Poetry Reviews

Creature Feature

Dean Young
Copper Canyon Press ($17)

by William Stobb

It’s fitting that the first posthumous collection of Dean Young’s poetry, Creature Feature, should come into the world just as the first full retrospective in thirty years of Marcel Duchamp’s work is launched at the New York MOMA. Young (1955-2022) wrote in a world transformed by Duchamp, who, after exhausting his potential as a Modernist painter in Nude Descending a Staircase, broke through formal limitations that others didn’t even realize existed, creating a whole new dimension of art through his readymades and late masterwork, Étant Donné. Duchamp’s influence on Young is apparent in a fierce spirit of play directed toward refreshed vision. Carrying forward the revolutionary intentions of Surrealism and Dada, Young’s poems break free of monotonous habitual constructs and reveal vivid, thrilling realities that we rarely notice amid our mundane routines. Line after line, the electricity of Dean Young’s poems shocks readers back to life.

At the start of “The Language of Flowers is in Much Disrepair,” Young takes us inside the mad laboratory of his art, where the creature shudders into existence:

I’m ready for a new poem.
Sure, it’ll still be on a first-name basis
with ants in eye sockets,
rain on ruined lawns,
the plethora of household solvents’
explosive potential.
It’ll still be astounded by translucence
pressure causes in what it doesn’t shatter.

In the making of a poem, Young will see some predictably poetic things: the cycle of life and death (ants in eye sockets), some banal suburban futility (life-giving rain on lawns already ruined), and even the violence implicit in the chemistry of toxic products we use to sterilize our lives. But if these revelations feel a little humdrum to some (though not to this reader), the process leads to deeper insights: contact with the fragile wonders at the core of life’s tectonics. The powerful forces of reality can shatter us, but they can also make us strong and uniquely beautiful.

But don’t underestimate the shatter. Creature Feature is full of calamities and intimations of breakdown—like a country song, but with a new wave flavor. “I’ll never be happy again,” says Young in “In the Wild.” And in “Welcome to the Neighborhood”: “It’s not like loneliness ever killed anyone. // Loneliness kills everyone.” In their excellent, brief afterword to the volume, Young’s literary executors––Dobby Gibson and Matt Hart––crack the biographical door a little, allowing readers to see inside Young’s own difficult passages. “Dean had become isolated in his final years, a situation compounded by the pandemic. He was struggling with declining health and failed relationships. . . . Creature Feature is Dean’s darkest book.”

While the presumption of autobiography in poetry can be misleading or irrelevant for many poets and traditions, Dean Young’s case proves there’s an artistic reason to center the poems around their real-life author. In his only volume of prose, the astoundingly brilliant The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (Graywolf Press, 2010), Young aligns himself with both Romanticism and Surrealism in honoring “poetic procedure as life lived, and life lived as poetic procedure.” Not only should poems be informed by real events, emotions, imaginations—this is the only way the poems will succeed as art works—but also the writing of the poems should shape the poet’s life, so that by living in alignment with the truth and beauty of the work, the poet manifests a new world that might transcend the political and economic banalities and of mainstream culture—small scale blinders that can channel us into large-scale human calamity. In reading Dean Young, readers can ignore the idea that a work of art is self-contained and instead remember the author was a living, breathing entity, striving to live a truly human life at the dramatic center of each of poem.

As Creature Feature was hitting bookstore shelves this past spring, the New York Times published a review of the book, which is big news for a poetry collection. Written by Jeff Gordinier, it’s a well-intentioned review and should expand the audience for the book, but unfortunately, it works from the false premise that the dizzying leaps and landings of Young’s poems are the product of cognitive degradations that our technological age hath wrought:

Maybe you feel like something is wrong with your brain. Your thoughts won’t stand still. … lately the machine of your attention has turned into a poodle chasing squirrels in Central Park, dashing here and darting there and never catching anything at all. Even now, perhaps, you’re having trouble staying fixed on this paragraph. Your phone beckons you with texts from friends and calamitous news from around the world.

Gordinier concludes that “Dean Young saw this coming,” but this reader disagrees. Young was neither a victim of nor a commentator on some intellectual diminishment endemic to his era. He worked from a sophisticated and clearly understood surrealist platform, where the drama of a “chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and umbrella” (as surrealist progenitor Lautréamont put it) can deconstruct conventional narratives and help us see new ways of living. Young’s digressive, disjunctive poems scout ahead from our world, performing a honeybee’s waggle dance that invites us to follow: “The imagination is forever in advance of criticism,” he explains in The Art of Recklessness, citing Rimbaud: “Poetry will no longer beat within action: it will be before it”.

Young’s saxophones, tennis balls, peaches, phosphates, loophas, dachshunds, and tongs gleam in the light of artistic display, as Duchamp’s urinal-cum-fountain reveals the beauty of even debased materials. Anything can be wondrous in a Dean Young poem, and the buoyancy in Creature Feature might restore your faith in the power of art to renew the world, but there’s an ache in there too. Can we feel fully alive? Can we ever arrive? One thinks of Marcel Marceau—a sad-faced mime performing so delightfully—but is that not the banal construct of the self, still holding sway with all its aches and pains?

I am tired of having a body.
Maybe this is what Whitman meant.
To feel like a wasp in a Coke can,
a dot in a Seurat, part of some madding
flood but utterly alone.

                                                        —from “Impulse Control”

A mortal longing perforates the collection, and readers can probably relate since the COVID-19 pandemic shoved our loneliness epidemic toward apocalypse. However, given the artistic legacy Young has mapped out for himself, it’s fair to wonder why his poems commit so fully to the Western construct of the self. Aren’t our worst problems directly related to its narcissistic needs? Loneliness, and its corresponding tendency to consume as a replacement for connection. Individual privilege, and its thoughtless exercises at the expense of others. War and eco-devastation as manifestations of childish existential tantrums. Young’s poems hold on to a contemporary American self that a lot of contemporary poetry seeks to transcend. Does this represent a failure to carry artistic ideals all the way through?

