Poetry Reviews

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

Abundant Life

New and Selected Poems

Hank Lazer
Chax Press ($34)

by Jefferson Hansen

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

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

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

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

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

                  why am i
writing  in the face of
your dying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     i think
   you are
 on your way
& it pains me

      that i
  that no one
    can be
   with you

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

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

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

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

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

Chronicle of Drifting

Yuki Tanaka
Copper Canyon Press ($17)

by John Bradley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crane

Tessa Bolsover
Black Ocean ($18)

by Robert Eric Shoemaker

Tessa Bolsover’s Crane is an exercise in indexing and meshing. Though many poetry collections invest in the interconnectedness of words, concepts, and experiences, writers like Bolsover and her touchstones (including Nathaniel Mackey and Susan Howe, whose epigraph opens the book) strive to show the undercurrent beneath language’s seemingly obvious connections. Bolsover successfully immerses the reader in a cycle of reemerging motifs and ideas, a subliminal sublime that only poetry hinging on metaphor can concoct.

Crane is made up of three sections: “Crane,” “Delay Figure,” and “Inlet.” In the first, Bolsover offers an index that multiplies meanings among the Roman deity Janus and the figure Crane or Cardea, goddess of hinges. Its use of myth and archive recalls works such as Susan Howe’s Songs of the Labadie Tract, H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. Bolsover redefines her myth texts by discursively dissecting related words and indulging in etymological connections/confusions to cause the reader to question what is known or knowable. For instance, the name “Cardea” is said to be a leap, a hinge, a mechanical beam holding together, a line delimiting, an intersection, and a solstice. Interrelating these concepts as a barrage, Bolsover immerses the reader in a poetic flow that is both pleasant and disorienting, polluting the boundaries between stories to “willfully create error,” as Bolsover quotes from Anne Carson. The interrelation or hinge mechanism is more vital than the door itself. Crane/Cardea isn’t as well remembered as Janus, the god who looks both ways, but Crane is necessary in the way that the spaces between words both “connect and hold apart” to facilitate meaning. As Bolsover puts it, “the unsaid within the said lends a word both its particularity and its instability.”

For Crane and its forebears, true poetic potency is a capacity to explore the depths of an image through its instability. Bolsover tells us, “I do not want to draw equivalencies, but to place objects beside one another and witness how a surface shimmers in and out of form and loss itself”; the tender expectation of that loss is rendered by a surface that loses itself in tactical line breaks and shifts from lineated poetry to blocks of prose throughout the book, along with moments of transition or quotation that bring the reader above the lyric flow. One such transitional moment returns to Howe’s opening epigraph, in which the calendar, a mechanism intended to create order and clarity, is torn to pieces and tossed into the snow—units still differentiable but ultimately confounding.

Sound becomes a source of meaning (and meaninglessness) in “Delay Figure,” which also explores the capacity for archive to both hold and evade meaning. Nathaniel Mackey’s blues and cry of “Cante Moro,” itself an inherited evasion of meaning from ancestors such as Federico García Lorca, guides this part of the text along with other citations. Music, here, represents a more complete dismemberment of meaning amidst delicate sonics like “a numb limb shimmers,” and echoes in this section, like the echoes of Howe at the end of “Crane,” reinforce the expanded meanings referentiality creates—cords of mist that “run the seam of shore.”

Crane’s obsession with citation, indexing, and other trappings of the archive create some moments in which silence or metaphor would speak louder than the quotation on the page. These can feel like a poet’s cliché, akin to overusing words like “ghost” or “body” or reveling in the etymology of “essay.” Parts of “Delay Figure” also feel drily academic, citing works on Western theory by Édouard Glissant and Amanda Weidman at length. Even so, these heady moments seem to self-consciously hold a mirror up to postmodern poetics and its penchant for elucidating meaning via quotation rather than by sheer flow.

The strongest passages of Crane lean into associations and follow thought-trails away from quotation—giving rise to the possibility that the quotations were deployed as necessary foils to bring out the beauty in these associative moments. Like the work of each writer and thinker it cites, Crane rewards multiple readings for those who wish to submerge themselves in the spaces between what can be remembered and dismembered, the unsayable and the essential—however we point to it.

