Book Review

Fugue and Strike

Joe Hall
Black Ocean ($17)

by Greg Bem

The grotesque yet inquisitive poetry of Joe Hall returns to the limelight in Fugue and Strike. The book has six sections and opens with a short sequence, “From People Finder Buffalo”; its vital poems on the economy and police violence instill in the reader a sense of the core protections of the structures that impose upon our communities and threaten our collective livelihood.

Fugue and Strike bursts from the seams through its two largest sections, where Hall brings together distinct series of poems that tackle one large theme: labor. The first, “From Fugue & Fugue,” falls in the lucid tracks of other serial works like John Berryman’s The Dream Songs and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, where Hall’s distinctive, deranged, and blunt imagery centers the whirlwind lives of the American working class. The poems in this sequence are some of Hall’s most experimental, their language derivative of both machine-like repetition and the manic bracing of daily stress:

I consider debt, each word, each poem
an easter egg, w/absence inside and inside absence
you are hunger, breathing this time and value
particularized into mist, you are there, at the end
of another shift

Following the fugues, the hypnotic and didactic series “Garbage Strike” sheds light on the history of sanitation worker strikes from the 1600s to the present. Across international cities including New York City, Oaxaca, Buffalo, Tokyo, and Memphis, Hall’s poems dig deep into the folds of garbage, trash, refuse, and output on a massive scale. These are stories of people deserving of the spotlight, of ecosystems of everyday life. Hall highlights the work of society’s perceived lowest working classes, those the systems want invisible or forgotten:

I want the history of lurching waste flows and accumulation, the labor of carriage and decomposition, the production of intensified difference and hierarchy among workers, and the rebellions of those laborers: Mudlarks; dirt-carters; loaders of horse-corpse barges, dung ships, and containerships; workers in ship-breaking yards; emotional garbage sorters and haulers. What if it was a celebrated labor? To disassemble the titans.

The book closes with a cluster of three standalone poems, “I Hate That You Died,” “The Wound,” and “Polymer Meteor”; each confronts loss separately while getting to catharsis collectively. In the final poem, Hall closes the book with statements on rigorous criticism, outreach towards sustainability, and our persistence through cycles of production:

Given that we, flesh, are affiliated with so many polymer immortals, I would like to suggest we imagine future time as present weight in order to see the world. If long after our bodies die, the case of a cell phone lives on into the thousands of years, its mass multiplied by (all that) time, would be unliftable. It would break your floors.

Like the contemporary American working-class poetry of Ryan Eckes, Robert Mittenthal, and Tim Greenup, the poems in Fugue and Strike foster a sense of irony combining labor and solidarity. Hall may not be overtly Marxist in his words, but he consistently throws punches against capitalism. His tones are derived from a spectrum of monotony and crisis with speakers engaging in moments of reflection amidst toil, explosions, brutal reckonings, and epiphanies.

As his fourth full-length collection, Fugue and Strike feels more mature than Hall’s previous releases; form across the collection feels neatly fitted despite the sprawling subject matter. Balancing personal stories with historic retellings, the book bears an academic level of research and contains an extensive bibliography. Coming out of a world of education and pedagogy, this poetry may serve for many as a kaleidoscopic keystone into the relentlessness of work, the void of commodification, the hope of solidarity, and the necessity of revolt.

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

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

Childcare

Rob Schlegel
Four Way Books ($17.95)

by Stephanie Burt

I woke up today intending to review Rob Schlegel’s new collection—his fourth, shortest (by line count), and maybe his best. Then I couldn’t find the book for hours, because one kid’s D&D backpack, a bag of dog food, my own undone dishes, and a scheduled Zoom call got in the way. When I finally found Schlegel’s volume, I realized that my distracted, distressed, and familially challenged mood fit the book I wanted to recommend. Childcare is a book about parenthood, household maintenance, and daily life; about maximum distractibility and post-quarantine forced togetherness; about our manifestly required (but secretly fragile) emotional resilience in an age when capital and mass media tell us to find individual solutions for collective problems. Are we too busy making grilled cheese sandwiches to address the tragedy of the commons? Or vice versa? What will my words do for my kids, if anything?

Such questions have shown up, for decades, in poems by moms (Rachel Zucker and Bernadette Mayer are two shining examples) but they’re pretty new for poems about, and by, dads, whom adults expect to work independently and outside the home, and who don’t normally, if they are cisgender, come with the same umbilical connections to young children. Schlegel knows time spent writing is time not spent preparing that grilled cheese, and Schlegel’s kids know it too: “Daddy, my daughter says, / When are you going to stop?” “Poetry / Is pointless, my son says. If you write that down / I’ll kill you. I fear he fears / The attention I give it.” What poet parent has not felt that fear? Who has not asked, as Schlegel does, “When will I reach the people I love?”

