noir films were written by Communists or near-Communists who saw postwar America through a glass darkly. His darkness was not theirs, exactly: He did not blame the rich and powerful, nor did the Spirit go after racists and anti-Semites, as some leading films dared to do. Eisner’s female characters, good or (more interestingly) bad, lacked any real volition, and the Spirit’s Black assistant was a throwback to racial stereotypes shifting for the better during wartime. But the darkness that artists of all kinds felt after the war years actually improved Eisner’s art, as it made him take more chances with narratives even as he drew a phase of his life to a close.

In 1950, Eisner, then a prosperous suburban homeowner and happily married businessman, launched a company that promised educational, instructive comics. The Army was immediately his best, though by no means his only, client. He closed out The Spirit officially in 1952 and seemed to have abandoned popular entertainment, the telling of fictional stories through comic art.

Only in the last few pages of the book do we learn that underground comix publisher Denis Kitchen persuaded Eisner to return to the medium decades later, first through reprints, then a brief Spirit revival, and then onward to new graphic novels. During the 1980s and ’90s, Eisner turned out almost two dozen books, from graphic art instruction to novelistic narratives of many kinds. In 1988, the Eisner Award, blessed annually at the San Diego Comic-Con, made clear his lasting fame. (I am happy to have shared one of these awards for The Art of Harvey Kurtzman [Abrams, 2009], Eisner’s younger friend of the 1950s and later.)

Writer Stephen Weiner and artist Dan Mazur have inevitably skipped over large chunks of comics history for a compelling bildungsroman of economic, family, and personal drama. Businessmen made a lot of money, but artists experienced extreme exploitation. Among his personal or moral weaknesses, Eisner did not—apparently could not—see the need for unions of comics workers, from efforts in the 1930s to a heroic if failed struggle during the early 1950s. In later years—as he was seeking to make amends on racial matters—he even began to see the wrongs of the Vietnam War, though he never quite grappled with the Israeli/Jewish dilemma of being at the wrong end of a particular suffering humanity. Eisner was always the consummate artist—and in that regard, this book captures his best self.

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

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

Shadow Ticket

Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Press ($30) 

by Ben Sloan

A time machine swiveling us to an assortment of cultural markers from the 1930s—vaudeville, fascism, “chorus cuties trucking across at all angles shaking ostrich-feather fans,” U-boats, antisemitism, Al Capone, “a slowly rotating dance floor,” Hitler—Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel Shadow Ticket is a history-steeped cautionary tale. Starting in Milwaukee then migrating to Eastern Europe, the novel follows the adventures of the savvy yet naive detective Hicks McTaggart after his boss, Boynt Crosstown, explains to him his new “ticket” (assignment): to “shadow” (follow) the lovely Daphne Airmont, who has run off with lounge lizard Hop Wingdale, and convince her to return to her fiancé, G. Rodney Flaunch. 

Pnychon’s snappy dialogue, mimicking vaudeville stand-up laugh routines, is thoroughly infused with bitter-pill historical references, resulting in a jarring mix of the funny and the fearsome. Take this conversation Hicks has with his Uncle Lefty: 

“. . . we gotta deal not only with the Reds who’ve been troublesome forever, but also with the Hitler movement. . . . blood on the streets of Milwaukee, let’s hope not too much higher than trouser-cuff level, till one party prevails.”
      “‘Prevails.’ And you think the, um . . .” Hicks pulling his hair down briefly over one eye.
      “Der Führer,” gently, “is der future, Hicks. Just the other day the Journal calls him ‘that intelligent young German Fascist.’”
      “They called me Boy Inspiration of the Year once, look where it got me.”
      “You can’t trust the newsreels . . . the Jews who control the movie business only allow footage that will make him look crazy or comical, funny little guy, funny walk, funny mustache, German Charlie Chaplin, how serious could he be?”

