by Steph Burt
An acclaimed poet explores coming of age as it might have happened for his female alter-ego.
This title is sold out
Published in April 2015.
chapbooks
Pieces of Sky
by J. Otis Powell‽
A jazzy mixture of prose and quintets sets this chapbook apart from the rest!< 26 pages, perfect bound
$10 plus $4 S&H in the U.S. Shipping costs added for overseas shipping.
Pieces of Sky peeks behind the curtain of a novel in progress titled Bottomless Sky by J. Otis Powell‽, a much lauded master of spoken word poetry and performance. "Stories are everafter and it's all about the story,” says the book's heroine Aquanetta, a poet and performance artist who has struggled every inch of the way to arrive at her ultimate accomplishment to date: herself.
Published in October 2014.
CLICK HERE to read the in-depth interview with J. Otis Powell‽ in our Fall 2014 Online Edition!
Rain Taxi, in partnership with J. Otis Powell‽, is a fiscal year 2013 recipient of a Cultural Community Partnership grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Clatters
Henri Droguet
Translated from the French by Alexander Dickow
Clatters is the first translation of Henri Droguet's poetry published in the United States. Here the original text appears alongside Alexander Dickow's exquisite translation, in a collection that is at once wonderfully cluttered and strikingly barren. As Dickow puts it in his Afterword, “Never, perhaps, has so pure a litany of despair, vanity, destruction and decay given rise to such vibrant language.”
"In Clatters, Alexander Dickow has beautifully translated the eminent and singular French poet Henri Droguet. Dickow has a lovely feel for idiom and sonic texture, and his poetic intelligence matches Droguet's subtlety. His introductory essay illuminates Droguet's place in French poetry, and meditates more generally about "loner" poetry and the principled refusal to traffic in the literary marketplace. It's a little book, but large, spiritually."
—Rosanna Warren
48 pp., perfect bound
$10 plus $4 S&H in the U.S. Shipping costs added for overseas shipping.
Click Here to download a free PDF of four bonus poems!
Published in February 2014
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
Henri Droguet's Clatters is a series of textual 'bricolages,' the poet's accurate description of his own work, appearing in translation here for the first time. At once wonderfully cluttered and strikingly barren; meaning and sound, man and landscape, interiority and exteriority merge together in this collection, as overcast as the landscape of the poet's home of Northern Brittany.
Droguet's characters are unfortunate phantoms, existing outside of time but anchored to a desperately isolated world by crunchy phrases evoking the haggard, the weary and the rusty. Clamorous and unruly textual fragments, disjointed syntax and sonic textures are framed in an atmosphere of playfulness. Wordplay, inversions, 'ellipses, anacolutha, paranomatha, parataxis.' Language unmakes itself, serving as another inconstant in an enchanting and terrifying world. Clatters is a telling title, the eponymous verb indicative of a sonorous contact, friction or conflict, of the mechanical vocabulary and the physicality of the poems.
The work is full of binaries -of editorial production, of the poet's equivocal fame, of the double valence of Droguet's world. As such, Clatters is particularly effective as a bilingual publication. As puppets and phantoms wrestle with new ways of inhabit the stark landscape, “as the paving stone resounds in time with that human stump pummeled lacking forward marching” (Littéralement/Literally,) the translation contributes to new ways of inhabiting the literary landscape. Although Droguet's work is filled with figures that produce crisis, this is certainly not the case with Alexander Dickow's exquisite translation, the result of a highly collaborative process and exceptional relationship between translator and poet.
Both translation and poetry are language-led means of approaching a truth. In this instance, Dickow was faced with the challenge of using his own words to redo the author's work of undoing, to retell the cyclical story mapped onto the pages; of the rise and fall of tides, of desolation and regrowth, of splendor and desolation; to wonder at ruin.
—Aoife Roberts, for Rain Taxi
Bridge: A Gathering
Poems by Steve Healey, Deborah Keenan, Jim Moore, Jude Nutter, Matt Rasmussen, Joyce Sutphen, and Katrina Vandenberg. Cover photo and internal photos by Vance Gellert.