In my view, Young was way too smart to have been oblivious to this dynamic, and his cleaving to the self is a gesture of a shared reality to the reader that can sometimes become opaque. And anyway, what am I, Dean Young, supposed to do about my dead cat’s ashes in this coffee can and the daffodils exploding around the power plant?

In other words, it’s just how Dean Young rolled. Yes, he wrote in deep relationship to counter-culture histories in art and literature, but he also felt the joys and pains of being alive in our time, and he brought it all to his thankfully prolific career. He leaves us with twenty collections (roughly a thousand poems) filled with moments of signature agility, and Creature Feature delivers some great Dean Young moments. Take these sparkling neurotransmissions from “The Disarticulated Monster at the Heart of the Array”:

just entering the hospital feels like never getting out
like there’s nothing too high to dive from
like you’re not allowed to bring your dog
this road’s not on any map
a lot can be done with pumpkin seeds
I have seen the best minds swear they’re leaving the planet
spooky action at a distance
fake meat barbecues.

Or these from “Clinamen,” a title referring to an ancient intuition that a swerve in the fabric of reality led to the very kind of explosive collision that brought the universe into existence:

I wonder if she ever thinks of me,
the one who I helped carry the terrapin out of traffic,
the one who kissed me at the crash site.
I have tried to welcome the breaks in the pattern
to allow the soul to escape.

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

Tried not to let the dew get me
with its shimmer-for-a-moment ethos,
but also accept how all things vanish
with nothing more than whiffs of accelerant . . .

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

Often I was forced into compliance,
which I quickly shook off in the rain,
the inflorescent rain.
Maybe a lamb, maybe a lion.
Entirely blooming inside.

Creature Feature thrills through the power of an art that conducts consciousness into such fluent music. In his early collection Beloved Infidel (Wesleyan University Press, 1992), Young overtly honored the action painting of artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and that energy of furious uncalculated motion finding strange balances continues to animate his poems, even after their author has gone elsewhere.

The physical object of the book is to be admired as well as its contents. The cover features a wrap-around collage by the poet, and the author photo at the back is not a glamour shot of Young, but a snap of Boris Karloff in full makeup as Frankenstein’s monster. It’s funny and clever and aligned with the book’s titular concept, but there is pathos here, too: captured in a pensive moment off-set, Karloff stares into the distance like a man distracted by the unbearable lightness of his being. Looking at this photo, I can’t help but wonder: After a 2011 heart transplant, did Young see himself as a kind of cobbled together meat creature?

Creature Feature does feel uneven at times, though admittedly there’s a certain amount of shimmy in any Dean Young book, as he stands with Duchamp on the question of imperfection in art: “It’s better with the crack.” Mistakes, for Young, are essential to the exploratory spirit of art. “What may seem like a mistake may in fact be the most important point in the poem, where the poet is trying to discover new territory, new methods and materials,” he exclaims in The Art of Recklessness. In the physical world we know that error is the mechanism of the mutations that generate evolution, and Young can always be counted on to generate his poems through the heat of spontaneity. At times, however, these poems lean on discursive crutches through regressive gestures that prop the poems up, instead of surging forward through a pulse of artistic images.

The risk is existing in the first place.
Enough with the close-ups,
I’m ready for some far-aways.
Sure, the new poem’s best friend
is still a three-legged dog trying to rip
the squeak out of a rubber toy.

                                 —from “The Language of Flowers Is in Much Disrepair”

Here, Young returns to the rhetorical gesture of “Sure” (used earlier in the poem to describe “the new poem”—see the first quotation in this review) to resuscitate the poem when it might be flatlining; it’s not a huge blemish on “The Language of Flowers Is in Much Disrepair,” but it raises the larger issue of how such conversational props suggest that the poet is not working with maximal freedom. Similarly, at the end of “Malpractice,” Young resolves a flurry of imagery in a cliché:

                     Wild hypnagogic berries
grow by the shore where desolate angels
may pour foundations, and demons design
the curriculum, and anyone who doesn’t know
they’re at the beck of strange mighty forces
isn’t eating in the same restaurants I am.
Watch yourself. This ain’t the shallow end.

Ending with the restaurants would leave us with a proposition / image that illustrates the connection between mundane culture and existential peril; by telling us , the poem ends up feeling a little pedantic, over-committed to message in the way an advertisement might be.

Fortunately, these lapses don’t last for long. In “Mexico,” the very next poem in the book, Young rediscovers the power of his imagination unleashed:

Just because I didn’t care enough about money?
Neck broken, the head still nods.

Heart ripped out still sobs.
Stone with a hole for a face,

Sunflower, flamethrower, new lover,
Door to a more darker dark.

Here, the dynamics of an ending relationship, and the future that lies beyond it, are fully transformed into a hypnotic, riveting image sequence with a primitive power that hits readers in the chest, and not just the language processing centers of the brain. I hope that readers new to this extraordinary American poet will feel the electricity of Creature Feature’s clearest moments and reach back in his catalog toward individual collections like Skid (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002) and Primitive Mentor (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), or his alphabetically organized volume of selected poems, Bender (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). At the height of his powers, Young hurled lightning bolts down from the mountains in poems that challenge us to risk true authenticity in our lives.

The Lilly Library at Indiana University has acquired and archived Young’s papers, and Gibson and Hart have proven themselves as dedicated literary executors who truly understood and loved the poet. Readers can therefore hope we might see one or two more Dean Young collections lumber forth into the light of day, with an “arrrrgh” or two for the “fucking villagers” threatening to pitchfork any innocent creature who walks a little off-balance and might be wearing, say, a bolt in the side of their head.