Falling for conspiracy theories, not to mention being duped over and over again by misinformation, exemplify our all-too-human tendency to misinterpret or outright ignore what is right in front of us. Pynchon underscores the irony as Hicks hops on a boat to Europe to proceed with his “ticket”:

Tonight the saloon deck is swarming with grinning stewards, uniformed juveniles years corrupted, American sorority girls, exiled royalty, . . . postwar liner travel in full swing. “Icebergs? Enemy torpedoes? Phooey! If that’s the worst that could happen, then it’s happened already, hasn’t it, and anything else is only an amateur act. Long as we’re alive, let’s live.”
      “Gaudeamus igitur to that, Jack!”

Blended in with the vaudeville and fright show moments is the occasional sidebar of political commentary. Moving “from trivial to world-historic,” juxtaposing comedy routines with the blood-drenched saga of humanity, and otherwise highlighting the “monster in the Tunnel of Love” are central to Shadow Ticket. The resulting centrifugal residue clearly illustrates what’s happening in the U.S. at this very moment:

“Like it says on the subpoena we haven’t served you yet . . . A federal rap, not to be shrugged off. Potential wrong-doers might keep in mind as yet little-known lockups such as Alcatraz Island, . . . We haven’t even begun to show how dangerous we can be, and the funny thing? Is, is we could be running the country any day now and you’ll all have to swear loyalty to us because by then we’ll be in the next war fighting for our lives, and maybe that’ll be all you’ve got.”

In response to this very real threat, we have used, and continue to use more than ever, pop culture anodyne happy-talk as a tactic to avoid civic responsibility and settle for “a lifetime of infantilized misery” instead. Is there any way out of this? “Maybe I should install a lens in my belly button, so I can see where I’m going with my head up my ass.”

To read Shadow Ticket is to return to the period between the two world wars and consider where, a century later, we might want (or maybe more importantly not want) to go. As Pynchon puts it:

We’re in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree. If anybody’s around to remember. Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark. Until finally we turn to look back the way we came, and there’s that last light bulb, once so bright, now feebly flickering, about to burn out, and it’s well past time to be saying, Florsheims, let’s ambulate.

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

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

Waste Land

A World in Permanent Crisis

Robert D. Kaplan
Random House ($31)

by Poul Houe

In his 2012 book The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (Random House), noted foreign affairs observer Robert D. Kaplan explored the spatial dimension of the crisis haunting the world, also labeled the “crisis of room.” In his new volume, this worldwide crisis has moved to a time(less) dimension; both “waste land” and “permanent crisis” imply that the times they are a-changin’—but not for the better. Admittedly a “relentlessly pessimistic” observer, Kaplan doesn’t ignore progress and betterments per se but puts them in historical contexts that tend to prove them unsustainable.

The state of modern democracy may be the most troubling case facing this approach. It dominates “Weimar Goes Global,” the first of Waste Land’s three sections, and describes, for better and worse, our current situation with its most typical pretext and sounding board: the way technology reduces distance while alienating closeness, thus intertwining globalization’s two poles. Much of our divided world appears as Weimar “of scale”—an advanced society that easily disintegrates into a Beer Hall Putsch. Weimar was a double-edged sword to be feared constructively. By Kaplan’s standard, conservative stability beats the illusion of progress, since freedom devoid of institutional order may only replace hierarchy with anarchy, unlike true freedom, which depends on order (as Solzhenitsyn put it).

In Kaplan’s view, failing to realize that history is not governed by reason inevitably leads to the falsehood of optimism and to a “borderless world” whose juxtapositions cause further disruptions and crises—presumably a forecast of today’s “terrifying technological and ideological innovations” and their erosion of a moderation based on tradition. These are instances of Kaplan’s “obsessively negative” outlook, which he acknowledges underlies his pessimism.

In addition, he considers today’s polarizing social media less conducive to cool thinking than cold war print culture; and while technology may pacify and feminize life, some leaders will rebel and become even more brutal chieftains. So, is Steven Pinker’s peaceful image of the West a beacon of hope—or one of self-delusion? Though still more peaceful than the rest of the world, the West is slowly dissolving and becoming like the rest; and in many places war “is not a means but an end,” as Kaplan puts it with a quote from Martin van Cleveld. To Paul Theroux’s point that anarchy (in Africa) is more likely than tyranny, Kaplan adds his own deterministic view that America’s cold war victory makes for an irrelevant optimism. Instead, “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease Are Destroying the Social Fabric of the Planet” is the title his editors, with his approval, gave one of his articles.

