Book Review

Arguing for a Better World

How Philosophy Can Help Us Fight for Social Justice

Arianne Shahvisi
Penguin Books ($20)

by Josh Steinbauer

Arianne Shahvisi is a Kurdish British professor of philosophy, and many of the essays in her new book Arguing For a Better World began as reflections on questions from her students. With extraordinary curiosity and conversational ease, she lays out her arguments in response. Shahvisi is not aiming to be objective or apolitical here: “I have tried to make my reasoning clear enough that those who disagree with me will at least see where we part ways.”

Early chapters like “Can You Be Racist to a White Person?” arrive where any progressive writer would, but with a noteworthy eloquence: “History breaks the symmetry between two otherwise comparable acts.” From there, the ethical inspections grow in complexity. In “Is It Sexist to Say ‘Men Are Trash?’” Shahvisi’s response is “When someone says ‘men are trash’ they connect sexual harassment to masculinity. That’s not an act of hate, it’s an act of illumination.” She takes the torch to the very concept of masculinity when she writes, “Toxic masculinity also implies the existence of a ‘healthy’ masculinity, when such a thing seems unlikely or even contradictory. Gender is itself a system of division and hierarchy. Finding ways to make it more palatable misses the deeper moral issues.”

Shahvisi layers a lot of historical research into her arguments. In a chapter about cancel culture, she makes a pit stop in the ancient city state of Athens, where every winter, residents could write the name of someone who’d caused offense onto a broken piece of clay pot. These shards were tallied, and the most disliked person was exiled for ten years. History shows us that even early forms of canceling were not about censorship, but rather “a powerful tool for discouraging assholery.”

The intersection of the personal and political is Shahvisi’s wheelhouse, and she engages it from an array of unlikely angles. In a chapter about individual responsibility within unjust systems, Shahvisi starts with a passage from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath about banks being monsters that men made but can’t control. She funnels that into a story about backyard bickering with her father over disposable plastic, and then pivots to U.K. medical devices produced using child labor in Pakistan. It’s all over the map (as issues related to globalization tend to be), but, like any skillful storyteller, Shahvisi is setting the stage.

When it comes to discussing environmental responsibility, the professor serves up Kant’s Categorical Imperative on the world’s dinner plate. Currently, about half the world’s land mass is used for agriculture. If the rest of the world ate like the average person from India, agriculture would only take up 22%. For the average U.K. resident’s diet, we’d need 95%. For the rest of the world to eat like an American—273 pounds of meat per year—we would need 137% of the world’s land mass for agriculture. This impossibility is the teachable moment of Kant’s universalizability principle: Americans cannot morally consume this much more than their share of the world’s resources.

Shahvisi is critical of capitalist solutions to global woes. When the market sees our desire for eco-friendly options, it cashes in with a retail markup; this sells a clear conscience to those who can afford it while pricing out the masses, functionally sidelining any meaningful solution. She eviscerates the hemming and hawing we do now over our personal carbon footprints, tracing it back to the oil company BP paying the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather to market the idea that individuals (rather than fossil fuel companies) should determine their own climate impact. When fossil fuel websites promote consumer carbon calculators, our society is simply gamifying a Choose Your Own Carbon Dystopia. It’s an update to the playbook that the plastics industry used decades ago to promote flimsy recycling programs as a way of shifting the cost and blame for environmental consequences onto consumers.

The author is pragmatic about how far individual responsibility will take us. Avoiding plastic grocery bags and straws is not going to save the planet: “A single drinking straw is, in fact, a literal drop in the ocean compared with, say, the 705,000 tons of plastic dumped in the sea every year by the fishing industry.” Global dilemmas require international government coordination. Shahvisi holds room for individual impact, but Arguing for a Better World illustrates that our choices are constrained by economic forces and our desires are manipulated by advertising, all without any sense of consequence.

Shahvisi does suggest some novel solutions. For example, she asks, what would it look like if the same level of scrutiny we apply to cigarettes was applied to other products? In the same way that health warnings are a mandatory portion of tobacco packaging, what if we learned, for example, that this pair of shoes or that pair of jeans was produced in a sweatshop where child workers are running machines on 11-hour shifts for less than their country’s minimum wage? It’s hard to say how much justice individual consumers might achieve this way, but the success of tobacco regulation is hard to ignore.

Essays about how to be in our present-day unjust world abound, but the guidance Shahvisi offers in Arguing for a Better World is a refreshing amalgam of progressive politics and professorial pondering. She reminds us that mistakes are unavoidable, and that our moral and political arguments require as much compassion as reason. As she states, “we are all fallible and unfinished, and need to be offered conditions under which learning is possible.”

Art courtesy of the reviewer, one in a series of renditions of writers alongside their words featured on his Instagram (@joshsteinbauer).

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Walk the Darkness Down

Daniel Magariel
Bloomsbury ($27.99)

by Jonathan Fletcher

Daniel Magariel’s latest novel, Walk the Darkness Down, immerses readers into the troubled marriage of Les, a commercial fisherman, and Marlene, a frustrated homemaker. Marlene and Les have endured the worst tragedy conceivable—the death of a child—and though they remained together, their relationship (less a marriage than the inevitable conclusion of a long past romance) is as turbulent as the seas to which Les escapes in an effort to avoid the difficult conversation he and Marlene have needed to have for years.

With observations as insightful as they are sonically pleasing (“Sex has become primitive to him, violent, as grisly as a knifing”), Magariel never strays into the didactic, and the dialogue is equally crisp and effective:

I’m not moving down there. The crew needs me. I have a responsibility to them.
And what about to me?
They’re family.
Family?
Family.