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

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

Colour / Grammar

Greg Thomas
zimZalla

by Ross Hair

Colour / Grammar, Greg Thomas’s collection of 49 new and redesigned postcard-poems, offers an ideal introduction to the work and sensibilities of this prolific Glasgow-based poet, artist, and critic. Thomas is the author of one of the most authoritative critical studies of British concrete poetry, Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (Liverpool University Press, 2019) and more recently, with the poet and publisher Julie Johnson, has co-edited a new selection of Edwin Morgan’s poetry, Home in Space: Selected Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry (Reaktion Books, 2026). Although the poems that comprise Colour / Grammar wear this learning lightly, the concrete poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay (one of the subjects of Border Blurs) and the minimal poetry of Aram Saroyan are very much Thomas’s touchstones: “The feints and tricks I learned from Finlay’s work, but also from Saroyan’s,” Thomas claimed in a 2022 feature at the online zine SPAM, “are still probably the basis of what much of what I’m doing (in particular, the page not as an invitation to forward movement but as a visual frame).”

The influence of Saroyan is most evident in Thomas’s one-word poems, including “blissom” which conflates a prominent subject of Japanese haiku (blossom) with the sensation it elicits (bliss). However, whereas Saroyan utilized the solecism (most famously, misspelling “light” with an extra “ght”), Thomas’s one-word poems tend towards the portmanteau and neologism. The distinctive color of “blissom” also gives some indication of how, according to Thomas, the poems in Colour / Grammar explore “the possibilities of colour as grammar and grammar as colour.” In this instance, the rich plum of the word “blissom,” printed on a pale pink background, makes the ephemeral phenomena of blossom all the more tangible and vivid.

In terms of its colors and design, Colour / Grammar recalls Finlay’s Poems To Hear and See (Macmillan, 1971), a colorful collection of some of his most familiar and accessible concrete poems aimed at junior readers. In the case of Colour / Grammar, however, the page is replaced with the postcard—a simple format that suits the brevity of Thomas’s bright, playful poems. Maximizing the possibilities of simple colors and verbal configurations, the postcards never outsay their welcome and encourage being displayed and shared. Indeed, two copies of each postcard are included in the orange box that houses them, with the idea that the duplicates might be posted to friends and other sympathetic parties. It is a generous sentiment but perhaps one that is rather anachronistic, if not nostalgic, in its harkening back to a different (pre-digital) time when mail was an inexpensive means of communication and exchange.

Many of the poems in Colour / Grammar take a backward glance to evoke the heyday of concrete and visual poetry. In one such poem, for example, the word “sedge” (set in a bold Cooper Black font) is repeated to form a calligram of the grass-like plant which splays and sways against the card’s sage green stock. While this inevitably recalls Apollinaire, the result is also not dissimilar to Mary Ellen Solt’s concrete flower poems such as “Forsythia,” which manifests the titular shrub with the letters of its name. However, whereas Solt makes her shrub bloom by utilizing other methods common to concrete poetry (such as acrostics and encoded symbols), Thomas’s plant is made entirely from the consecutive repetition of “sedge,” which yields the additional words “edge” and “edges.” As a result, Thomas’s calligram makes a playful allusion to the mnemonic rhyme for identifying the plants of the Cyperaceae family: “sedges have edges.”  

Unlike the triangular stems of sedge plants, the poems in Colour / Grammar are themselves rarely “edgy.” This is something that Thomas is evidently conscious of, and a quality that he recognizes in Finlay’s work. In his SPAM feature “Greg Thomas: Ten Things,” Thomas claims he learned from Finlay’s example

that it’s not inherently problematic to make poems that are small, simple, and express a kind of emotional warmth (I find ‘edginess’ quite a facile quality in poetry). The reader or viewer can feel they understand your work, feel a gentleness and love from it, without that signifying some sort of complicity with a damaged world.

If the challenge that comes from cultivating such warmth is to keep the poem from becoming anodyne or trite, then Thomas generally avoids such pitfalls. One way in which he does so is by subtly defamiliarizing otherwise common turns of phrase, making the everyday just a bit more incongruous and strange. In “the buzzing / of instincts / in hedgerows,” for example, Thomas subverts assumptions by substituting what one would expect, “insects,” with the more idiosyncratic “instincts.” Such a feint not only deftly evokes the liveliness of summer hedgerows, but it also conveys their diverse ecologies. In a similar spirit, the satisfyingly sibilant one-word poem “restlessnest” conjures both the insatiability of a burgeoning nest and the harried parents tending it.

Several poems in Colour / Grammar are commendable for how they breathe new life into the otherwise hackneyed subject of dawn. The non-gendered personification in “the dawn / clears / its throat,” for example, deftly ensures that this evocation of the dawn chorus is not mistaken for the less salubrious guttural hacks and hawks of a human early morning riser, while in the more aphoristic “day / breaks // night / mends” and the proverb-like “the dawn / was not / born / yesterday,” Thomas strikes a perfect balance between poignancy and whimsy. While such punning and wordplay confirms the extent to which Colour / Grammar is not an “edgy” collection of poetry, it nevertheless reminds us that the optimism and joy contained in its bright orange box is perhaps something that, in these dark and difficult times, we all need a bit more of right now.

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

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

What God in the Kingdom of Bastards

Brian Gyamfi
University of Pittsburgh Press ($20)  

by John Bradley

“I was made in Kumasi, Ghana,” states Brian Gyamfi in What God in the Kingdom of Bastards, his stunning debut book of poetry. This is no mere autobiographical detail, for the author’s African heritage is a source that continually enriches this collection’s thirty-five poems. It’s difficult to believe that this is Gyamfi’s first book, as his work exhibits both strong confidence and an original voice.

The very title of the book reflects this originality. While most poetry collections feature a title drawn from a poem in the book, nowhere in these pages will the reader find Gyamfi’s titular phrase. The poem “Kingdom” comes closest, and it does deal with religious matters, though in surprising ways: “It is said, Jesus killed fleas to save his dog. / Even a boy must perform acts of sadism.” The leap between those lines is thought-provoking to say the least. Later in the poem, the speaker tells us, “I once shoved wind into my brother’s mouth, / whispered in his ear, ‘the kingdom of God is a wild animal.’” There’s nothing cliched or reassuring about religion in this book.