Predictably, the second section of his Waste Land is about “The Great Powers in Decline”—with an America weakened by technology, deification of the present, and an undermined sense of history. Meanwhile, a war-faring Russia remains “the sick man of Eurasia” and the whole world “one of pitiless power struggles that make a mockery of elite posturing.” Quite simply, this is a “brawling, tumultuous world defined by upheaval,” backed by an antiquated United Nations and “superseded by the very messy reality of globalization itself.” Because “everything intersects with everything else,” such a world is “by definition unstable” and its resulting confrontations the very “totemic reality of globalization.”

As for Russia, Kaplan deems its army “a mob on the move,” and while Putin differs from Hitler, their histories “follow similar patterns.” It’s a waste land, in T.S. Eliot’s sense, or an incompetent aggressor in a mix of war, climate change, and AI. Even more than China, and the U.S., it is a crumbling empire in the globe’s “unified theater of conflict” or “geopolitical bear market.” Kaplan’s doomsday conclusion to his section on declining great powers reads: “Isolationism is the past: full immersion in a chaotic world is the inevitable future.”

To break down what this means at the socio-cultural level of everyday urban life, Waste Land’s third section on “Crowds and Chaos” draws especially upon Jane Jacobs’s classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961), a classic work about different people getting along—before social media changed it all, re-segregating the urban locales and putting the segregated classes in contact with each other, say, in Brooklyn with three-quarters of the population well off and the rest being on food stamps. The digital web became a city of its own and replicated its inhabitants’ countless interactions, “not always for the better” but in a way that presaged how geopolitics will deteriorate as well. Worse even than Stalinism’s exteriorization of everything, by Kaplan’s account today’s tech world will hollow out human souls completely and put the urban elite’s “groupthink” (or “google-think”) in their place. Much in the way Oswald Spengler once predicted world cities’ production of “the mob” would replace “the folk” of the country-sides.

To all that Kaplan adds that ‘folks’ in today’s U.S. are Trumpsters, Confederacy-nostalgic haters of liberal bastions, world media, cosmopolitan cities, and left-wing mobs. Both in Russia 1917 and in the U.S. 2020, liberals were intimidated to support their violent far left, while “cancel culture’s” mode of rectifying opinions became the virtual, non-violent version of Leninism’s mob mentality. Such a combination of digital video tech and Hannah Arendt’s vision of lonely individuals seeking shelter in crowds assailed New York Times editors for not being purely ideological, much in sync with Spengler’s image of “the urban horde” and fear of the media, a wedding of “urbanization and weaponry” that Kaplan finds especially menacing today.

He goes even further than Spengler and accounts for “the world-city and its pathologies … with its access to the Internet” as the site for undermining “the nation-state.” It’s a stylish beginning of the end of civilization, as when modern art with its abstract cities shows disconnection from the land becoming rigid as (Spengler’s) “deep soil ties” disappear. This is how Kaplan with his (and Eliot’s) title signals the alienation of our modern world “of futility and anarchy,” “a pile of fragments,” situated between an eradicated national culture and an insufficient international replacement thereof. With his bent for existentialism, Kaplan’s take on reality is individualistic, unlike the sensations of crowds and mobs, which by his definition are untrue, especially when such groups are formed by self-obsessed tech individuals who have become too anxiety-ridden to be themselves.

As reason yields to the “ideological abstraction and crowd psychology” that governs the modern world beneath its surface, our century’s future will be subject to similar tumultuous and self-destructive forces. According to Elias Canetti, lone and isolated individuals form “the most fearsome crowd” and deem this tyrannic form of equality the best shelter from which to seek “retribution.” Crowds are the bedrock of dark human experiences, and the McCarthy era’s witch-hunt may well be repeated when high tech “encourages intellectual mobs,” much as 1984 and Brave New World predicted. Post-modern tech exploits what already “the Founders of the American Revolution knew, that unrestrained democracy is the proving ground of anarchy.”