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

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

Document

Amelia Rosselli
Translated by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard
World Poetry ($24)

by Greg Bem

We were looking for a crossing last night
not a clear country road nor a city street
but a simple passage: we found
death! as always, death!

The latest book by Italian poet Amelia Rosselli to be translated into English is her sprawling third collection, Document. Originally published in 1976, it captures a significant chapter of the late poet’s life, where daily musings and reflections were chiseled into literary form and experimentation. This marvelous bilingual edition is also a challenge to readers in its size and scope, offering over 400 pages of complex thoughts and linguistic layers.

Document searches a world moving past one arm of authoritarianism and fascism into new, confusing chapters. Rosselli’s intensely crafted book is both large and elegant, filled with intentional arrangements of verse that are inspired by the Petrarchan sonnet yet also offer the postmodern pleasures of sequential structure and call and response between poems. The poet invites the reader to critically examine the text through its relentless references and embedded connections, as in “Concatenation of causes: you’ve seen the shadow”:

Teargas bombs: they chose a field
completely indifferent to you to fraternize
with the strike of renouncing
yourself: that it was you, and so my

beating heart doesn’t want peace only oblivion

on the highest branch of the sky.

Though much of the book was written by 1969, the poems cover events between 1966 and 1973. The subject matter is intensely autobiographical, and the lack of context may occasionally feel frustrating; the editors acknowledge there isn’t nearly enough space in the text itself to address this, and offer a handful of notes in the back of the book to give the reader a sense of the poet’s journey through her own work. Still, even without biographical context, Rosselli’s poetry appears crafted through absorption—of the world and its trauma, its overbearing weights, its peripheries within shadows—leaving the reader with mystery and a phantasmagorical surfacing of images and settings.

It’s fortunate that Document comes in a bilingual format, because Rosselli’s poems are a joy to read across both languages. Her careful attention to musicality—the poet was, in fact, also an accomplished musician—leads to powerful moments in punctuation, syntax, and the line, as seen in “Cold is scary and blood too”:

I’m cold today and I don’t know why a new
attitude sifts through my heart: but
it’s not true that tomorrow is certain
and it’s not true that today is calm.

These acrobatics in logic reflect a mind that is curious, wandering, and far from satisfied. Rosselli’s work in Document yields many emotional and psychic tributaries of thought, though many of them are deceiving; a poem may feel or allude to doom and malaise on its first read, only to offer confidence and critical inquiry on its second. Take these lines from “Flanking the empty tree the ants’”:

                       What could it have been
this arid genius that put so many obstacles

in the way of a richer safeguard? Maybe
life is defeated and has no species resolved
to fight evil.

Emerging out of incredibly transformative years in the 1960s and ¢70s, these poems are deeply embedded in contemporary moral inquiries across disciplines, and while they may be presented neatly, they are far from neat; their kaleidoscopic nature resonates.

It would be remiss to not mention Rosselli’s death by suicide approximately thirty years after the poems in this book were written. The editors describe the work of this collection as profound, as it established the arrival of Rosselli’s poetry when it was first published; Rosselli’s was indeed a profound voice of the postwar period, offering comments through a raw and emerging anti-fascist lens in Europe. How might Document inspire readers in another chapter, as we watch the world corrode with fascism again? Translator Roberta Antognini’s afterword provides Rosselli’s emerging English-language audience with biographical information that may inspire some answers, as well as further exploration of her work.

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

The Odds

Suzanne Cleary
NYQ Books ($18.95)

by Peter Mladinic

In the poem “I Go Back, as I Am Today,” from Suzanne Cleary’s latest collection The Odds, Mr. Winslow, a teacher in an eighth grade classroom, wonders aloud if he should have read his students the E.A. Robinson poem “Richard Corey,” as it reflects the recent death of one of their classmates; like the man in Robinson’s poem, the classmate, William, died by his own hand. Mr. Winslow, his back to the class, wonders if he did the right thing or the wrong thing. The buses that will take his students home are yellow, like the “long hedge aflare with forsythia” out the window, while Cleary’s speaker sees “for the first time the bravery / . . . of displaying doubt to others.” The irony lies in the poet’s certainty: If there is any doubt, as surely as there must be, in these poems written by a woman alone in a room with language, it is all behind the scenes. The presentations on the page are rendered in a voice of certainty; like the forsythia, they are unmutable, and memorable. Cleary’s attentiveness to people, places, and things gives her poems access to the metaphorical resonance beneath the surface.