If such lines—however quotable—sound bald, or abstract, or all too accessible, it’s worth mentioning the elegance and the sophistication in this volume too. Schlegel has learned spareness, abstraction, and accessibility from Oppen (who provides an epigraph), Niedecker, and Dickinson. He’s also learned how to bring readers deep into his own fact-studded idiosyncrasies, quick images (a baby is a “little herring”), and the sounds he makes when he’s alone: “The rolling hills of Pomeroy / Bring the locals local joy.” The diary, the flatness, and the divided attention between what the kids need and what the poet desires place Schlegel in a delightful—and young—tradition, among recent books about domesticity by poets such as Chris Martin, Nick Twemlow, Dobby Gibson, perhaps Dana Ward.

To their disarming ongoingness, to the “competing / Sorrows of parenthood,” to fears about being a man and raising men (“my son pinning the future against the wall”), Schlegel adds white space, concision, and the uncomfortable, imperfect elegance of a careful craftsman sharing a rough draft in the knowledge that making it smoother will ruin it. Those spaces are his self-divisions, his irresolvable quarrels with himself: “I’m two people— / One not speaking to the other.” Like the Bon Iver album he namechecks, Schlegel adds an explicit sense of multiple generations, but where Justin Vernon imagines “I am my mother on the wall,” Schlegel frames his own worries in response: “I’m angry at my father for aging.” His clipped lines suggest he feels the rebuke that sensitive adults get when we remember how privileged we remain: privileged just to have enough to eat, let alone to take care of our kids, to find time to read, to be alive: “I tuck my son into bed. / I wish I had better parents, he says.” Schlegel, and I, hold such wishes for our children too, wishes the poems work hard—and sparely—to name. All of our kids deserve better than we can give them, but they get, at best, you and me.

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

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

Move Like Water

My Story of the Sea

Hannah Stowe
Tin House ($24.95)

by Elissa Greenwald

In her debut memoir Move Like Water, Hannah Stowe immerses readers in the world of the ocean. Early on, the Welsh author connects the constantly changing outer world of the ocean with her troubled inner one: “There was a current inside me. At times, it swept along straight and true, serene on the surface, but determinedly fast flowing. At others, the winds of life would turn against the tide . . . and I would rage, tempestuous.”

In the book’s opening chapter, Stowe tends to pile up phrases, with many sentences using five or more commas. While the lyrical style may lull the reader like waves, we start to long for events and characters that comprise a life, though we are given brief glimpses of the author’s mother (her parents are divorced) and companionable brother. Her mother, however, becomes more important as the book progresses; we learn it was she who both inspired Stowe’s artistic impulses and taught her how to swim, “moving with—moving like—the water.”

The book finds momentum in the second chapter when the author goes to sea, on a ship where “it was hard to tell the sea from the sky—the water was everywhere.” At sea, Stowe is continually off-balance, literally and metaphorically. In order to cook on shipboard, “You have to lash yourself to the stove, which swayed wildly on its gimbal, the pivoted support that allows it to swing with the motion of the boat.”

The dramatic action at sea brings the narrative to life. “In my roamings around the coast back home, I had moved through the landscape,” Stowe writes; “Now, the seascape built, fell, hurled, roared, and hurtled around me, dictating my movement with a Mephistophelian chaos.” There is no doubt that the ocean is Stowe’s true home: “I had found my north, the area of life into which I wanted to pour my passion.”

Stowe’s adventures at sea, where she crewed for scientific expeditions as far as Newfoundland, recede into memory after she suffers a surfing injury. Move Like Water here becomes a memoir of healing, both of body and mind. Comparing herself to Icarus for being dissatisfied with her life and always seeking new adventures, Stowe experiences recurring dreams in which she alternately becomes an albatross and a sea captain. Both dreams help her grow—the first through study of how the wanderings of the albatross resemble her own, and the second by inspiring her to buy her own boat.

The author’s rapturous descriptions of the sea and its inhabitants, from the lowly plankton to the lordly sperm whale, fulfill her goal to give the reader “an ocean to hold in your hands.” With a scientist’s perspective, a sea captain’s knowledge, and a poet’s soul, Stowe takes readers on a journey that enlists us in her project to preserve the ocean and its creatures.

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

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

Meltwater - Curve

Meltwater
Claire Wahmanholm
Milkweed Editions ($16)

Curve
Kate Reavey
Empty Bowl Press ($16)

by Jessica Gigot

Poetry focused on the experience of motherhood, or that has the perspective of a mother figure, is sometimes seen as overly domestic. However, the many dimensions of mothering can inform other aspects of human experience. Two recent collections, Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm and Curve by Kate Reavey, illuminate what we all gain when we examine the intricacies of life with a maternal lens.

Wahmanholm’s Meltwater is a somber feast of sounds and images, part remembrance and part gut-wrenching prediction; in poems both playful and bleak, the author employs lyrical repetition and fierce honesty to explore topics ranging from ecological change to personal grief. A series of poems titled after letters of the alphabet offer a particularly rich slurry of language, alliteration, and imagery: In “M” Wahmanholm writes, “I am a mare rolling in a midnight / meadow, all musk and muzzle,” while in “P” she speaks of her daughter directly: “I place her outside my arm’s parenthesis so she can’t feel my pulse/ pounding.”