Though Gyamfi’s poems are often visionary, they are not romantic, as can be seen, ironically, in “Our Romantics.”  In this playful poem, “The earth shivers and a crowd of poodles / urinate by the streetlight.” Note how the initially cute image of the poodles is undone in the next line. Other unromantic images populate the poem—a cat chasing beetles, someone swallowing a sword—yet a woman in the poem “blooms as a daylily.” Paradoxes abound in Gyamfi’s work.

In “The Tree Carries Water,” set in New Mexico, we hear of a boy rescued from a river. The action is ambiguous but always evocative:

—I write this to understand the sorcerer in Benin:

the breaker of mountains, a heavy voice
in the story of a gardener fetching a boy from the river,

his hand under the heavy current, a beetle climbing a tree

Benin, a West African country not far from Ghana, is known as the birthplace of voodoo, and the poem has the hallucinatory quality often associated with that religion: The relationships between the sorcerer in Benin, the gardener in New Mexico, the voice, the beetle, all seem to shift as the rushing water threatens the boy’s life.  Later in the poem, another layer of complexity is added: “in my thoughts, the sorcerer in Benin is the river.” Rather than confuse, however, the ambiguity adds depth and mystery.

Gyamfi is unafraid to challenge the reader.  The longest poem in the book at twelve pages, “Praxis of Being,” uses a form that resembles a notebook, with entries separated by a dash, and it continually evokes Nobel-Prize-winning Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, not only in an epigraph but in direct references throughout, such as: “Soyinka’s words dictate anger is not a pomposity for justice, you / say, fidgeting.” You should know Soyinka’s work, Gyamfi implies. 

While allusive, “Praxis of Being” is also highly personal. Some of the most moving lines in the book can be found in this poem: “In 2013, I detangled mother’s braids, brushed them out gently / and braided them again. I kissed her long fingers.” The tenderness of this recollection follows the news that “mother will soon lose her memory.” Gyamfi’s most devastating observation, though, might be this double-barreled one near the end of the piece: “We are all just lonely. That’s a quiet sentence.”

Gyamfi’s many Ghanian cultural references can be confusing at first for readers not already familiar—in “New World,” for example, we hear, “The word petrichor does not exist in our language. / There’s no equivalent in Ewe or Ga”—but the poet’s multilingual engagement with sense and meaning making ultimately pays off. “I am a person in many languages,” Gyamfi reminds us later in the book. Like Whitman, his poetic identity is expansive, and his poetry is affecting not despite its complexities, but often because of them. What God in the Kingdom of Bastards introduces an exciting new voice in American poetry, with the promise of more ground-breaking work to come.

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

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

Fuel

Rosie Stockton
Nightboat Books ($17.95) 

by Walter Holland

Fuel, the second collection by Rosie Stockton, presents a complex poetry of disruptive and transformative language culminating in a strange lyric beauty. Central to this book is a queer love for a “you,” be it an aspect of the speaker, a lover, the Earth, or the creational force which made our world and still drives it forward. Their poems often emerge in cascading columns, outpourings fraught with evolutionary images from natural history, but always tied to the ache of human desire and love. Stockton’s style is an adept process of collage and décollage, taking strips of writings from visionary poets who sought to explain the mysteries of our world and the perplexing nature of love and combining them into an unstable accretion of oddly colliding imagery, an admirable and unsettling bric-a-brac. Stockton offers us their own creation story for our fragmented world, and how it is fueled, why we are driven and continue living. Is it by desire, by love? They do not offer easy answers.

The notes section reveals the collection’s ambition and lineage, explaining that “This book reverbs with the words of others” mentioning Ovid’s, Metamorphoses, Bernadette Mayer’s Soule Serman, Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations and other texts including Jacques Lacan’s Desire and its Interpretation. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written in 8 CE by the Roman poet, defied easy classification and alluded to “transformations” such as those from animals to humans, inanimate objects to humans, one sex to another sex, representing gender as mutable. In this sense Metamorphoses has recently been seen as a queer text, one that posits transsexuality and non-binary gender as inherent, and, that the entire world is mutable and shape-shifting, epicurean and materialistic, made of atoms ever reconfigured as Lucretius described.

A broad genre-defying poem of mythology and literature, Ovid’s poem addressed the myths of transformation, and the recurring theme of love, both personal love and love personified by the gods and nature. Stockton nods to this mythic slant in the collection’s “Pumpjack” section. There, Stockton takes us from “layers of dead sea creatures” through “mud and plankton” to “landing on air” to “shale rock” and “oil fields,” “Roman fascism” to “global big block stores.” Stockton moves through evolutionary, geologic, and human time. There are interesting flashes as well of Rimbaud’s symbolist and fin de siècle surreal imagery, illustrating the illusory world of transformations, synesthesia, and changes in perception. They speak of

          velvet corpses, polluted, unassimilable each unit
our aromas muzzled together
                  a Luddite tactic too heavy to lift
lulling tariffed cargo with uninsured joints
           murderous orators in ecstasy

As with Ovid’s transformations, often metatextual and embedded within funny and absurd grammatical and narrative constructions, Stockton creates with Fuel their own metamorphoses, perhaps drawing on their perspective of a non-binary life, a life that understands the absurd transformational shifts in gender, the upturning of those myths, and the resulting disruption to our present-day creation myths and varied beliefs on human behavior.

In fact their poems seethe with ongoing internal and external shifts, doubts, social critiques, guilt, anguish, and ceaseless revolt against itself, which Stockton alludes to in the book’s epigraph from Frank Bidart’s “Guilty of Dust”: “Whether you love what you love//or live in divided ceaseless revolt against it//what you love is your fate.”