Bridge: A Gathering is published by Rain Taxi Review of Books in an edition of 500 copies on the fifth anniversary of the 35W Bridge collapse to accompany the commemorative event held on August 1, 2012, the fifth anniversary of the I-35W bridge collapse, at the Mill City Museum.
24 pp., perfect bound. Edition of 500 copies.
$10 plus $4 S&H in the U.S. Shipping costs added for overseas shipping.
Published in August 2012
This chapbook is funded through a partnership grant from the Minnesota Historical Society through support provided by the Legacy Amendment.
Police Story
by James Tate
Twenty-one poems of small town life gone berserk from the Pulitzer-prize winning poet.
32 pp., saddle-stitched: Sorry, this chapbook is SOLD OUT.
26 copies were lettered and signed by the author and were accompanied by a handset broadside of an additional poem, "Torture." This special edition is SOLD OUT.
Published in December 1999.
A Pound of Steam
Dessa
Acclaimed as a songwriter, performer, and recording artist, the whirlwind force known as Dessa wears one moniker with particular pride: writer. A Pound of Steam presents seven poems exploring identity and alienation, a philosophical bent that can be found in her song lyrics, but here goes further to unearth truths about the human condition.
Dessa, born and raised in Minneapolis, is a poet, essayist, and musician. She studied philosophy at the University of Minnesota. Before earning her living in the arts, Dessa wrote pacemaker manuals, waited tables, painted faces, and sold knives. In her early twenties, Dessa joined the Doomtree collective. With that group, Dessa published her first literary collection, Spiral Bound, and released more than a dozen recorded projects. She now splits her time between a Minneapolis apartment and an Econoline tour van.
23 pp., perfect bound. Published 2013.
$10 plus $4 S&H in the U.S. Shipping costs added for overseas shipping.
Rain Taxi, in partnership with Dessa, is a fiscal year 2013 recipient of a Cultural Community Partnership grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
OBJECT WITH MAN'S FACE
Jay Besemer
A chance dream of Max Ernst and Jindrich Heisler leads to a pack of playing cards bearing a message; shuffled randomly, the message changes. Such is the experience of Object with Man’s Face, twenty-seven collage poems that beckon, question, challenge, and portend. Rain Taxi and the author invite you to add your own collage poems to the mix!
46 cards, shrink-wrapped in a plastic case.
SOLD OUT. Sorry, we are sold out of this item.
Published in July 2013.
THREE BLIND POEMS
Ron Padgett and Yu Jian
A unique collaboration unites East and West. From the Preface by Ron Padgett: “In the summer of 2010, the Chinese poet Yu Jian and I took a cable car to near the top of Mount Mansfield (altitude 4,393 feet) in Vermont and wrote three poems together. Using a method similar to that of the exquisite corpse of the Surrealists, we wrote alternating parts, but in our case we did not have to conceal our words, since in effect they were automatically concealed: Yu Jian cannot read English and I cannot read Chinese.”
22 pp, perfect bound, with color photographs
Last few copies!
$15 plus $2 S&H in the U.S. Shipping costs added for overseas shipping. Purchase now
Published in October 2012.
Egyptian Sonnets
by John Yau
32 pp., saddle-stitched
Edition of 226 copies
Published in March 2012.
The twenty-four poems of Yau's Egyptian Sonnets journey through a night-time landscape populated by jackels, hippos, and fading moments of time, where "dust lips were all that remained."
$10 plus $4 S&H in the U.S. Shipping costs added for overseas shipping.
26 copies are lettered and signed by the author and include original art by the author. Signed copies are available for $250. You may purchase these via Paypal using a credit card or bank transfer.
WHY I AM NOT A TODDLER
AND OTHER POEMS
by Cooper Bennett Burt
(age one)
As budding young poet Cooper Bennett Burt (age one) puts it so eloquently, “I am not a toddler, I am a baby. / Why? I think I would rather be / a toddler, but I am not.” And so begins a poetic journey through the trials and triumphs of babyhood: teething, drooling, strollers, Cheerios, and bedtime. Cooper taps into the voices of the great poets to bring his unique perspective to bear on the age-old question: Where’s pirates? Cooper lives in Boston with his parents Jessie Bennett and Stephen Burt, who might have helped him here and there with the wording of these poems.
Sorry, this title is sold out
Published in November 2011.