Several poems in this book share the same title, such as “Meltwater” and “Glacier”; these poems are in conversation with each other and also serve as a touchstone for the rest of the collection. The “Meltwater” entries are erasure poems taken from an essay by Lacy M. Johnson called “How to Mourn a Glacier,” and the “Glacier” series examines glaciers as both abstract concepts and fleeting creatures. Wahmanholm’s treatment of water imagery can get confusing as she considers its various transformations, however, in the final “Glacier” poem of the collection she brings it all under one rubric when she writes, “It is the water I am trying to teach my daughters to float in.” There is deep reverence for the changing state of glaciers as well as immense guilt for what they will represent to future generations.

In the book’s penultimate poem, “The Empty Universe,” Wahmanholm writes:

I cannot, this night, stop myself
from listening to my daughter wail
and wishing she were less like herself
therefore less like me

Meltwater is the poet’s wail against the way our environment is changing. With the discerning eye and open heart of a mother, she startles the reader awake—in no small part because of her willingness to divulge her own vulnerabilities.

Reavey’s Curve navigates the full arc of a life, starting with poems focused on early motherhood, then moving through stages of parenting, marriage, and loss. Curve alludes to the shapes that contain us, the roles (like motherhood) that give us perspective on how the world works and for whom. In the poem “Curve is a word” Reavey sets the scope of her observational task: “that the curve / of the earth / is too small to see, / yet defines us // allows us to breathe.” Through the container of these observant and autobiographical poems, Reavey shares the textured experience of her own life as a woman, wife, and mother.

Reavey is focused on the body, particularly the way it transfigures through time and with age. The collection’s first poem includes a vision: “as I, in my own bed, dream of being / a mother.” Later, in “After the Hysterectomy,” the poet confesses, “Mine as verb // no longer possible.” Her physical experiences within a mother-body speak to a broader understanding of longing and the challenge of grappling with temporal changes to identity.

The poems in Curve elevate the quotidian in surprising ways; a series about grief, for example, melds the making of blackberry jam with the death of the poet’s mother. In “Grief,” she writes, “Fruit ripens, even in rain”; “Grief II” begins, “Blackberries boiling on the stovetop / are not violence. Their color changes.” In “Grief III,” Reavey concludes:

Come December I will wrap the jars, drop them in the heel
of stockings.
                                 Christmas morning, the fruit will remind me
of everything
except loss.

The metaphor is clear: Through the process of creating something, the poet becomes able to let go of the past; tending to others she is also modeling renewal.

These two collections offer distinct visions, to be sure—the fractured nature of Wahmanholm’s work is perhaps a generational artifact, rooted in skepticism, defiance, and frustration, while Reavey’s poems focus on complexities within relationships and between self and place rather than global urgencies—yet they both traverse wide swaths of emotion while anchoring their poems in the grit of life. As we continue to face ecological catastrophe, political collapse, and a thousand paper cuts of isolation from human contact, the tender and receptive voice of the mother may be what is needed most.

Click below to purchase these books through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

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

SMRTi

Nina Zivancevic
Spuyten Duyvil ($20)

by Jim Cohn

The title of Serbian-born poet Nina Zivancevic’s vivid travel memoir, SMRTi, comes from the Sanskrit—literally, “that which is remembered.” Historically, smrti refers to written Hindu texts composed by authors seeking an ever-evolving yet precise and compact prose form to capture the passing of essential facts, principles, instructions, and ideas from generation to generation. In Zivancevic’s hands, smrti is an ideal and flexible form to present memorable distillations from her sojourns to India, Egypt, Italy, Spain, England, Paris (her present-day home), Lima, and Peru over the period from 1990 to 2015.

Zivancevic is an intrepid, eclectic world navigator and chronicler. She applies her own extensive and unique knowledge of European intellectual and aesthetic movements as well as Beat Generation writers and poets in a style exemplary of the international post-beat avant-garde, alive and well today. Cornerstones to her sense of lineage and tradition include the Serbian poet Ljubomir Micić, founder of the avant-garde movement Zenitism; the raw and transgressive French writer and dramatist Antonin Artaud; the Belgium-born French writer and visual artist Henri Michaux; the Bulgarian-French philosopher, semiotician, and feminist Julia Kristeva; and two American poets associated with the Beat Generation, Ira Cohen and Allen Ginsberg.

As a writer who has lived an international life in the arts, Zivancevic describes how she approached the writing in SMRTi based on something Michaux said after his travels to India: “I was observing myself during my journey as if I would observe someone else who was observing the world with emotion, remembering an imaginary land.” But they have differing relationships to this “imaginary land”: Whereas Michaux believed that he did not “inhabit” the lands to which he traveled, that he “was not there” and “did not even visit it,” Zivancevic argues that she had “always lived there . . . I am a part of it, I was there even when I did not live in it.”

The writing in SMRTi is delightfully fresh as a result and gives space to unexpected scenes and commentaries. Steeped in the history and cultures of the places she visits, Zivancevic approaches the world as a multilingual surrealist poet or anthropologist might, with a distinct and inventive sense of detail and a mashup of intellectual and colloquial subject matter.