Thing-oriented poems involve the speaker’s discovering and placing her findings in an epistemological context. “Worry Stone” begins with a stone in a pocket, and ends with a boulder, encircled by small stones, near a house in the country. The speaker wonders which came first, the house or the boulder. She pictures a woman in the house, and finally the boulder flying over the roof, leaving the woman unharmed (beating the odds). The epistemological link between the stone and the boulder is forged by the imagination. Similarly, in “Lovespoon,” the spoon’s carved “hearts and doves and bells” are linked “with cables and braids and knots” stitched into “Aran / sweaters knit to protect the sailor / from cold” and “to identify the body washed ashore.” Gloves, artificial wings, a bumper sticker, a mural, a poem by Robert Bly, and an Emily Dickinson poem are among other objects Cleary includes. One entity of nature that appears is Dan, an endearing bulldog; another, which has no name, is a large snake that appears in a hot, dry dusty place, near a water trough. The speaker saw the snake daily

from her attic studio, the snake 
           sunning itself on the top of the stone wall,

all near-six-feet of it shining like black oil,
            like a slice of midnight come early 

               then gone, woven back into summer’s grasses.

When the speaker discovers that the snake has been raiding her hen house, she gets it into a thick sack, places it on her truck’s floorboard, drives to a mountain’s edge, and releases it into the wild, thus relinquishing, in this instance, 

the beauty that sometimes one sees
         and sometimes disappears for weeks,

invisible, though it spread itself long and shining
             in clear sight, hungry.

There is great variety in the places in these poems: an emergency room, classrooms, art galleries, studios, a park, an opera house, a college campus, a CVS drugstore, a virtual Zoom, winding roads, neighborhoods, and basement stacks in The New York Public Library serve as stages for narratives to unfold and be resolved. In “Bumper Sticker,” a stretch of road is described in images that lend credence to the book’s title, The Odds. Anna, the minister’s wife does not want her faith displayed on a bumper sticker. Driving the road her daughter drove when her daughter had an accident, she lives her faith. Fortunately, Anna’s daughter, Julia, survived the accident. As best she can, the speaker explains the odds:

No one is safe on that road built when cars were small and slow,

when trees now crowding the shoulder, their limbs overhanging, 
were saplings, planted not by gardeners but by wind carrying seeds
through the air and dropping them. We understand some things:

the air drops a seed, a bird eats the seed, the bird flies away,
The bird shits out the seed, which takes root. A tree grows.
A car hits the tree. The car is totaled. The girl lives, or not.

Just as the poems are particularized in form, content, and thematic concerns, so are the people. In “Emergency Room,” the book’s first poem, the speaker evokes empathy for her fellow-patients: “the construction worker holding his side / and the woman with long brown hair holding a baby.” In “Life Class” art students look at the model but do not start to draw or paint until they’ve left the model’s presence, because of “The first lesson: to see.” In “Baseball” a grandfather’s imagination conjures for himself and his grandsons the inner life of the beloved sport. Suzanne Cleary goes to the inner life in all of the poems in this collection, rendering a panorama of exacting images that emphatically evoke the joy of living—and that often underscore the idea that poetry is more about questions than answers. The Odds, in short, is one really good book. Poets and non-poets alike would do well to read it.

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

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

The Ocean in the Next Room

Sarah V. Schweig
Milkweed Editions ($18)

by Walter Holland

In The Ocean in the Next Room, Sarah V. Schweig captures the flat affect of our digital lives by using a brand of oddly understated language to reflect uncertainty and dissociation. Drifting through mindless work routines and instances of first-world guilt, the collection moves through social notions of packaged enjoyment and family relations with an estranged viewpoint. Distracted, preoccupied, and ruminative, the speaker of these poems hovers in a twilight state between her laptop screen and the daily realities of social and environmental collapse.