In “Dispersal,” Stockton writes:

            I finger a bur
            I want to be nothing
            but of things

            & if I am more me
            next to you
            it’s because relation
            made me this way

like light, you hit me
when I ask you to

I let flood emboss me
I dress up straw men
just to find new ways
to love all I extravagantly
destroy

braced for fire season
all that makes us
possible, before our candle
swallows the wick
and that summer darkness drenches us
           here, I feel the story so many ways
           I have to lay down

Fuel is not within the Language school of poetry or adjacent elliptical styles of previous decades per se; rather, it responds to and moves into Stockton’s own hybrid language for the current world of streaming and the fragmented flow of news and information, where verbs are often mismatched to nouns, metaphors are always mixed, pronouns are transferred fluidly, and synesthesia holds sway. Stockton exhibits wildly inventive phrases such as “I let flood emboss me” and “summer darkness drenches us,” capturing with virtuosity the new argot of our impatient texting world, with its autofill distortions, purposeful interruptions, opposing images taken from advertising and capitalistic speech, all of it joined or turned around. But in this sonic disjoint there is the address to a “you,” a “you” which may be the speaker, a facet of the speaker, or a beloved other. This makes for rare and wonderous images, mashups of verbs and nouns and adjectives in a viscous emulsion.

Fuel is full of humor, but like in Old English there is provocative and active physical roughness:

           the verification system we annihilate
the shackled fantasy of aching feet, adrenal shame
           and lip liner in the cozy hour molding fantasy of intimacy
how oil money rots virile our pleasure leaking to the front-end strike
                  and back-end theft slipping through power. . .

Also from “Dispersal:”

we are the only people
today shrugging stunning
how the stolen Snake River
confronts stone
volcanic battery life
surges hungry snacks
litter my lining
strained for you
this is loving. I walk so
fast wanting water
eddies to ghost, wanting
to point myself out
to you, there, there
and there

Stockton’s poems move us through a world littered with units of free-floating language, from “Chevron’s unliberated future scenarios” to “eddies of ghost”; they show us how human desire and love always seek expression, always point toward the mysterious soul “there, there/ and there.” Perhaps most importantly, they show us transformation is possible and has been the basis of all creation since the dawn of time.

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

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

Elegies of the Earth

Selected Poems

Ahmad Shamlou
Translated by Niloufar Talebi
World Poetry ($24)

by Patrick James Dunagan

The poetry of Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000) towers over 20th-century Iranian literature, but has been too little appreciated outside the Middle East. Fortunately, Niloufar Talebi’s translations in Elegies of the Earth offer the most comprehensive selection of his poems yet to appear in English. Shamlou, who never earned a high school diploma and was imprisoned several times, found in poetry a venue for expressing the inexplicable. He eschewed traditional Persian poetic forms, writing free verse that blended the richness of Persian visual tropes and surrealist leaning metaphors with a stylized self-scrutiny. As Talebi describes in an introduction, Shamlou’s poems “synthesize East and West, the classical with the contemporary, the high and low to invent language that propelled Persian poetry into the pulse of a rapidly evolving Iran. . . . Without sacrificing its depth, he democratized his literary mode, giving voice to the ‘everyman’ in a range of registers.”

The clarity and immediacy of Shamlou’s work is indeed striking. What exactly a poem is “about” may not be entirely clear, but the imagery and associated feeling are always animated; as well, there’s an easy-going dreamlike fluidity to his descriptions of abstruse scenes, though they are nevertheless loaded with emotional heft. Take these lines from “I Can’t Help But Be Beautiful”:

 in my world
 blood
           is never the spirit laid bare
 and the fear of lead
                                doesn’t deter the partridge
from its strut

Talebi knew Shamlou personally, and she attests to his magnetism, saying, “he was the sun around which everyone at my parents’ secret literary salons in Tehran gathered. I recall him abruptly retreating from our bustling living room, where he was holding court, into a bedroom because a poem had seized him, demanding immediate transcription.” Even if enigmatic at times, his poems are deeply personal; in Shamlou’s own words, “My work is my complete autobiography. Poetry isn’t just an interpretation of life—it’s life itself.” He embeds weighted depth into mundane existence, as in “Still Life”:

An obscure book and
a burnt-to-ashes cigarette next to the forgotten cup of tea.

A forbidden thought
on the mind.

While Talebi’s selection of poems, drawn from the full range of Shamlou’s oeuvre, succeeds in delivering some sense of his poetic purview, one might wish for more commentary upon his life and the poems themselves. Talebi supplies footnotes for many of the poems, but they leave much unsaid. For instance, Shamlou has a number of poems scattered throughout volumes across the years with an overarching title of “Nocturnal,” which would seem to indicate some specific reference linking these poems together for him (a disrupted poem-series coming in fits and starts over an extended period of time)—yet Talebi supplies no information in this regard. As if in expectation of such grousing, she offers this short explanation: “I had prepared a lengthy introduction filled with biography and analysis, drawn from my previous writings about Shamlou. But let’s just get straight to the poems.”

Given ongoing current developments within Iran—where the people are in a perpetual state of peril under the brutality of the regime, thousands have been gunned down in the streets for daring to rise up and express discontent, and war with the United States continues—Shamlou’s poetry is a welcome demonstration of the vibrant cultural and imaginative resources of the Persian people and a dependable bulwark to lean against whatever the future holds. Let’s let him have the last word with these lines from “Nocturnal (Among the Eternal Suns)”:

Your gaze
    is the fall of tyranny—
a gaze that dressed
                               my bare soul
                                                     in love
so fully that now
                            the darkest night of never
feels like nothing but a comedy of ironies.

Your eyes told me
tomorrow
      is a new day—

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

Ecstasy

Alex Dimitrov
Alfred A. Knopf ($29)

by Walter Holland              

Alex Dimitrov, a clear and artful descendent of Frank O’Hara, richly appropriates the heady musings of the 1980s and 1990s, when Nan Goldin photoshoots in despondent shadowy doorways and bathroom stalls documented a version of New York City that has all but disappeared. Take “Another Party,” an early poem in his new collection Ecstasy, which begins:

            An orange streak in the sky!
            Before I go in I smoke
            with the roses on Fifth.
            They’re drenched from the rain
            and perfectly dressed.
            The party is beautiful.
            The windows are French.
            The windows are open
            although it’s not time
            to jump out of them yet!