Zivancevic is also grounded in a Buddhist practitioner’s understanding of breath, which sustains the rhythm of her prose. The poems in SMRTi are sequenced from longest to shortest and give rise to a stylistically oblique autobiography, filled with slanted and implicit recounts of investigations into the memory of ex-lovers and the development of her own maternal sense.

Perhaps most importantly, Zivancevic’s travel writing is a welcome departure from the colonialist norm. Her travel-memoir language has little relation to any National Geographic documentary or hired tour mentality—the kind of habitual, dull bubble of travel where people never really leave their cultures behind while abroad. Citing the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, as the basis for her own way of being, she writes:

Italy, Serbia and India are not so different; at the same time they are just singular entities, as Deleuze would have explained when he was creating the notion of “singularity,” opposing the notion of “otherness” which purported the Euro-centrist theory. In other words, one should view the cultural differences not so much as the post-effect of “otherness” but as an act of exhibiting equal cultural entities. What follows is a possibility of observing all cultural singularities as equal participants in our mutual presence, rather than treating them as different relics of the past.

It is this egalitarian and transformative approach to otherness that contextualizes Zivancevic’s perspective throughout SMRTi as a series of memory-oriented and dream-connected aesthetic singularities. She writes about her travels to India: “I close my eyes . . . and for a second I fall asleep, float away, as if I am Sarasvati, the goddess of poetry, noise and music in person.” Such “invasive souvenirs” allow Zivancevic her the opportunity to notice “quick passing memories” or, in her words, “what’s the most important thing to remember while passing out.”

This line of thinking brings her back, while traveling to the south of India to attend a yoga retreat, to memories of Allen Ginsberg, with whom she studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, who also journaled about his travels to India. As she notes, “Ginsberg called this particular experience in poetry ‘the direct (subjective or objective) approach to an object,’” adding that Ginsberg got this notion from Ezra Pound, who decades earlier advocated this same poetics based not on the Western version of concept or “sentimentality of abstraction” but on “the direct observance of things, without a particular conceptualization.”

SMRTi thus not surprisingly operates with a vigorous dedication to William Carlos Williams’s poetics of “No ideas but in things.” Writing in this mode can lead to brilliant anthropological investigation; it can also work on an individual, psycho-emotional scale. Take this reflection about the deep south of India and its coconut trees:

In order to drink coconut milk you have to cut off almost half the coconut very fast. The movement has to be stable and rapid, and then only at that point you’d be able to get the sweetness of that milk. And so with our life, when we grow older and weary of it, we have to cut it off, throw the negative part out––so we can get deeper into something better.

Zivancevic’s chaotic coherence throughout SMRTi aligns masterfully with her own life changes, and her approach to change as the essence of travel is informative even in its most comic and distraught moments of revelry and remembrance. This philosophy is most apparent in her explorations of her dreams, especially her four major “karmic dreams.” In one of these dreams, Zivancevic describes an argument regarding the nature of feelings between German artist Joseph Beuys and “a French sociologist standing next to me” who responds to Beuys in this way:

“You probably imply here a certain anti-realism. Feeling defends itself by preventing itself from observing something which is unbearable, thus replacing it immediately by a certain illusion.“

“However, you must agree with me that the ‘feeling’ became immune from persuasion and the commercial propaganda imposed on it by that very man who creates perfect illusions but who does not accept the truth of a lie which reality feeds him.”

Dreams like these make Zivancevic question her reality as she travels in the south of India: “Am I dreaming all this, or am I really in a certain film, more precisely, am I in a film where I’m having a dream about cinematography”? Her cinematic dream continues, with scenes of the green fields of Lido changing into the “pavilion of ex-Yugoslavia,” land of her birth, where the subsequent history of civil wars “mingle with the stories of the killing of the population, torture and mutilation and all this repeated every ten minutes on the screen in an endless loop” like one may experience at any museum of fine art.

History as memory, as future, as travel, as illness, as dream, as museum installation—all these divagations allow the reader to realize that for Zivancevic, the ancient cults of the goddesses still exist, that they live in universes that thrive by a matriarchy we cannot apprehend. It is a universe in which parents and children appear in a story when their grandparents are still children themselves, or not yet born. In such a universe, it is possible to go, as Zivancevic did, “right back to the only landscape where I truly belonged, the country where any real family of mine lived––of poets, writers, philosophers and artists. And it is not important really where I live as long as these people are directly or indirectly in my company.”

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

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

An Eye in Each Square

Lauren Camp
River River Books ($18)

by Richard Oyama

The artist Agnes Martin slips in and out of Lauren Camp’s An Eye in Each Square like a wraith, an invisible companion. “Must Learn Neither” introduces the book’s tripartite structure and its obsessions: “What I want / is nothing. No meaning, no matter, no more.” Like Martin’s art, Camp’s is private and oblique, not confessional. The poet observes how the artist’s work “made / sacred an emptiness,” and if the poems are ekphrastic, they are also an invocation, a conversation, and the suture of “A line, a line: it never leaves you.” The book’s title is itself drawn from Martin’s description of a family potato farm in Michigan, “an eye in each square of a chequerboard field, all by hand.”