Magariel also judiciously treats readers to purposeful, understated insights. At the end of the first chapter, Marlene clumsily fights Les, only to end up face down on the street in front of their apartment:

For a moment she believes he might somehow conjure Angie by uttering her name, which he’s refused to do for two years now. For a moment, turning her eyes to the top of the stairs, to all the light pouring out of their apartment, she stakes her life on the doorway not being empty.    

A story about two people whose life together has been mostly a life apart, Walk the Darkness Down relies on scenes in which such apartness is not only felt but explicit. Marlene finds an unusual hobby of sorts in befriending local sex workers from The Villas, a defunct motel that since essentially serves as a brothel, and taking them home to care for them: “She never entered the motel, never even pulled up to the lobby, and never brought home the same woman twice.” The arrangement is generally reciprocal: “On nights like these Marlene sees herself as a kind of archaeologist, exhuming the lives of others. As Marlene works, the woman she picked up an hour ago is remade into a girl.” Though Marlene’s “hobby” may not be entirely altruistic, her motives are sympathetic: In helping care for the sex workers, Marlene can feel she is symbolically saving her and Les’s late daughter Angie. Yet when Marlene is alone, this indirect salvation is not enough—it will take more than good deeds to heal. It will also take the understanding and involvement of Marlene’s detached husband—a reality not lost on Marlene as she cuddles one of the women at the end of the second chapter.

Magariel’s settings are equally important in establishing the distance between Marlene and Les. Eschewing lengthy and elaborate descriptions of the coastal town in which the couple lives and life at sea, Magariel instead treats the reader to dynamic and symbolically loaded sequences. At one point, Les looks out on the Atlantic Ocean from the trawler he’s stationed on, taking in the unfathomable scale and size of the sea and the life within it:

Out here bait balls the size of football fields appear from nowhere, the water surface suddenly sparkling with tens of thousands of glinting fish. Biblical weather arrives in full portent. On clear days, when the faint curve of the planet is the only delineation of sky and sea, thoughts warp toward the terrors of myth. Les might imagine a skyscraper tsunami lifting out of the horizon. Or in the inscrutable white of fog, the waters haunted and the hazy sun a second moon, the boat might steam into the open mouth of an awakened leviathan.

At times the environment in Walk the Darkness Down is reported or implicit within the plot. Josie, the latest sex worker taken in by Marlene, shares a news story about horseshoe crabs spawning early in the area, a moving echo of her own urgent situation:

They came up out of the ocean, laying their eggs way before they were supposed to, Josie says. But the awful thing is that the sand was too cold to bury them. So they just left them there. Bill [Josie’s pimp] calls it the tooth and claw, same with the birds, times when the human shine rubs away and the world becomes just a giant thing eating itself, one town at time, one species, one industry, one mother—she pauses—one child.

Besides obviously reflecting Marlene’s and Les’s loss, Josie’s reportage also serves as a tonal contrast to Les’s scene of contemplation on the trawler. Though foreshadowing impending danger, such a scene also suggests the possibility of hope—a possibility only achievable through cooperation and forgiveness. Magariel’s novel doesn’t shy away from sad, even tragic, truths, but also gives the reader a more positive reality to contemplate.

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Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

Anna Funder
Knopf ($32)

by C.T. Wolf

George Orwell’s contributions are many—though he did not achieve them alone. As with many men, it was the women in his life that made his success possible. Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who was married to the writer from 1936 until her death at age thirty-nine in 1945, did just that, even as it shrank her own horizons. What did it mean to be Orwell’s wife? Anna Funder’s new book unpicks this inquiry with precision, dexterity, and charm. Wifedom is not a biography, but instead an incisive investigation into “wifedom” and what it meant for Eileen, a poet with chronic illness, to inhabit the role of “Mrs. Orwell” until her dying day.

Eileen had what in her time was called uterine tumors, which caused vaginal bleeding, anemia, and crushing fatigue. Despite this, she was often the sole breadwinner for the couple, working full time outside the home so George could focus on his writing. She also was his typist, editor, and collaborator, using her poetic sensibility and humanist insight to help push George’s writing to new heights. Friends were in awe of his 1945 novel Animal Farm, both for its gemlike quality and in the departure it represented from his prior work. That was Eileen’s deft influence, as Funder lays out—one among many that have been carefully erased from the record of George’s life.

How were Eileen’s contributions made invisible, and by whom? Funder creates a hybrid narrative that craftily builds a multifactorial story. She lays out archival material, critically appraising letters and firsthand accounts of the couple by their friends and acquaintances, documents written both contemporaneously and later. At the core of the archival record are six letters written by Eileen to her best friend, Norah Symes Myles, discovered in 2005.

Funder looks closely at the ways language is used to erase women from historical records; she inspects Orwell’s own writing as well as the work of his biographers and overlays events that happened in the couple’s life with how those events are written about. For example, both Eileen and George went to Spain in the late 1930s to fight in the resistance, yet Eileen is entirely omitted from George’s account. Similarly, in Orwell’s first book Down and Out in Paris in London, his chronicle of living and working among the poor, he left out the wealthy aunt in Paris who offered him respite from his fieldwork. And pointing to the pernicious use of passive voice, Funder argues that many of Orwell’s biographers surgically erased Eileen as an active subject in George’s life.