Here, Dimitrov mimics the whimsy and sarcasm of O’Hara’s blithe conversational banter and “Personism,” adding a nice dose of Dorothy Parker’s flippant bite. Skilled at capturing the camp cadences of the past, Dimitrov takes us through the lonely quotidian of 1980’s and ‘90’s East Village bohemianism; he can speak the dark New York chic of Capote as he name-drops designer labels, makes cocktail banter, and pines away with belabored sexual longing in his favored Manhattan restaurant. His range of settings roams from trendy bar to trendier eatery, always pitch-perfectly capturing the despairing intonations (laced with shots of acidic self-pity) that attend the sophisticate poet. The collection’s queer urban voice feels generally authentic, though at moments a bit posed and heavy on the world-weariness.

Boredom in the midst of privilege and American materialistic decadence seems just one of Dimitrov’s fallback themes. “Gold Amex,” for example, glows with cynicism:

The city glitters like a gold Amex.
A guy lifts his shirt and shows you his scar.
You lose your ID. The palms rustle.
Someone asks if it’s Tuesday . . .

Dimitrov is fascinated with the disillusioned cadences of American writers who wallowed in the wake of New York’s heyday, but the East Village of queer criminals and dissident bad boys no longer exists as he conceives it; his jaded cosmopolitanism is almost now a genre in itself in American literature. Though at times repetitive or nostalgic, his soliloquies are magnificently melancholy, and his flickers of international settings serve the poems nicely, as in “Paris”:

                                            I drank holy water
            from the church on Rue du Temple.
            I couldn’t remember names
            and I couldn’t remember hours
            especially after ten, after sunset
            after everything I thought I wanted
            was here and not mine anymore.

Here, Dimitrov mixes Weltschmertz with just the right accord of wit, humor, and vulnerability. One senses a lonely reach for mid-century drugs-sex-rock-and-roll nihilism and the desire for a new entourage of rebel co-conspirators—though he may have to settle for the less glamorous company of jaded millennials.

Despite my sense of his manqué poetic voice, Dimitrov is a poet of effete aesthetic savvy and emotional truth who understands lacerations of spirit. There is something of Fitzgerald in him, a tragic sensibility; his urbane ennui has the bored auteur spirit of Andy Warhol in his diaries (in fact the cover image is taken from Warhol’s 1964 film Blow Job, a fitting bit of kitsch), as well as the raw, desolate view of David Wojnarowicz. He’s good at reflecting a past of elitist boredom, educated solipsism, and melancholy, but if he’d step out of the shadows and address the hard realities of now with that deeper voice he conceals within, he would better help us to feel the currency of the new and the present.            

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

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

Lola the Interpreter

Lyn Hejinian
Wesleyan University Press ($18.95)

by Luke Harley

Lola the Interpreter, the final work by Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024), stands as a crowning achievement of her career as an experimental poet. A sequel of sorts to Saga/Circus (Omnidawn, 2008), it continues her exploration of hybrid forms uniting poetry and prose, autobiography and fiction, and observation and citation—what Hejinian’s fellow Language poet Barrett Watten terms a “combinatorial poetics.” Structured in seven sections—each introduced by a color plate of Hejinian’s own design—the book arrives like a consoling breeze in today’s climate of political extremism. In its embrace of allegoresis, a literary strategy which Hejinian claims as a form of critique, it refuses to buckle to authoritarianism and the “technocratic takeover of reality.”

In Lola the Interpreter, the titular character is tasked with making sense of a destabilized world. First introduced in the “Circus” section of Saga/Circus as a bike-riding, book-loving child, Lola reemerges in this volume as a sharp-witted, affectionate, pragmatic adolescent—one playfully dressed in black jeans and a black Stetson, evoking the rebellious spirit of a literary cowgirl. Her transformation signals a shift from innocent observation to incisive critique as she confronts the “machinations of capitalism” and challenges a dystopian reality she deems “insufficiently artistic.” For Lola—a kind of muse for Hejinian—interpretation is resistance: her rationality and linguistic skill empower her to navigate (and subvert) the ideological structures that shape her world.

Like ours, the world that Lola inhabits is marked by “global interconnectivity, selective interconnectivity, changing urban demographics, extreme weather events, economic inequality, mass incarceration, homelessness, urban congestion, civic madness”; it is a world where eros has been “monetized” and almost every aspect of personhood is “weaponized for political ends.” Disillusioned, Lola and her friends yearn for lives of meaning and coherence. They seem to seek what Walter Benjamin, in his concept of Jetztzeit (now-time), calls the “mystical instant”—an allegorical moment that crystallizes into the “now” of historical consciousness.

For Hejinian, “allegorical thinking” offers a way out of the anxiety, fragmentation, and “dismal indifference” of contemporary life. In her essay collection Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), Hejinian champions poetic strategies such as parataxis, digression, and syntactic disruption, deploying them to challenge conventional narrative coherence and resist closure. Her “wayward poetry,” grounded in material particulars of “adamantine specificity,” opens a space for imaginative flourishing—including in Lola the Interpreter, where Hejinian conjures a self-effacing “tumult of language” that sends “waves of polysemy rolling through even the most quotidian, banal, pedestrian, and seemingly inconsequential of situations.”

Hejinian’s focus on material particulars—the “paltry objects of quotidian life”—bears some resemblance to Wordsworth’s elevation of the ordinary, yet Hejinian is certainly not a Romantic poet in the conventional sense. Her work has been shaped more by Russian Formalism, pragmatist philosophy, and critical theory than by Romanticism; if Lola the Interpreter stages a dialogue between Romantic poetry’s idealism and Language poetry’s skepticism toward narrative and lyrical unity, it is one in which the latter usually prevails.