Camp’s poetry admits a stony absence: “the moon rising in the bone-field is more hole than stoic presence.” It can break into an unpunctuated sentence, syntax awry—not unlike Gertrude Stein, whom Martin admired. In “Line Break,” the artist’s “line . . . lets the artist unfinish weariness.” It isn’t difficult from the title to see how the poet’s process parallels the artist’s; Martin’s marks on canvas don’t yield meaning or consolation so much as the desire for an emotional response, but her repetitions were a way of “moving grief to the side.” Camp writes in an end note that Martin and her work remained an enigma, which was precisely what was needed: After having been diagnosed as schizophrenic, she was submitted to shock treatment and became both explorer and interrogator of the psyche.

“Trusting Space” is the longest poem in the book. It opens with the question of “How to ask for joy,” then follows the speaker through the quotidian and mystical events of her day—a cemetery’s “glances,” low water, the sky filled with apparitions: “It is imperative / to see how this is substantial.” Martin figures as both oracle and prophet who has “drawn hurt” and practices erasure—like a poet. Thus the speaker of these poems, who “had plundered past nervous,” is enlaced with the artist, who at last stops burning paintings she judges flawed.

In “Lecture on Nothing,” the speaker is caught in the “antique gaze of Agnes’ / eyes” while Martin “frames the room and the room where she sits is built reliable / around her.” Martin disappeared from an artists’ cooperative in lower Manhattan for New Mexico, building an adobe brick house and a log-cabin studio, a move alluded to in “Tremolo”: “When she quit the city / to break from her constant hysteria, Agnes promised herself the apology // of firmness.” In “Lecture on Nothing,” then, the poet is empowered as the artist inhabits the “reliable” world of her own making. It is, as another poem suggests, a “Self-Portrait with Agnes Martin,” both self-reflective and joined.

The last poem in the book, “White Flower,” observes birds rehearsing scales as “their voices wing out / abundant. /. . . / I unthink.” Martin was profoundly influenced by Zen Buddhism and Taoism, practicing no-thought through meditation. Camp deftly captures the reason why: not to deny the world’s peril but to calmly experience “pasture and idle. / . . . / To grow solace is to measure light / as a purpose.”

After his conversion to Christianity, W. H. Auden famously rewrote the closing of “September 1, 1939”: “We must love one another or die” to “love and die,” seeing it as no choice. Camp is less era-specific, but these are poems of our catastrophic time—of smoke and schism, love and abyss, vigil and disquiet. How one accommodates dread and the beauty of a world going on despite it may be unanswerable, but through her veers of thought and bracing opacity, Camp offers poems that attempt to articulate a response.

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

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

Mother Howl

Craig Clavenger
Datura Books/Angry Robot Books ($17.99)

by Gavin Pate

It’s been eighteen years since Craig Clevenger’s previous novel, and his fans have long wondered if the next book would inhabit the same sinister world of broken criminals and slippery identities as his earlier works. With the release of Mother Howl, the answer is yes, and then some. The most ambitious of his three books, Mother Howl has a wider scope and takes more risks; the novel has equal parts gritty realism and swaths of the fantastic. It’s a crime story and a social commentary at once, a book unafraid to be philosophical about humanity’s purpose on Earth and how we must learn to deal with our pasts if we want to fulfill it.

Lyle Edison, the son of a serial killer, changed his name years ago to escape his father’s crimes; now, he is on the cusp of a new marriage and baby. Problem is, he’s trying to navigate The System: the hoops he must jump through while on probation and the malicious officials determined to reduce him to their shuffling paperwork. All the while, he worries someone will discover who he really is. Lyle’s predicament allows Clevenger to dive into the modern noir underworld of mandatory recovery groups and piss-tests, hard-screw probation officers, tenuous employment, and piles of mounting bills. The author carefully balances Lyle’s desire to do right by his new family and his urge to vanish again, though when the book begins, it is clear there is nowhere left for Lyle to hide.

While Lyle’s story is the dominant narrative, it is the mysterious character of Icarus who pushes Lyle from the shadows and forces him to confront his past. Icarus is a man on a mission, sent by a strange entity he calls the Mother Howl. Early in the novel, Icarus explains to a psychiatrist:

Captain, me and my crew, we cooled the earth. I’ve crumpled suns in my bare fist. Made those black hole things, pockets of space so dark they bend math. I watched you monkeys climb down from the trees, sprout thumbs and figure how to sharpen sticks so’s to roast marshmallows in front of cave paintings. And I’m just one of the clean-up guys. A clock puncher.

Is this the story of a fallen angel or another street-smart schizophrenic cut loose in the world? Clevenger impressively straddles these possibilities and keeps the reader as uncertain about Icarus’s identity as the other characters are.

The intertwined stories make for a slow burn, but in the process, Clevenger delivers a series of thoughtful set pieces that allow his themes of memory, identity, and survival to develop through the material stresses of society’s forgotten and ignored. In vivid prose that defies the traditionally curt style of the crime fiction genre, Clevenger carries the story along with powerful recurring images and poignant dialogue. Mother Howl might test the patience of those who like their noir shackled to reality and all their questions neatly answered, and some might find the distribution between Icarus and Lyle a bit uneven, but for those who read to the end, the rewards are plentiful— especially in the last fifty pages, where two expert scenes (one with Lyle and one with Icarus) tie together the story’s looming questions and reveal both the horror and the hope at its center.