Still, Kaplan claims that “it isn’t that the world is getting worse. It’s getting better.” A rare pronouncement on his part, and soon followed up by renewed thumbs-down claims: about AI’s negative impact upon democracy as it worsens crowd mentality; about the modernist breaking of rational rules and “rational man” yielding to “psychological man”; about elites turning more conformist, masses more ignorant, and civilization likely to die as conflict on Earth intensifies, despite an overbearing urban sameness. Most certainly, the tyranny of the crowd is both an indicator and producer of inconsistent chaos everywhere.

Ultimately, totalitarianism and progress prove intertwined, which Kaplan finds evidenced by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich; while the West did free the individual from group dominance, it also enacted a cosmopolitanism that “can itself be anti-democratic” by dispensing with soil, roots, and location. Kaplan ends by recalling the Weimar republic with its great hope but insufficient order: How do we inherit its best side while avoiding its worst? I’m rather reminded of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Shadow,” in which progress casts a shadow that only grows more deadly by being ignored.

There are important lessons to be learned from Kaplan’s Waste Land. That modernity’s upsides are dwarfed by the abundance of gloom that the author rightly accounts for is indeed regrettable, though not always sustainable. His literary approach to several cultural and political pitfalls is mostly refreshing, but sometimes outdated, such as his existentialistic conception, which seems too stereotypical and cliché-oriented to measure up to current insights into this artistic and philosophical idiom. Yet, Waste Land is all in all an important and timely memento. 

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

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

Cavalier Perspective

Last Essays, 1952-1966

André Breton
Translated by Austin Carder
City Lights Publishers ($18.95)

by Allan Graubard

In 1946, some six years after fleeing Fascist France for New York City, André Breton returned to post-war Paris. He sought not only to resume surrealist activities with old and new comrades, but also to situate Surrealism within the new political climate of the Fourth French Republic (1946-1958) and the new cultural zeitgeist attuned to Existentialism and its allies.

By 1952, this situation had not changed in great detail. Marginalized by the power of the Communist parties that now steered cultural production and sidelined politically by his critiques of Stalinist abuses that the majority refused to acknowledge (including summary executions and exile to the Gulag), Breton did not diverge from his aim to root surrealist activity in the three reciprocating realms that were his beacons prior to the war: love, freedom, and poetry. As he explained in the 1952 essay “Link” that opens Cavalier Perspective: Last Essays 1952-1966, the emotional catalyst that inspires surrealist activity resides in the “realm of desire which everything today is conspiring to veil.” His advice on how best to respond, however quick it might seem, does not diminish the goal: “explore it in every direction until it reveals the secret of how to ‘change life’” [as Rimbaud demanded].

Austin Carder’s translation of these final volleys from Breton comes at a significant moment: The international celebration of the centenary of the Surrealist Manifesto in 2024, which prompted numerous exhibitions both retrospective and contemporary, along with the 2025 publication in English of Breton’s late work Magic Art (Fulgur Press) and a new translation of his landmark early work Nadja, make a ready stage for this book, his gathering of shorter essays published prior to his death in 1966.

Diverse in character, these forty-one selections reveal Breton’s personal voice and richly sculpted style. While they are not poems, of course, they are clearly texts written by a major poet, one whose sensitivity to nuance and clarity when opposing oppressive conditions kept his viewpoints—including on the Algerian Revolution (which he supported) and France’s ongoing colonialism (which he detested)—sharp and alive.

Cavalier Perspective contains prefaces, reviews, letters, interviews, poignant eulogies, and public speeches Breton gave during the fourteen years it covers. Certainly these pieces do not exhaust his entire output, but they provide what he felt was worth a reader’s time; Breton was always a fine anthologist. Tracking the issues that Breton dealt with and the people he discussed, the majority of whom he knew well—Antonin Artaud, Robert Desnos, Francis Picabia, George Bataille, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Guillaume Apollinaire, and others—they clarify the stakes at play and the risks involved.