A quiet observer, the speaker watches her daily performance of gender and transactional relations with her husband, a man who is paradoxically intimate and unintimate. Her deadpan narration about their relationship in the long poem at the heart of the book, “Unaccompanied Human Voice,” suggests a destabilized America:

When he lies down and blindly reaches for me,
I think of the economy of time. It’s thought

we’re grateful to lease our lives away, or should be.
Into our work-issued computers, we empty out

our minds. My husband and I pour our work
into our work-issued computers, connecting

and verifying through a virtual private network
neglecting to look up and at anything for hours.

Happy to be here! Happy to help! No problemo!
Just wanted to circle back on this! Can you circle

back on this? Can you approve my PTO?
Thanks!

Masterfully repetitious, the poem’s technologic think-speak and snatches of social banalities reflect a kind of human communication on autofill. But Schweig isn’t dependent on technology to power her ironic look at our blunted senses and civic malaise; “Waves,” for example, is another kind of treatise on the behavior of American privilege, alienation, and neurotic self-examination. In it, Schweig describes an ethically grotesque Caribbean vacation:

Here we are, in Barbados, at Waves Hotel and Spa.
We are three, now, with an infant son.
Every other guest is British, burnt pink and smoking.

The literal is all that’s left.
Our son cries, and for a few long seconds
I do nothing, keep writing.

Everyone has a penchant for cruelty, given opportunity.
Between feeds, I order a “mango breeze colada.”
By the highway men selling coconuts wield machetes.

The poem’s refrain, “The literal is all that’s left,” drives home the way our algorithmic culture has destroyed the mythic and the romantic, the analog and the figurative. As we enter the dawn of the AI era and its potential dehumanizing effects, The Ocean in the Next Room sounds the age-old warning about solipsism in the language of our times.

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

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

A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet

Laura Isabela Amsel
Brick Road Poetry Press ($17.95)

by Danielle Hanson

Situated in the natural lushness of the American South and discussing a range of family dynamics, Laura Isabela Amsel’s A Brief History of Sting and Sweet delivers on both the sting and the sweet.

The core subject matter of these poems is family tumult—a cold and abusive father, cancer, raising children, the dissolution of marriage—yet there’s no hint of melodrama; instead, Amsel’s vulnerability encourages connection. Take “First Born,” a poem about becoming a mother:

   Looped cord cut free, bagged, he began—
his brown eyes jaundiced moon-yellow. He’d stutter at five,

refuse to wear shoes half his life. Dressed in anything
tight, he’d cry. Sock-seams overloaded his senses. He roams now,

looking for loose, running from confines—Bulgaria, Thailand.
He wears Tevas in winter to give his toes room.

As much as family, however, the poems also writhe with nature—snakes, salamanders, butterflies, frogs, squirrels, and plants crowd the scene and frequently suggest truths about human life. “Naming Moons” explores a sweet family tradition about full moons, while “Father” details the killing and pinning of butterflies and “Owls” portrays nature as an escape: “One leads the other follows / and I forget to breathe.” Elsewhere, the scar left from a mastectomy is referred to as “tender stem,” while salamanders are “sacred” because their scarcity. In later poems, the speaker finds solace in spring:

Don’t make me beg you, April.
God knows my knees ache
enough already. See me groveling
in March mud, raving,
staving spade holes
with cold fingers, jabbing
zinnia seeds in each.

In addition to using strong imagery, Amsel excels in her playfulness with language. “Listening for Something as a Girl, 1970” is filled with short i sounds and rhymes that speed up the poem and carry the reader away:

My vigilance is visceral;
there is no freeze in me.
I am all ear-swivel
and twitch, amygdala
and head hitch, tail
switch and quick shit,
adrenaline and flinch.

A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet brings us the lovely, the terrifying, and the sad experiences of family life, but in making them all connected to the natural world, it tones down the highs and modifies the lows into something more manageable. We are all part of this world, it seems to suggest—and it’s going to be okay.

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

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