As for the Mother Howl—the godlike transmission running like static through the world—the book will make you wonder if you’re tuned to it, and if not, what you’re missing, or what you’ve been refusing to hear. If Mother Howl tells us anything, it’s the importance of paying attention to the here and now.

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

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

Loot

Tania James
Knopf ($28)

by Mukund Belliappa

Tania James’s third novel Loot recalls historian Marc Bloch’s observation that it is impossible to understand the past without being interested in the present. However, in the case of Tipu Sultan—the 18th-century Anglophobic South Indian ruler of the kingdom of Mysore whose reign is the setting for much of Loot—the past seems self-explanatory: It is laid out in propagandist colonial-era English tomes and in treasures carted away by the victorious British, some of which are still on display behind plexiglass. To evaluate that history through the lens of the present, though, one has to wade through a variety of opinions. Was Tipu an early “freedom-fighter,” as held by many postcolonial liberal and secular thinkers? Was he a modernizer because he developed rocket technology that would inspire William Congreve, started a silk industry, and embraced trade? Or was he just a garden-variety Islamist despot, as some contemporary Hindus think, if only because he is a hero to the Muslims of South Asia?

In the Western world, Tipu’s reputation as the latter (based mainly on his harsh treatment of British prisoners) had been well established long before his end. As the kind of bloodthirsty figure the British needed to depict their colonial expansion as a heroic endeavor, Tipu (aka Teepoo, Tipoo, Tippoo Sahib, Tipu Saeb, etc.) appeared as a bogeyman for a century and a half in English fiction, plays, travelogues, and tales of colonial derring-do. Loot, a thoughtful and obviously well-researched historical novel, offers a corrective of sorts.

James threads her narrative around the fictional life of a real toy. Known as “Tipu’s tiger,” this life-sized, crudely built, automaton depicting a tiger devouring a red-uniformed English soldier was discovered in Tipu’s palace—the perfect loot to showcase his hatred of the English. European technicians in India, to flatter their royal employers, tended to showcase their virtuosity by putting together eccentric and eye-catching doodads rather than useful machinery. The protagonist of Loot is a young Muslim man named Abbas, a talented toymaker apprenticed to the French clockmaker named Lucien, who has been commissioned by Tipu to produce the mechanical wonder.

The first half of Loot, set in Tipu’s capital fortress of Srirangapatna in the 1790s, sympathetically shows a beleaguered ruler in the waning years of his reign. Dealing with both the unreasonable demands of Governor-General Richard Wellesley (the architect of British expansion Tipu calls a “walking hemorrhoid”) and with spies deployed by a rival chieftain, the Maratha Nana Phadnavis (aka the “termite”), Tipu seems resigned to a final showdown. Under the flimsiest of pretexts—two centuries later, historians would compare them to those under which the U.S. invaded Iraq—Wellesley launches a massive British attack against Mysore, and among the spoils of eventual victory for the British is Tipu’s tiger; it is chosen by Colonel Horace Selwyn, but he soon dies of dysentery, so his aide, a sepoy named Rangappa Rao, carries the Colonel’s remains and his possessions, including the life-sized toy, to the Colonel’s widow in England.

Four characters make it out of the carnage of Tipu’s capital to Europe and to the second phase of Loot. Lucien simply returns to Rouen to run his watch and clock repair shop. Abbas escapes India as an assistant to a ship’s carpenter and eventually makes his way to Lucien’s shop, which is being run by a half-Indian girl named Jehane—the third person to survive the razing of Tipu’s capital—after Lucien’s death. Abbas and Jehane hatch a plan to travel to Mrs. Selwyn’s castle in England, hoping to exchange some assorted memorabilia for Tipu’s tiger; the high-society widow has meanwhile been garnering attention by showing off the automaton. In England, Abbas and Jehane immediately run afoul of Rum, who is Mrs. Selwyn’s “personal secretary and land agent,” as well as her controlling lover and the fourth person to have escaped Srirangapatna—though unlike the other three, he takes great joy in Tipu’s demise.

It turns out we have met Rum before, briefly, at the “prize” ceremony after Tipu’s defeat, when he was introduced as a “sepoy with the Madras Infantry.” Rum is the nickname of Rangappa Rao. He is a central figure in the final sections of the novel set at Cloverpoint Castle, Mrs. Selwyn’s sprawling country home (which of course, because she is a collector, has a museum-like vastness, with “no humble rooms”). To find the former lowly sepoy as the virtual Lord of the Manor is puzzling, though James hurriedly fills in how Rum ended up as a sepoy: His parents, officials of a minor kingdom that was brutally subdued by Tipu’s father Haider Ali, were killed during the purge after the subjugation, forcing him to seek employment with the East India Company. Still, a reader might find his current station implausible.