For Surrealism that meant one thing, as Breton expresses in “At Long Last” from 1953: total refusal to join any camp, whether cultural or political, powerful or not. He called for sustaining surrealist group activity with younger artists, filmmakers, and writers joining those of the pre-war group who remained (death, exclusion, and defection having taken several). In brief, with two world wars and multiple genocides to prove it, the myths and mores that founded Judeo-Christian society were bankrupt (one might observe that a similar situation prevails for us now) and something new was needed. The effect was a broadening of Surrealism’s intellectual compass as indigenous cultures took center stage along with Western esotericism (alchemy and astrology especially).

The essays range widely in subject matter. “You have the floor, young seer of things . . .” (1952) celebrates the audacity of youth, as Breton recounts coming up with the initial artistic revolts of the 20th Century. “Stalin in History” (1953) offers a cutting response to the dictator’s death, in which Breton portrays Stalin this way: “Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.” In “Letter to Robert Amadou” (1954), Breton discusses the critical avenues opened up by psychoanalysis when considering art such as de Chirico’s painting The Child’s Brain, which profoundly influenced early Surrealism. That same year gives us three texts devoted to a new surrealist game called “The One in the Other,” a kind of riddling that forefronts analogical thought to socialize poetic discourse, and “Everyday Magic” (1955) consists of journal entries and reflections on chance events that occurred over six days—the kind of curious happenstance that uncovers hidden confluences between our exterior and internal worlds.

No matter the topic, striking insights are peppered throughout Cavalier Perspective: for example, in the 1956 piece “Embers at Ceridwen’s Cauldron” (written as a foreword to a book on the ancient Celts), Breton celebrates the “originality of Gallic art” contra Greek ideas of beauty at a time when such thinking was rare. “The Language of Stones” (1957) presents a charming, thoroughly researched piece on the history and pleasures of visionary minerology—when gazing at a stone induces a state of trance followed by the same “hyper-lucidity” that feeds poetic consciousness. In “Flora Tristan” (1957), Breton celebrates the legacy of Gauguin’s maternal aunt; several years prior to the publication of The Communist Manifesto, she advocated for workers (men and women both) to organize against their submission to the system of alienated labor that Marx would soon expose on a wide scale. (The relationship between this revolutionary tradition and esotericism becomes clear through Abbé Constant, later known Eliphas Levi, a theorist of magic who published Tristan’s The Emancipation of Women, or the Pariah’s Testimony in 1845, one year after her death).

“Phoenix of the Mask” (1960) is a significant statement on Breton’s affinities with indigenous cultures for whom ritual and ceremony infuse daily life. Along the way, he points out that while scholarship has advanced, it has done so through an assumed objectivity that keeps scholars distant from the experience they study—of particular relevance when the topic is how wearing a mask empowers and transforms the personality.  

Other compelling texts lead to the finale, “Credits” (1966), an introduction to the eleventh international exhibition of Surrealism titled “L’Ecart Absolu” (“Absolute Divergence”). There are two lines in “Credits” which clarify the point of the surrealist adventure: “Reality must be pierced through in every sense of the word” and “I want to point the mind in an unfamiliar direction and awaken it.” For Breton, it was all truly that simple.

Austin Carder’s translation lends to Breton’s prose the colors it needs in English. Carder also provides a back matter “Note” that details the glue that binds the essays in the book into a shifting, absorbing, multileveled field. The book contains two introductions: one by City Lights editor Garrett Caples, and, thankfully, the original introduction to the 1970 French edition by Marguerite Bonnet. Finally available in English, Cavalier Perspective: Last Essays 1952-1966 delivers something precious from the founder of Surrealism.