In Wifedom, Funder brings some of the history to vivid life via speculation. She sees this not as writing fiction, however, but rather like “directing an actor on set.” Putting archival events mise en scène—the clinks of tea cups, the pangs of uterine cramps—allows the reader to become more intimately immersed in the world occupied by George and Eileen and to bear witness to the peculiar dynamic of their relationship. And in yet another writerly layer, Funder tells her own story of working through the project and what it has meant to her as a writer, wife, mother, and Orwell fan herself, wrestling with the complexities of gender, agency, and love as they relate to the craft:

As a writer, the unseen work of a great writer’s wife fascinates me, as I say – out of envy. I would like a wife like Eileen, I think, and then I realise that to think like a writer is to think like a man. It is to look from his perspective at what he needed and see how he got it. But as a woman and a wife her life terrifies me. I see in it a life-and-death struggle between maintaining her self, and the self-sacrifice and self-effacement so lauded of women in patriarchy, which are among the base mechanisms by which our work and time are stolen. What did she give and what did it cost her? I find this question so chilling, coming out of twenty years of intense life-and-home-making, that I prefer to think it does not apply to me.

Grappling with this personal tension, Funder’s reflexivity helps breathe contemporary life and immediacy into the book.

One aspect missing from Wifedom is attention to Eileen’s experience of disability. In one of her last letters to George, Eileen debated the cost of her upcoming surgery, confessing to him: “what worries me . . . is that I really don’t think I’m worth the money.” Perhaps she was just wanting comfort and reassurance from George (who was off in Europe leaving Eileen to handle, among other things, the adoption of their son). Or perhaps her feelings of guilt and shame for needing an expensive operation were a manifestation of internalized sexism and ableism. Regardless, Eileen’s health concerns were treated as hers and hers alone, while George’s tuberculosis was a family affair: Eileen enlisted her brother (a renowned thoracic surgeon) to ensure George received first-rate care, and the couple carted off to Morocco so George’s lungs could enjoy a dry winter; later, Eileen endured grueling, long train trips (after working all day) to visit him in a sanitarium, while she too was suffering from a disabling medical condition. Looking at Eileen’s life with an intersectional lens—how both sexism and disability worked to close in the horizons of her life —could have strengthened this already stellar book.

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Praiseworthy

Alexis Wright
New Directions ($22.95)

by Simon Webster

In the opening pages of Praiseworthy, the latest novel by Australian author Alexis Wright, we meet Cause Man Steel, a raving dreamer performing his anxieties for the “clergy-oriented” people of the titular town. Cause—variously referred to as Widespread, for the breadth of his ideas, and Planet, for their cosmic nature—is a step ahead of the game. These are “cataclysmic times,” he preaches, but Praiseworthy people are survivors with “a sovereign world view.” The choir has heard this one before, but Cause is offering more than survival; he promises the townspeople they will “ride straight through the century on the back of the burning planet” and live to tell the tale.

The catastrophe that sets Cause in motion is a haze “full of broken ancestors breathing . . . virus air.” As the haze settles over Praiseworthy, the townspeople try everything to banish it:  They punch at it, play it Dvořák and Bach, lobby for its Constitutional exclusion. They curse it. They build a giant hologram scarecrow. They appeal to God and to the white government—Hail Marys and a Hail Mary. Resigned to its permanence, they promote it as a tourist attraction.

Eventually, the haze splits, metastasizing in the lungs of Ice Pick, the town’s mayor—a “rhapsodically self-proclaimed king of orators.” Possessed by the haze, Ice becomes “obsessed by whiteness”—his skin, even his eyeballs, turn white, and he covers his body with a “labyrinth of Casper the Ghost tattoos.” Ice warns his constituents that government help (in the form of explosives to blow up the haze) will never arrive if they “do not assimilate and be white,” and—with an eye on the upcoming election—promises to build “the new Praiseworthy into an all-bustling, all-glitter . . . Aboriginal world metropolis.”

But if Ice is a man of words, Cause is a man of action. Knowing that survival has always been an economic question, he looks backwards to look forwards, and decides to bet on donkeys; when global transportation systems collapse, he’ll be there with his carbon-neutral transport conglomerate. But his fleet needs a lodestar, a “Jesus donkey . . . the colour of an Apollo spaceship,” as was revealed to him in a dream. Cause feels called to greatness, like Genghis Khan, and for a few hundred pages, we follow him on his picaresque journey: Don Quixote in search of his ass.

It’s the family, of course, that suffers. Cause’s wife, Dance, has dreams too, and no “desire for being a stand-in for [him] as the social pariah of the community.” Their eldest son, Aboriginal Sovereignty—named for the words Cause most liked saying—is a seventeen-year-old amateur boxer and dancer; Tommyhawk, their youngest at eight, believes that Aboriginal parents are heartless and that all Aboriginal men are pedophiles—and acts accordingly. When his brother falls in love with his promise wife, who is only fifteen, Tommyhawk reports him, and Aboriginal Sovereignty is arrested for raping a minor.

Epic in scope, Praiseworthy is split into ten sections. The second opens with Aboriginal Sovereignty walking into the sea—“flat out disappearing into the mighty shark-infested ocean”—and continues for over a hundred pages as Tommyhawk, hiding nearby in a whale skeleton and eating a bag of chips, impatiently wills his brother on, a harrowing inversion of the story of Cain and Abel. Suicide by drowning is common in Praiseworthy, especially among the kids: “It was like a pied piper thing, somebody’s spirit coming up from the sea at night and talking rubbish to those children.” The sea has become a tomb, and fishermen involuntary “corpse hunters.” Shouldering Ecclesiastical pain, the people of Praiseworthy know that “wave after wave of their eternal tides of grief [will] end up plonking Aboriginal Sovereignty right back in the midst of the breathing heart and soul of the traditional country.”

Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria; she grew up in Cloncurry, a small town in northwestern Queensland about a thousand miles from the capital. She published her first novel in 1997 and in the quarter-century since has written furiously about violence, cruelty, injustice, and hopelessness in a humane, generous, and hopeful manner. As in her other works, church and state loom large in Praiseworthy, and are cast against the permanence of country. There are “sixty thousand lightning bolts in every dry storm,” an allusion to the “sixty thousand year plus cultural history of Aboriginal survival.” At a slight breeze, the churches of Praiseworthy topple “like a line of dominoes.”

In all of Wright’s books, language does power’s bidding. Praiseworthy people use “God words for renovating their Dreamtime cathedrals” and know “being literate in government affirmative action jargon talk” is essential. The colonial “gaol” is retained, and signs outlining the prohibition of liquor, pornography, and pedophiles in Praiseworthy are written in English—a language ignored by the old fishing people. Yet in the face of country, language recedes:

The old men and women eternally searching for the return of Aboriginal Sovereignty were bequeathed to nothingness, other than to a consciousness of interconnectedness where relatives were all life, and further related to ancestral creators, and further related back into deep time, and across all country places of land, sea, and skies.

The impassiveness of country is total. The seagulls “never once landed on any of these signs . . . nor had a single lizard, ant, or any other animal like a snake bothered twisting itself around a government signpost.” A few pages later, thunder roars, and forks of lightening “hit every single one of the signs . . . like a circle of firecrackers lit up on a cake.”

Still, language is persistent, and in Ice Pick, word becomes flesh. “See this piece of paper? That’s me . . . You are looking at the bodily incarnate of this piece of paper. I am the Commonwealth Government of Australia’s forward plan for Praiseworthy.” For Ice, assimilation is the key, and he implores his constituents to leave grief behind and embrace figures, multiplication, economics; follow him into the future and he will “make the ark pure again.” Aboriginal Sovereignty is the ultimate target:

He was being personified by the imagination of the nation-state, the dull dirty lens of Australian folk law. Yep! He was the ethnological story. He fed the hunger. Fattened the mudslinger’s narrative of racial vilification. He was the paedophile savage. You know what happens when you throw enough mud? Hallelujah! . . . The national narrative strengthened at the total cost of billions of dollars to hold back the tide of black justice through a simple illusion of fear, the dreaded uprising of the soul, the spirit of black savages attacking Australian domesticity. Nothingness achieved again, and again. Where was the light? Where was the flame to see the way?

Praiseworthy, a big novel in every sense, ranges from deep in the sea to the “dusty rivers of stars in the Milky Way” as well as across time and “through all the known spatial realities.” There are references to Borges and Calvino, Kafka and Krasznahorkai, as well as to a Waanyi language dictionary, Livy’s History of Rome, the operas of Belshazzar and Offenbach, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Donne and Shakespeare, Greek, Chinese, and Japanese mythologies, pop culture high and low, various oral traditions, and the Bible, again and again. It’s not tidy, and that’s the point—because it contains all of country, the “atmosphere, cosmos, stars, heavens, lands, seas, flora and fauna,” this latest outing from an exemplary Australian writer refutes domesticity and affirms sovereignty unapologetically. 

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The Private Life of Lord Byron

Antony Peattie
Unbound ($45)

by Allan Vorda

Previous biographies of Lord Byron, including Leslie Marchand’s three-volume set in 1957, have seemingly covered and dissected every inch of the English poet’s fascinating and mythical life, which ended when he was only thirty-six. In the introduction to The Private Life of Lord Byron, Antony Peattie tells us to expect something completely different.

Recent studies of Byron have focused on his bisexuality, but Peattie investigates “two other areas (which may be related to one another): his intermittent eating disorder and his obsession with fatherhood.” Peattie’s unique approach draws on less-studied biographical facts—for example, that Byron suffered from bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa: “Considering his diet, what he ate, what he didn’t eat, when and why, yields insights into Byron’s love life and his intentions in his masterpiece, Don Juan.” Peattie tracks some of the reasons why Byron dieted, including battles with his obese mother, a misshapen foot that required him to walk with a metal plate in his boot, a prescription from a physician for a daily diet of six biscuits and soda water, and his relentless romantic and sexual pursuits. 

Byron’s issues with his father were complicated. He rarely saw Captain “Mad Jack” Byron, who was often at sea; when on land, he was a womanizer and gambler. He left his wife and three-year-old Byron for France to escape creditors before dying at thirty-five. From a young age, Byron began to follow in his father’s footsteps; the same habits landed him similarly in debt. He felt he inherited his father’s traits and that he was “predestined to evil.” Part of this thinking was drilled into him by his mother, whose Scottish Calvinism endorsed “predestination, man’s innate depravity and his hereditary taint.” Byron also learned that his particular heritage included “a long tradition of dissipation, incest, rampant promiscuity, decadence, murder and unbridled debauchery.”

Some of those family prophecies came true; Peattie traces Byron’s wide range of trysts that gained him a kind of infamy. Byron’s first sexual experience was being seduced at age nine by his nanny; at Trinity College a decade later, he became involved with a younger student, John Edleston: “I certainly love him more than any human being, & neither time or Distance have had the least effect on my (in general) changeable Disposition.”