It does not take much to realize that Rum is a surrogate for a constituency of Tipu’s legacy that Loot, until this point, has largely ignored: the mainly Hindu and Christian peoples of South India who bore the brunt (and who, if one reads the screeds of present-day right-wing Hindus, still bear scars) of Tipu’s self-aggrandizement. Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan were ferocious conquerors; many of the regions they conquered had grown increasingly fragmented under effete rulers; and the English were sneaking around everywhere, playing one against the other. The balance James is able to strike with her characterization of Tipu and his era in the first part of Loot proves elusive in the novel’s post-Tipu world. Rum is an attempt to restore that balance, but he seems like an afterthought, a band-aid.

Though set in an entirely different context, James’s previous novel, The Tusk That Did the Damage (Knopf, 2015), tackled a parallel predicament with greater success. The central themes of Tusk are elephant poaching and conservation, and one of its principal narrators is a tribal member from whose ranks most elephant poachers come. For centuries, those poachers derived their livelihoods from a forest which is now a “Wildlife Park,” where picking up a “finger length of firewood” is suddenly a serious offense; an equally crucial second narrator is a filmmaker who is sympathetic to conservation. Loot, however, has a single narrator, and its post-Tipu pages are devoted only to the perspectives of Tipu loyalists, an imbalance in the world James has created.

Unfortunately, Loot does not recover from Rum’s unconvincing rise to prominence, although it does hint at the possibility of happy endings. Mrs. Selwyn, who has artistic aspirations of her own, has written a romantic novel and by showing sympathy for it, Jehane is able to win the widow’s confidence; although she and Abbas return to Rouen without Tipu’s tiger, they start an aspirational boutique in a Brooklynesque setting, and even hire Rum as their bookkeeper. “People are so opinionated about endings,” Mrs. Selwyn had worried after giving Jehane her manuscript. In this ending to Loot, in the rapprochement between Rum and the Tipu loyalists, there is perhaps the wishful and wistful hope of Hindu-Muslim reconciliation in a foreign land.

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

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

Fire-Rimmed Eden

Selected Poems

Lynn Lonidier
Edited by Julie R. Enszer
Sinister Wisdom ($25.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

A prolific poet of the San Francisco small press scene from the 1960s onwards, Lynn Lonidier (1937-1993) is virtually unknown today. No doubt this is due in part to the fact that she didn’t belong to any particular coterie. Even among lesbian poets, the crowd with whom she might most generally be associated, she always went her own way. As Fire-Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems testifies, her work is invariably unique, and all the more valuable for it, as it realizes an idiosyncratic sensibility.

Take the opening of “Sailorjig to Seapatchwoman” from A Lesbian Estate (Manroot Press, 1979):   

            Down the briny paths of rime,
            I join hands with an encrusted lion.

   Transpose a lion on a whale and have upheaval to the last
   tumescence of seadrop (water-holding speck of life) I am

Mid-Forty Woman    Deep tonnage tensor of wisdom    Weedpatch woman
with brio-bulge crop       mat       carpet island       Thicket       fishhooks
monster bites      Slew of parasites hang loose in the gold lion’s
mane      Hoar nest     Primeval catch    SeaROAR cRest sWell Woeforth
/PROMISE:       Green land grows on your bullback    wending invisible
harpoons R     uddy mantle of rush in Green Sea Contest

The jamming together of words here, along with the erratic spacing, spelling, and capitalization, achieve a dizzying yet effective presentation. There’s a clear sense that Lonidier writes the lines as she feels them arising within her, inflecting them with distinct emotive force; indeed, it reads irresistably like a performance script. While she may have had precursors from Dada to punk influencing her, her experimentation feels rooted in her own impulses.

Lonidier’s initial artistic inclination was musical in nature; she studied the cello before breaking away to poetry. Upon moving to the Bay Area, she became an early romantic partner of the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, and the pair moved to San Diego in the ’60s before splitting up. They were immersed in the local arts scene, collaborating on several musical and art projects both together and with friends. Lonidier’s brother, the feted photographic artist Fred Lonidier, lived locally as well at the time (there are several terrific photos included in Fire-Rimmed Eden).

Lonidier lived elsewhere for periods of time, but she always returned to San Francisco. She was a founding member of the Women’s Building in the Mission District, where she also lived and worked as a public-school teacher, and the city’s environs continually triggered her imagination, as they have countless others over the years—as can be seen in this passage from “Bernal Hill,” originally contained in The Rhyme of the Ag-ed Mariness (Station Hill Press, 2001):

A tree-laced road leads to radar
screens overlying the Mission,
Morning sun timbres the bay—
Oakland— Berkeley— Mt. Tam—
in by breathtaking eye.

Fire-Rimmed Eden contains the vast majority of Lonidier’s poetry. There are selections from her earliest collections, Po Tree and The Female Freeway, and the substantial A Lesbian Estate is presented in full—as is the last collection she assembled in her lifetime, Clitoris Lost, along with excerpts from her Mayan travelogue Woman Explorer. Selections from the posthumous The Rhyme Of The Ag-Ed Mariness, assembled by her friend Janine Canan, round out the rest.