Nevertheless, Hejinian was influenced by a foundational text that introduced many in the American avant-garde to the collaborative ethos of German Romanticism: Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s The Literary Absolute (SUNY Press, 1988). Moreover, her recent writing contains flashes of unexpected Romantic ambition, as if reviving ideas that remain relevant amid the complexities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In Saga/Circus, for instance, the “Saga” section—comprising thirty-seven nonlinear free-verse segments—invokes Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner through its metaphor of poetry as a sea-going vessel, navigating the unstable waters of perception and meaning. Similarly, her book-length poem-essay Positions of the Sun (Belladonna*, 2019) alludes to Wordsworth’s “The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement” (1789), echoing his claim that it is “not in Utopia” but only “in the very world which is the world / Of all of us” that we “find our happiness, or not at all.”

As in earlier works such as My Life (Burning Deck, 1980) and My Life in the Nineties (Shark Books, 2003), Hejinian is aligning herself with a tradition that locates moral clarity and fulfillment in lived experience rather than abstract ideals. Her engagement with Romanticism represents a sustained inquiry into the nature of human connection amid social fragmentation. Poetry, described in Lola the Interpreter as the “skeptic’s philosophy,” becomes a site of collective reflection and shared experience.

This anti-narcissistic ethos is conveyed through the rich intertextuality of Lola the Interpreter, where an eclectic ensemble of thinkers—among them Horace, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sextus Empiricus, Charles Baudelaire, Fred Moten, Michel Foucault, Clark Coolidge, Christa Wolf, Henry James, George Eliot, Albert Camus, Stan Brakhage, Sigmund Freud, Carla Harryman, William Blake, Louis Zukofsky, and Etel Adnan—are drawn into dialogue. Their presence evokes the “symphilosophizing” impulse of German Romanticism, inviting readers to become “lovers of linkage”: those who uncover unexpected connections and embrace a collaborative, expansive mode of inquiry. Through this polyphonic exchange, Hejinian celebrates the generative potential of shared thought, associative movement, and collective imagination.

Hejinian dedicated Lola the Interpreter—as she had nearly five decades earlier with A Mask of Motion (Burning Deck, 1977)—to her husband and fellow activist, avant-garde saxophonist Larry Ochs. The book’s architecture emulates the improvisational logic of Ochs’s music, particularly his long-standing work with the Rova Saxophone Quartet. Its open-ended sections engage themes such as skepticism, freedom, reason, beauty, time, memory, and dreams, unfolding them with the fluidity and unpredictability of a jazz composition. This improvisatory structure resonates with Benjamin’s concept of constellation, where meaning emerges through the relational configuration of fragments; much like Benjamin’s montage technique in The Arcades Project, Hejinian’s paratactic text resists narrative continuity, inviting readers to traverse “nodal singularities” that generate meaning through proximity, disjunction, and imaginative association.

In the book’s final section, Hejinian’s brief references to Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Susan Howe’s Frame Structures set the stage for a striking intertextual gesture: a quotation from “Mode Z,” the opening poem in Barrett Watten’s 1–10 (This Press, 1980), written for Rae Armantrout when she left the Bay Area for San Diego in 1978. In this poem, Watten calls for the erasure of society’s “imperious frames”: “Could we have those trees cleared out of the way? / And the houses, volcanoes, empires?”

Watten’s call to dismantle inherited structures evokes Marx’s philosophical imperative for a “ruthless criticism of all that exists,” suggesting a poetic and cultural tabula rasa from which the world might be reimagined. “Mode Z” thus initiates a kind of permanent revolution, confronting entrenched personal and collective mythologies and urging a break from received narratives. Hejinian echoes this impulse in the seventh section of Lola the Interpreter, offering a bold refutation of rising American conservatism: Conceptual frameworks are not immutable. Drawing on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,” she writes: “Are you grieving over the unleaving of the trees? They will fall.”

While Hejinian acknowledges profound grief over “the bigotry, the greed, the voluntary, willed stupidity, the passion for fascism” in today’s American conservative movement, she insists that sorrow must be transformed into critical engagement and imaginative resistance. Near the end of Lola the Interpreter, she returns to the theme of skepticism introduced in the opening section, and in a “precipitously disturbed” mood, she adopts an ambivalent stance: Skepticism may “KEEP YOU FREE,” but it can also lead to “hopelessness, impossibility,” offering “nothing but dead ends and fatigue.”

In the book’s closing moments, however, Hejinian strikes a more upbeat note, befitting the defiant utopianism that runs throughout her oeuvre. Drawing on Brad Giggs’s reading of Hume’s motivational skepticism, and writing in a present-tense voice reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s “continuous present,” Hejinian calls on readers to recommit to activist inquiry—to remain critically attuned, imaginatively open, and politically responsive, even in the face of despair: “Skepticism requires refocusing, repurposing, reconnaissance, resistance, utilizing thought’s ‘capacity to be mobilized toward different ends.’”

Lola the Interpreter exemplifies Hejinian’s “late style” in Edward Saïd’s sense of the term—a “mature subjectivity” marked not by passive decline or neat closure, but by “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” That Hejinian completed this formally daring and conceptually rich book while battling cancer speaks to her extraordinary resilience and creative force. Lola the Interpreter, in the end, is an affirmation and a continuation of Hejinian’s belief in language as a tool for reimagining the world. 

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

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

Archive of Desire

A Poem in Four Parts for C. P. Cavafy

Robin Coste Lewis
Alfred A. Knopf ($27) 

by John Ngoc Nguyen

Robin Coste Lewis’s lustrous Archive of Desire hinges on a word it does not contain: “excuse.” The National Book Award–winning author’s third lyric performance opens with a handkerchief, an homage to that vital, charged piece of cloth from a poem of queer desire by C. P. Cavafy, “He Asked About the Quality.” In it, Cavafy’s speaker and a shopworker ostensibly make conversation about the handkerchiefs on display, “their only aim: the touching of their hands / over the handkerchiefs”—an excuse to do what is only natural.