Edleston died at age twenty-two from consumption, and Byron’s sexual conquests quickly escalated. After graduating from Trinity, he did a Grand Tour of Europe, during which he had numerous affairs. Upon his return, he published two cantos of poetry, titled Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which sold out in three days. He was only twenty-four.

Once Byron achieved fame, his affairs were countless. There was Lady Caroline, who stated, famously, that Byron was “mad—bad—and dangerous to know”; his niece Mary Chaworth; his half-sister Augusta Leigh; Annabella Milbanke, whom he married and who bore his only legitimate child; Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Shelley, who bore his daughter; the Italian women Marianna Segati and Margarita Cogni; the nineteen-year-old Countess Teresa Guiccioli; the Maids of Athens (three sisters who were under the age of fifteen); fourteen-year-old Nicolo Giraud, whom Byron hired as an Italian tutor; and many others—and those are just the ones whose names we know. By the time Byron turned thirty, Peattie writes, the poet was “determined to make the most of his time for sex and for writing—the two activities were now closely linked in his mind.” Don Giovanni claimed 640 conquests; Byron is estimated to have had around one thousand sexual encounters.

Byron composed his epic poem Don Juan in Italy from 1819-24. Consisting of seventeen cantos and 1,950 stanzas, the mock epic poem shows Don Juan not as a womanizer, but as a sexual victim. When it was published, it was considered the greatest poem since Milton’s Paradise Lost.

In the final chapter in his life, Byron, wanting to achieve some glory like his hero Napoleon, decided to try to help the Greeks wrest their freedom from the Ottoman Empire. He went to Missolonghi to train some Christian Albanian troops and was ready to go into battle when he became ill. His doctor performed a blood-letting that he claimed “cured Byron’s ‘attack of epilepsy’ by drawing off ‘four pounds of blood’, half the total in his body.” During this time, Byron adhered to his strict diet, which compounded his illness, then decided to train his five hundred soldiers on horseback when he “was ‘caught in a shower.’” Byron came down with a cold and the doctor performed a second blood-letting, but after becoming delirious, Byron died on April 19, 1824 at age thirty-six.

Two congratulations must be given for The Private Life of Lord Byron. The first is to author Antony Peattie for offering such a unique insight into Byron’s life regarding his eating disorder—not to mention delving into numerous other aspects of the poet’s life from Satanism to Shelley, and discussing numerous poems and plays with aplomb. The other goes to British publisher Unbound for making the book such an extravagant and elegant production: Its 586 pages include amazing photographs, paintings, and sketches rendered in extraordinary color, and there is even an old-style ribbon bookmark sewn in. Everything is exquisite about this book.

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The Cheapest France in Town

Seo Jung Hak
Translated by Megan Sungyoon
World Poetry ($20)

by John Bradley

“The value of this book is, at present, the same as the lowest online-exclusive price for a half box of thirty Shin instant noodles,” deadpans Seo Jung Hak in his introduction to The Cheapest France in Town, a collection of prose poems. Even before reading a single poem, the reader has entered Seo’s world of the absurd. The author gleefully takes apart logic in the thirty-four poems (and a foldout poem) in this subversive bilingual edition.

For those who believe that the prose poem has been thoroughly explored, many surprises await. One innovation of Seo’s is to offer two versions of the same prose poem: “There’s Nothing Between Us” and “There’s Nothing Between Barns” appear on the same page, the texts almost identical—but wherever the first uses the word “barn,” the second uses “us.” For example, “The scent of lilac seeping into our faces sent the barn up in flames” in the first becomes “The scent of lilac seeped into our face sent us up in flames” in the second. Such a small change, with a tense shift, produces surreal results.

Even more innovative is the foldout poem at the back of the book that makes a small box (or rather two boxes—one in Korean and one in English). Seo’s obsession with boxes, those reliable tools of consumerism, becomes literal here as the reader is given the opportunity to construct their very own paper box adorned with poetry. One box fold reads: “If you order online, / two copies of the / book / with / his awkward smile / will be delivered / in a paper box.” As Seo enjoys satirizing familiar enticements, he is not above subverting even the title of a poem, that sacrosanct entity so vital to the reader; the title “You’re Necessities” plays with “your” and “you’re,” a distinction that bedevils many English speakers.

Not content with subverting prose poem expectations and language conventions, Hak also problematizes punctuation, mainly by violating the proper use of the comma. While the reader may at first believe these odd commas are typos, Megan Sungyoon points out deeper resonances in her translator’s note: “even an element as small as a comma can completely undermine the sentence structure, catapulting us into unfamiliar syntax.” Here are a few examples of those “catapulting” commas: “You become, a tree,” “The highlight, of the conference was mispronouncing a word,” and “Where is, everyone.” One of the poem titles even includes a comma, “Quite,”—aptly demonstrating how nothing is off limits to Seo.

While there are many references to France in this book, Seo appears to be influenced less by the French Surrealists than by a writer from Prague—Franz Kafka. It would not seem out of place if we were told that Joseph K in The Trial had this experience: “When he opened his lunch he saw the word ‘freedom’ written in black beans.” Unlike Kafka, though, Seo focuses not only on the absurdity of the situation, but on language itself. Noticing the dangerous lunch of their fellow office worker, his colleagues come to his rescue: “By the fast and precise chopsticks of the colleagues, the beans disappeared one bean at a time so ‘freedom’ was turned ‘freed’ and then ‘feed’ and then ‘fed’ and then ‘fd’ and then was completely gone.” Once again, Seo uses humor to resolve the conflict: “one of the colleagues farted once as the price of digesting ‘freedom.’”