Lonidier’s earliest work features an insistence upon freely, and often wildly, wielding language in an unexpected, eyebrow raising manner. Her first collection, Po Tree (Berkeley Free Press, 1967), is more artist-zine than poetry book; between saddle-stapled covers, Lonider’s poems appear intermixed and superimposed among collages and drawings by sisters Betty and Shirley Wong (while the artwork is not reproduced here, notes at the bottom of relevant pages offer descriptions); the poems themselves are Dada-like in their playful stridency. Several are list-poems of unusual word-matches given in full capitals: “CONFETTI NIPPLE / HISHERS / MIND BLINDER / VENETIAN TUBE ROOM / GONDOLA GONADS / AUTOBLOMB / POOM /MOM HARASS HEROOT / GERMAN VICTROLA HOAR CAUSE / CHARTREUSE COMB JUICE.”

Among the central concerns of Lonidier’s poetry are gender, sexuality, and power. She avoids being overtly political or banner waving, however, keeping the focus on her direct experience. She writes what she knows:

In drive-ins movie foyers men’s magazines    they comment on my body
as though they owned me    are as familiar with my buttbreastthighs
as they are with    rings on their fingers    It’s not rape that they
heighten their bodies by removing mind earsmindfeelings    tossing
away the body they’ve mass-raped Because    I’m their perogrative
to imagine their penises are    rolled-up dollar bills in my
penny vagina

(from “The Boys At The Beach”)   

In short, Lonidier doesn’t hold back. Her work has rough edges and non sequitur ruptures, which can leave readers hanging as to where she was headed; nevertheless, with every poem the impression remains that she has managed somehow to achieve her exact desired result. These are the poems as she would have them—no regrets and nothing vital left unsaid.

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

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

Growth

A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived

Karen DeBonis
Apprentice House Press ($19.99)

by Blair Glaser

In her memoir Growth: A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived, Karen DeBonis draws upon the various meanings of the word. When a mysterious set of behaviors—lack of focus, odd tics, and declining motor-skills—sprout up in her son Matthew, she must confront her people-pleasing nature and develop the assertiveness required to raise a special needs child in a broken healthcare system. As DeBonis registers the maddening helplessness of searching for what ails her firstborn, we spin with her through the revolving door of mother-shaming doctors, false diagnoses, ineffective treatment plans, and the well-meaning concern of friends and family.

DeBonis parents with the extreme patience of a Buddha, while peeling back the curtain on darker thoughts and feelings: her fear of making waves, her rage and its occasional outbursts, her coping mechanism of binge eating. Growth will especially speak to parents of special needs/chronically ill children, but it is, at its core, a woman’s story; many women will recognize themselves in the author’s struggle with her social programming to be “good,” underneath which—in her case—is genuine compassion. As Matthew’s illness isolates them both from friends and community, she writes, “I ached for his aloneness, knowing intimately the awfulness of it.”

Growth also holds up a mirror to the way patriarchal values operate in traditional marriages. DeBonis’s husband Michael is a loving partner and parent, but the author is often coaxing him into a greater level of concern and action on Matthew’s behalf. When they finally discover the cause of their son’s bizarre symptoms—the brain tumor of the subtitle—DeBonis criticizes herself for not working harder to find answers, but Michael wonders, “How did I not see it?” It is a question we’ve been wondering alongside him, and it validates DeBonis’s long held frustration of carrying the larger share of emotional labor.

DeBonis’s grounded perspective on personal growth helps readers see their own limitations with compassion. Directly after receiving the correct diagnoses, she experiences a seismic transformation when a new part of her she calls She-Bear emerges: “The boundaries of my body were unable to contain the force, so my legs and arms and head stretched and expanded to gigantic proportions. It wasn’t imagined. It was palpable in every cell of my growing body.” It’s one of those life-changing moments, and yet, DeBonis is honest about its fleeting nature: “My foray into assertiveness . . . turned out to be brief and subdued. My skills had not been honed for the long haul.”

In one particularly self-revealing chapter, “My Real, Messy Story,” DeBonis asks an existential question familiar to anyone who’s withstood long periods of crisis: “How does one reconcile such extremes of feeling, thinking and believing?” We find answers in the book’s main theme of self-acceptance. After what should have been life-changing surgery, Matthew’s handicaps do not vanish, and in order to thrive as an independent adult, he must finally come to terms with his disability and accept help from a government jobs program. DeBonis shares with us what she wishes she’d had the courage to say to the pediatrician who initially and repeatedly dismissed her concerns. This is the only time we lose an intimate connection with her, as she asks us to join her in self-recrimination. But at the chapter’s end, DeBonis offers forgiveness for her own—and by extension, our—shortcomings: “the baby steps I took were leaps of great distance.”

With exquisite vulnerability and awareness of interior dynamics, Growth anchors its suspense in a loving family who plays well, fights with and for each other, and ultimately grows together. Towards the end, the author’s parents exhibit polite passivity when a healthcare agency cancels an important appointment for her ailing mother. DeBonis finds their complacency—the very trait that shaped her good girl persona—unacceptable, and, in She Bear manner, swiftly and effectively advocates on their behalf. In this regard, Matthew’s tumor has spurred real change; readers would do well to conclude that though personal evolution can’t be rushed, it is entirely possible.

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

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