Lewis revises these characters. Her autobiographical speaker stops by a clothing store, where skirts are on discount “(polyester, cheap),” and beholds the girl of her dreams on shift. Her “whispery voice breaking open // with desire,” the speaker pretends to be “looking // for embroidered handkerchiefs,” which she and the “shop-girl” go back and forth over, beneath their talk and burgeoning heat “a psalm of consent.”

In Lewis’s hands, the pocket-sized handkerchief experiences two sublime transformations. The speaker observes “a boat so casually navigating / the rough sea. // Its sail is / your unfolded, opened / handkerchief,” which is also, stanzas later, “a kite soaring // within my sky.” The handkerchief navigates land and water and air, not unlike the chorus Lewis summons: “We are the Goddess’s words— / Her bracelets, Her rings, // We are Her / intense and infinite wanderings.” As in her second book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (Knopf, 2022), Lewis nods to the courage of ancestral, diasporic Blackness, adding her own precious stones, patiently cabochoned and faceted by her verse-thinking, to this begemmed birthright.

For all its epic making, Lewis’s book is about undoing, unlearning, being unapologetically unrepentant:

All the fallen
and broken
statues inside

my heart

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

I am no longer afraid.
I will never again allow myself
to be afraid to be loved. Or to love you.

Cavafy, Lewis says in the lesbian bildungsroman that serves, too, as her epilogue, “was a god for Black, Brown, Red, Yellow, and all of that mixed together, for baby Queers . . . We were elegant in his lines.” She looks on her upbringing: formative was Ms. Paddington’s high-school debate class in Los Angeles. Wide open during lunch period, the classroom became a gathering place for “all the freaks, of which I was proudly one.”

Freakishness offers pain, pride, and—above all—humor, of which there is a trove in Lewis’s collection, an Ellisonian extravagance of laughter. “My father asked me one afternoon, affectionately and nonchalantly, ‘So, Baby, you a bulldagger?’ . . . And I laughed because he imbibed a word that was traditionally vulgar with such affection.” Lewis and her sister regularly accompanied their father to the garage, where he “constantly put tools in our hands . . . Soldering guns, the monkey wrench, tape measures, spackling.”

Lewis’s sweeping eye marries this “low” hardware with the “high” objects of her acropolis, which from the Greek translates to high city. A glass perfume bottle, small terra-cotta altars, the bones of a piglet, a hare-shaped baby rattle: these objects from the museum of Lewis’s acropolis, which doubles as a self-portrait, are “happily lost so that in the future—now—they can be regained. . . . Each of us broken, each of us emanating an earlier glory. A procession of winged selves parading constantly throughout our cells.”      

These relics join the company of possessions from Lewis’s matriarchal family, her mother and grandmothers and aunts and female cousins, their “most gorgeous” bodies intimated by the garments and accessories they used as methods for beauty on earth: “Their handsewn frocks. Their holy rage. . . . Their rhinestone-studded pocketbooks and their mother-of-pearl pocketknives, the latter hidden inside the former—like their own interior weapons.” These last mementos call back to Cavafy’s vest pocket, where his handkerchief lies snug.

Lewis recasts Cavafy’s images via fragments and erasure in her lyric offering to the altar of multigenerational Blackness: an ebony divan, candles ticking off the years. Though the poet would “rather look / at things than speak // about them,” she describes them profoundly, her beloveds using “pearly combs to groom / our raven-black hair.”

Lewis’s poetics is balanced with the passion and play of youth, her development as artist, intellectual, lover. As a second grader, she was Cupid-struck for a peer, Bridget, whom Lewis, a precocious flirt and practitioner of mutual aid, would spare some change for lunch money. “Other girls had crushes on very cute but very stupid boys. Why should I not fall in love with the smartest person in Mrs. Larson’s class?”

Later, fleeing their racist public school system, a 16-year-old Lewis and her girlfriend would drive to Sisterhood Bookstore, their go-to: “It was here—among the ‘Sisterhood is Powerful!’ buttons, and the volumes of Our Bodies, Ourselves greeting us at the front door, as well as The Joy of Lesbian Sex (which made me blush hard), and Audre Lorde’s Zami—that I found a volume by the remarkable Greek poet Constantine Cavafy.” So marks the dawning of Lewis’s ardor.

To be a freak, to have membership in the freakdom, brings up Cavafy’s famous barbarians, so named by ethnocentrists of yore whose ideas are not unfamiliar, with Lewis writing her book against the backdrop of “my countrymen’s absurdity.” “[T]he barbarians? We are / their children.” Bestowing on each child the title of “Great ancestral palace,” Archive of Desire exalts “the little girls—all the brown little girls—whose bodies we buried in the Great Pit . . . the moment we looked to the horizon—the second we saw them coming,” in-groups and out-groups re-envisioned to indict power and its literally crushing notions of whiteness.

“The Earth and Sky still like to make love,” she writes. “They still give birth to giants.” Chiseling from life, history, and metaphysics another indelible work, Lewis is our lyric giantess.

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

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

Pink Lady

Denise Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press ($20)

by George Longenecker

 

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

 

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

 

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

She visited me in Florida the day after

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

I thought we’d both be celebrating

the first woman president. I was baffled, sure

that the planes of the world would stop flying,

their wings too heavy with grief.

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

I emptied her white purse—

tissue pack and reading glasses, coupons

and address book. I once lived in a purse

inside her, my first pink home, the umbilical cord

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

of my own purse, its pristine lining never stretched

or stuffed with a fetus.           

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

 

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

I have my mother in my pocket—her face

on the prayer card we had printed for her wake.

I ate oatmeal with maple syrup for breakfast

so how can the front page news hurt me?

 

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

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