Given the challenges of translating such a non-conventional poet, Megan Sungyoon deserves much acclaim. Not only does she maintain clarity despite Seo’s odd diction and non-standard punctuation, she also captures his strange and utterly unique playfulness. Who else but Seo would compare writing a poem to “spitting a seed out of your mouth—phut”?

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Public Abstract

Jane Huffman
The American Poetry Review ($16)

by Erick Verran

Like a Purcell aria, Jane Huffman’s poetry is plaintive, formally numb, and indefatigably self-pitying. Early in Public Abstract, Huffman introduces “my brother death,” the Thanatos to her Hypnos: “Held the broom / Of sleep // Between / My teeth // Until I slept,” she mutters (and readers might note the cover art, Albrecht Dürer’s Pillow Studies).  Recalling the ill lungs with which it begins, this debut collection is by turns caught up short in shallow brushstrokes and morbidly expansive:

I am under-interpreting my symptoms, the doctor says. My interpretation can no longer be trusted. I’m seated in a glass spirometry machine. On one monitor, green lines tick against a dark backdrop. On another, a cursor draws roulettes. It will feel like you’re breathing with your mouth against a brick wall, the doctor says. Air buckles behind my lips. So in love with interpretation, I’m blue in the face from kissing it.

Though koans abound—a goldfish pond, for instance, “Is mostly water / Little gold in it at all / Despite its name”—haibun, which combines narrative prose with haiku, is the main attraction. Haibun was invented in the late 1700s by Bashō during a months-long journey through the Japanese hinterland, as recounted in his travelogue The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Huffman, trapped somewhere between agoraphobia (“with the curl / of my ear to the door”) and invalidism (“Mortified to move / My body through // The world // In the way / That it demands”), keeps to the country of her emotional interior, sketching poems that would fit onto envelope paper.

Like Emily Dickinson, who is echoed here, Huffman is neither straightforward nor deliberately cryptic, but rather mysteriously honest. Dickinson, though, for all her proto-modernity, was never this recursive (“I was / small and dizzying. I was dizzy. I rode / in small and dizzying circles”—here she sounds more like Robert Creeley or John Taggart). Huffman’s wish to thank literally everyone in the book’s end pages—university administrators, a twelfth-century troubadour, the family dogs—is perhaps unconsciously snobbish, while in her more maximalist mode she can slip into scholastic preoccupation, as prose experimenters are wont to do:

In the first translation is a hammering. “Should”—a moral judgment. An oiled object laid bare on a linen bed. “Shouldn’t” tied around the “should” with butcher’s string.

In the second, a yip, a certainty, desperate in its forwardness. “Where could?” as if the possible eluded him. To boot, denied its final mark. The thought falling from “Where could?” like rain from a cloud, a vanishing source.

This has all the verve of a dissertation. The more finished poems, labeled revisions or fragments, are the more successful; and when a “failed” sestina abruptly breaks off, like the fugue Bach died writing, the reader lurches after its absence.

Evincing stylistic kinship with Language poets such as Rae Armantrout, Huffman’s instruction, though cold as doctrine, consistently fascinates for its willingness to teeter at the edge of sense; we find her weeping “into the zenith of a rose,” a kiln is said to be “thinking itself warm.” This is impressive, given that the book ultimately concerns the rippling effects of her sibling’s addiction (much like Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec). In the penultimate section, Huffman’s topical absorption reveals itself to be deceptively extempore. One paragraph hides a sad vocabulary drawn from pregnancy, including tied fallopian tubes, the question of viability, and a metal pail. Another rhymes with drowsy lethargy:

I wrote a play, out cold in urgent care. Heated blankets toweling my sweated hair. When staged, the actress playing Mother held a wicker broom for acts two and three, with which she beat and beat the rug—a heavy tapestry rolled across the deck. It jumped with fleas—a cast of tiny specks that leapt with urgent hunger as she swept. Lucidly, I slept. I always do, when in duress (no escape from the world of the page). So I wondered how I would create the effect on stage — what props and practical effects—and who would clean up the mess?

With their diminutive, hardened fragility, there is something a bit Glass Menagerie about Huffman’s poems; and though Public Abstract also feels cobbled together, it coheres with greater sureness than many first collections of poetry. To avoid the pitfalls of the merely cerebral—intelligence for the hell of it—there’s no denying that the live wire of a poem must be grounded in the truth. But truth, with apologies to Keats (and to Huffman, who quotes from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”), isn’t beauty ipso facto. Without invention, the unadorned horror of what happened, like one might overhear in a waiting room, will be “private as a runny nose” and as interesting. What so often disappoints about artistic suffering is its obviousness, the way it leans on grief at half the craft. Huffman, however, allows hurt to knock everywhere, to come out with things plainly, in this enviably wise debut. The language countermands—“The lie is that today I want to die”—and this gives life its shape.

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Death Prefers the Minor Keys

Sean Thomas Dougherty
BOA Editions ($17)

by Nick Hilbourn

The poems in Sean Thomas Dougherty’s Death Prefers the Minor Keys offer a meditation on life, death, and grieving. Languages undulate through the book, whether braille, Hebrew, or the asemic scribblings of his daughter: “I try to read the secret hieroglyphics. What does this say, I ask our daughter. She says, ‘It is a new language I have invented but it is still teaching me how to read it.’” These languages create a kind of divination to communicate with the world of the dead, as revealed in the collection’s final work, where Dougherty writes: “You are my nation. I only wanted to write poems to save you.”