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

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

North Sun

or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther

Ethan Rutherford
A Strange Object ($17.95)

by Nicole Emanuel

Annie Dillard observed that under the influence of Herman Melville’s pen, a whale becomes “an aesthetic or epistemological probe by means of which the artist analyzes the universe.” The same might be said of the whaleship in Ethan Rutherford’s novel North Sun: or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther. The material and metaphorical heft of the Esther, this nineteenth-century bark-rigged schooner, are how we come to understand the world of Rutherford’s fiction—and, by extension, a means of probing our contemporary world as well.

Rutherford understands that the whaleship-as-literary-probe is a peculiar craft, built for navigating paradox. The Esther sails from flesh-freezing ice to mind-melting sun; the ship is the stage for acts of butchery and messy labor, as well as for scenes of beauty and tender intimacy. Whales are chased, harpooned, and rendered. Men are lost at sea. Boys lose their innocence. The humans aboard the ship encounter dolphins, walruses, seabirds, crabs, and sharks, and the ensuing interspecies interactions are sometimes transcendent, sometimes harrowing, sometimes both.

These episodes form the bulk of the book, and they hang upon the framework of a plot that’s a bit like Heart of Darkness transposed from equator to pole. The novel opens in 1878 New Bedford, where Captain Arnold Lovejoy has returned from an unprofitable whaling voyage. He bears a letter for the Ashleys, a wealthy family who command a fleet of whaling vessels; their fortune was built upon this extractive industry (and possibly upon more occult sources too, as events later in the novel suggest). The Ashley patriarch is displeased that Captain Leander, who dispatched Lovejoy with the letter, has announced his intention to stay with the Ashleys’ most prized ship, which is in danger of being crushed by the ice pack. Lovejoy is to play the Marlowe to Leander’s Kurtz—to seek out the rogue captain and do his best to persuade him to return what the Ashleys feel is rightfully theirs. As the Esther sails ever further from her origin into a world dominated by forces both natural and supernatural, the tenuous hold of the ship’s human crew on their own lives becomes more and more shaky.

Like Moby-Dick and most other maritime literature, North Sun is not especially concerned with linear plot or fixed personae. Sea stories tend to navigate a complex relationship between the expansiveness of the ocean and the claustrophobic confinement of the ship. Time, too, is defamiliarized in a setting where days can be repetitive and monotonous yet are also punctuated by violent tempests. The spatiotemporal strangeness experienced by ocean-going humans has meant that many sea stories, from The Odyssey onward, have used episodic or picaresque forms—and North Sun is no exception. In brief bursts of action, we follow both the internal and external experiences of various characters, most notably Lovejoy, two young brothers who have signed on to their first voyage as ship’s boys, and in a crucial interlude, Sarah Ashley, the daughter who wrestles with moral qualms about her family’s business.

Rutherford subdivides his book deftly, organizing the narrative into three discrete parts that are further broken down into chapters and fragmented still more into even shorter numbered sections; many of these are only a paragraph or two, though some span a few pages. This creates plenty of room for white space in North Sun, which is fitting for a voyage into distant regions unknown. As the arctic explorer George De Long wrote in his journal in 1880, “I frequently think that instead of recording the idle words that express our progress from day to day I might better keep these pages unwritten, leaving a blank properly to represent the utter blank of this Arctic expedition.”

Toward the end of North Sun, Mr. Ashley quotes a passage from Captain William Scoresby’s 1820 account of life as an arctic whaler. Scoresby saw the supposed docility of whales as evidence of God’s love for humanity, since it was what enabled relatively puny people to consume leviathans. Ashley embellishes Scoresby’s justification with an additional observation of his own: “That they cannot speak, nor answer back; it’s in their design. Their suffering is theirs alone. It’s unheard. And to it I offer neither consolation nor embrace.” North Sun itself does not give readers easy consolation. And yet, the suffering in its pages is heard. This applies to the pangs endured by whales and whalemen alike, by shipworms and pigs, by children and captains. The novel insists that there is no such thing as suffering borne by an individual; for better, and for worse, it is always shared. That idea may hold little consolation, but Rutherford’s lilting prose and carefully constructed narrative make North Sun into the kind of book that does in fact feel like the most expansive of embraces.

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

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