Each poem seeks a language equipped to transgress the boundaries of the mortal world—especially the strange space that we inhabit with loved ones who have passed. To address that boundary, Dougherty redraws the meanings of intimacy and presence. Absence becomes the highest form of intimacy, or what one poem calls the “true shape of love,” and is able to rupture barriers of time and mortality and redefine human relationships in the process.

Dougherty also reimagines language as a veil through which our dead pass and are subsequently reimagined. In “Fugue Written on Unpaid Medical Bill and the Backs of Old Menus,” the poet transforms into a heron and follows a fish swimming below the water’s surface, trying to “find a language to translate . . . the ripples of the veil. Ginsberg said he wanted to do with language what Cezanne did with paint: to capture light on objects.” Between the transformation into the heron and the identification with its prey, Dougherty moves beyond a discourse on grieving and into a mythos of it, postulating that communication between the two worlds is not only possible but necessary.

Death Prefers the Minor Keys eventually translates this life-death relationship into musical terms: If the living are the major keys in a musical scale, the dead are the minor keys, the notes that construct blues and jazz. Music saturated with the dichotomy of loss and gain, as Dougherty might say, keeps us in touch with the dead. In “The Dead Who Return as Animals,” pets owned by the grieving are incarnated—“what we didn’t spend in this life goes inside them, and then they find their people again, that light guides them”—and absence is a “leash of longing we use to pull them back to us, to fully receive all their unremittent tongue lapping love.” The image of light reoccurs in this poetry’s discourse of divinity as a mucilaginous substance that leaks from objects and people; the grieving self experiences life in an altered and almost ecstatic state of being.

One of the more curious elements of Death Prefers the Minor Keys is the speaker’s place in the lives of others; whether transported into a portrait in the room of a clinically ill patient or absorbed by the “miasma” of a crowd of people around him, joy becomes present when the dead and the living are most comfortable with each other. For example, in “People Ask Me if I Get Tired of Writing About Your Illness,” the poet describes the presence of his dead wife while sitting at a restaurant:

I can feel your eyes as if you are touching me. You are able to eat the asparagus with butter, the sauteed saffron chicken. We speak in the old tongue. As you talk, the couple next to us falls into a daydream of their childhoods. The waiter hears the lullaby of his dead mother. The cooks begin to sing. All my ancestors spoke impossibly difficult languages. Always your hand in the absence of your hand.

In this poem, there is not a linear passage of life to death, but a gradual realization of death’s presence in life. The scene succeeds not because it is surreal, but because it is mundane. One of the charms of Dougherty’s writing is how surreptitiously he ushers readers into such a radical perspective. A repeated phrase in this collection, “there can never be one hundred percent lack of joy,” reiterates his ultimately reconciling message: if the dead are always with us, their joy remains also.

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All Tomorrow's Train Rides

Matthew M. Monte
Sixteen Rivers Press ($18)

by Lee Rossi

Yes, you hear an echo—the Velvet Underground playing “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” their great anthem to indulgence and dissolution. But though it offers less indulgence and more longing, less dissolution and more selflessness, All Tomorrow’s Train Rides—the second book by San Francisco writer Matthew M. Monte—is also great in its own unpredictable way.

A thoughtful, educated writer with associate’s degrees in insomnia, shoplifting, and alcoholism, Monte evidences a fascination with the work of other writers, figures as varied as Gary Snyder, Pierre Reverdy, and Miguel de Cervantes. In “Then I Read Wisława Szymborska” he reports on purchasing one of her books in Paris—at Shakespeare and Co. of course—and retreating to “the silent piano room”:

Where with you, I
Must say I
Feel only
Free

A love poem, isn’t it? Conversely, we find him hating on Jacques Derrida: “Form and Function Letter” mimics William Carlos Williams’s famous “This Is Just To Say,” except that Monte’s apology, which is more j’accuse than je t’aime, is directed at the fabulously indecipherable French philosopher. “This is just to say,” the poet begins, that he doesn’t “mind these synonyms / and metaphors and analogies,” but that he “very much mind[s] the meanings of these tightropes / between conventions, this / high-wire act we call language.” Language is perilous, the poet seems to admit, but “these lines save us / from drowning in your / soup of same.”

Clarity, precision—these are language’s gifts, and we abandon them at our peril. Consider Section V of the title poem, a sequence whose sections are spread throughout the book, in which Monte engages in dialogue with that consummate realist from the pages of Cervantes, Sancho Panza—transformed for the occasion into a Caltrain conductor. Who are these people on the train, Sancho wants to know, who “earn their keep from neither arms nor letters”? And the poet tells him: “the ore is silicon, a fool’s gold for sure. They create other minds from it. So that we don’t need to remember.” “No memory?” exclaims Sancho incredulously, issuing the poet “a private smile” for all the 400-thread-count cotton dress shirts: “Sancho knows / Clothes don’t make the man / Sees the suits for what they are / Variations on the fig leaf.”  

Culture, he insists, is a charade, a theatre of the absurd.

Reality is what Monte wants, in all its clarity and precision—even when what it reveals is harsh or cruel:

Where the utility men
Cut back pine and manzanita
          near the old quarry
They left behind a ragged cross-section of knotted wood
          in the boot-print trail dust
That resisted the motoring blade and its bite

Monte’s passion for the real takes him into unexpected places. Many of these poems come with notes and annotations, some which are straightforward, and others which read like prose poems. Commenting on Don Quixote’s famous discourse on arms and letters, the poet references the GPS coordinates where Quixote spoke, and adds that “the windmills . . . / are spread along a / hill overlooking the Manchegan / plains, offering an excellent view of / things as they are, which are even / easier to see through the pages of / Don Quixote than the bullet train’s / blurring windowscape.” Once again, language and literature lead us closer to reality than our technological culture.

Latitude-longitude designations appear throughout the book, adding a dash of typographic esprít, but there are also other typographical flourishes—long strings of periods enclosed in brackets, for example. As a reader, I’m not sure how to receive these extra-literary excrescences; are they a sendup of erasure, a musical interpolation signaling rests, or a just a new-fangled jokiness? I suspect one can read them all three ways. But without a doubt, All Tomorrow’s Train Rides is a variorum of image and epithet where time and again we encounter this poet’s extraordinary verbal facility. Another poem in sequence, “[Latitude],” “[Longitude],” “[Degrees],” etc., is a list poem offering scores of subjects which contemporary poems do (and in some cases shouldn’t) embrace. Or consider these lines from “Three Sketches from Insomnia”:

              That used-car salesman, memory,
never tells the true mileage or how
pumping the brakes never stops the night
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

            With histories like these, who needs enemies

For a writer who seems consumed with knowing exactly where he is, these lines signal a refreshing skepsis vis-à-vis the possibility of knowledge. It’s there, Monte suggests, but only if your search is dedicated and uncontaminated by self-will. I hear that sort of injunction in these lines from “Reconsider a Meadow”:

But it is states of not-mind
that reconsider a meadow
day after subtle day

above the snowy track and
shallow thaws in sheltered valleys.

Similarly, in “Write Livelihood,” he issues a slight re-formulation of the Buddhist imperative:

You read and say
how many things crystallized in your mind
and we know life found in found words is without parallel.
And though the world is not without its darkness
there is not
so much regret.

What do we find “in found words”? In All Tomorrow’s Train Rides, we find compassion, forgiveness, attention, and insight. We should be so fortunate in everything we read.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Wonder About The

Matthew Cooperman
Middle Creek Publishing ($18)

by Joe Safdie

A reader of Matthew Cooperman’s latest collection, Wonder About The, might “wonder about” its seemingly fragmented title. Ostensibly a portrait of the expansive biodiversity that can be found on the banks of the Cache la Poudre River in Colorado, Matthew Cooperman’s Wonder About The also explores fracking, the distance between culture and nature, and the peculiar problems of poems devoted to ecology and the environment. On that last subject, Forrest Gander poses some useful questions in his 2008 essay titled “What Is Eco Poetry”:

Aside from issues of theme and reference, how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics? If our perceptual experience is mostly palimpsestic or endlessly juxtaposed and fragmented; if events rarely have discreet beginnings or endings but only layers, duration, and transitions; if natural processes are already altered by and responsive to human observation, how does poetry register the complex interdependency that draws us into a dialogue with the world?

The “interdependency” Gander mentions is very much a concern of Wonder About The; from the beginning, it’s clear that this book doesn’t offer any sort of lazy propaganda. In the first poem, “Thesis,” lines such as “It rolls on as sugar beet, sweet in its labor and sweat in its weight” show Cooperman paying attention to the sounds of his words as well as to the indomitable river. In this expansive vision, humans aren’t separate from their environment, but are charged with the task of striking a balance between how things appear and how we, in turn, are located within the appearance—or as Cooperman puts it in “Another River in Spring” in lines that well represent the exchanges between inner and outer life throughout the book: “what marks the site of your sight // who walks through the door of a river.”

One major concern of ecopoetry is, as critic Nassrullah Mambrol writes, “how the human is situated within its habitat, specifically where (or whether) borders exist between body and world, human and other, space and place.” The peculiar art of perceiving the environment is often a subject of Wonder About The, whether it’s acknowledging that a farmer’s “bright Deere” is “a part of / the field’s design” or the urgent command, presented in progressively larger type, to “look up / look up / look up.” Eyes, in fact, are mentioned often, from “the sense record” being visited “upon our eyes / our ears” to a hard-earned vision of a waterfowl:

my winter eye
unlayers all frost
anneals what distance
     takes

rank glorious muck
rot palimpsesting rye
the duck
the living eye

Cooperman’s eye is sensitive enough also to register the fact that “the number of active oil and gas wells in Colorado almost doubled from 22,228 in 2000 to 43,354 in 2010” while explaining what’s really at stake:

frack is a word to obtain a thing
gas body or oil body
by liquefaction     say water     various solvents
an exchange body     replacement earth
toxic metonomy the force of
forces     engineers     making a new earth writing

In these contexts, the collection’s fragmented title might signal that such unnatural phenomena—“benzene earth man / now embowered with / salt and sand”—challenge traditional grammar’s ability to comprehend or explain them, though it also heeds the dreamier nature of observation, given its provenance from a poem by Theodore Enslin (which Cooperman uses as a section epigraph): “wonder about the / dream a dream’s about wonder will be.”

In his magisterial 2004 study A New Theory for American Poetry, Angus Fletcher posited that “environmental sensitivity demands its own new genre of poetry” and argued that environment poems “are not about the environment, whether natural or social, they are environments.” The inclusion of stunning color photographs of various places the book chronicles, most taken by Cooperman himself, makes it clear that Wonder About The not only adds to those environments, but breaks new ground.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024