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Volume 30, Number 3, Fall 2025 (#119)

To purchase issue #119 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Marcia Butler: Woolfian Voyager | Interviewed by E. J. Levy
Esteban Rodríguez: No Choice But To Believe | Interviewed by Tiffany Troy

FEATURES

The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan
René Char: Resistant | by Mike Dillon
From the Backlist: Wanda Coleman | Heart First Into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets | by Walter Holland

PLUS: Cover art by Jeffrey Hansen

FICTION

NONFICTION

Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans | Steven Belletto
| by Patrick James Dunagan
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers | Caroline Fraser
| by Chris Barsanti
The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation | Charlotte Beradt
| by W. C. Bamberger
The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light | Craig Childs
| by Emily Wortman-Wunder
An Island To Myself: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life | Michael N. McGregor
| by Joanne B. Mulcahy
Home Club: Up-and-Comers and Comebacks at Acme Comedy Company
| Patrick Strait | by Joshua Preston

POETRY

COMICS

Charlotte Brontë before Jane Eyre | Glynnis Fawkes
Persephone’s Garden | Glynnis Fawkes
1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed
| Eric H. Cline and Glynnis Fawkes | by Andrew Cleary

To purchase issue #119 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

Jeffrey Hansen

Non-Zero-Sum Untitled No. 125
Oil on Paper, 30 x 22 Inches

Visual artist Jeffrey Hansen has lived and worked in the art community of Lowertown, St. Paul since 1994. In 1991 while attending the College of Visual Arts he opened his own workshop and studio in the downtown area of White Bear Lake. Following three decades of experimentation, evolving practices, and a re-discovery of circular motifs, today he is concentrating on his own concepts and minimalist techniques of abstract expressionism in non-subjective symbolism and geometric form. Jeff’s renewed take on various artistic methods and disciplines is creating a body of work that conveys a new vision of artistic interpretation and iconographic value.

His 'Non-Zero-Sum' series of circular patterns has been exhibited in New York, Denver, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Florida, and in many local MN exhibits including at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Phipps Galleries, Gamut Gallery, Hallberg Center for the Arts, Eagan Art House, Northfield Arts Guild, Art Reach St. Croix, Sower Gallery, Paradise Center for the Arts, Beckmann Gallery, and many others. Visit him at jhansenartist.com.

Volume 30, Number 2, Summer 2025 (#118)

To purchase issue #118 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Lauren Markham: Language and Catastrophe | interviewed by Elizabeth Brogden
Zack Kopp: The Future Is Unwritten | interviewed by Michele McDannold
Mai Der Vang: Light as Kin | interviewed by Tiffany Troy

FEATURES

The New Life | comic by Gary Sullivan
Peter Gizzi: An Appreciation | by Dennis Barone

PLUS: Cover art by Areca Roe

NONFICTION

FICTION

POETRY / MIXED GENRE

COMICS

Existential Comics: Selected Stories 1979–2004 | R. Crumb | by Paul Buhle

To purchase issue #118 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

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Hi there!

Thank you for registering to attend the Rain Taxi 30th Anniversary Exhibit Opening Night Reception on Tuesday, October 7 at 6:00 pm at Open Book. Simply check in with event staff when you arrive; your ticket(s) will be reserved under your name.

You will receive a confirmation email shortly. We look forward to seeing you there!

Rain Taxi 30th Anniversary Exhibit

Please join us to celebrate 30 years of Rain Taxi!

Open Book
1011 Washington Avenue, Minneapolis
Directions
October 3 through November 16

Free and open to the public!

Whether you’ve read Rain Taxi in print or online, attended any of our literary events or Twin Cities Book Festival, used our Twin Cities Literary Calendar or made the rounds with our Independent Bookstore Passport, we’d love to say cheers to you, because we couldn’t do it without you.

Amidst the exhibit's visual cornucopia of artwork, archival documents, and literary ephemera, we held a grand opening featuring food and drink and a stellar program, featuring an invocation by poet Jim Moore, an activation by artist Anne Labovitz, a reminiscence by author Mary Moore Easter, an excerpt from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard performed by theater makers Dominique Serrand and Nathan Keepers of the Jungle Theater, and the unveiling of Rain Taxi’s 30th Anniversary Broadside. Photo album to come, stay tuned!

Robert Bly letter among the fun ephemera from the 25th anniversary exhibit in 2020.

Volume 30, Number 1, Spring 2025 (#117)

To purchase issue #117 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Rachel Robbins: There’s No There There | interviewed by April Gibson
Kevin Prufer: The Mystery of Metaphor | interviewed by Justin Courter
Ron Whitehead: Wild Nature | interviewed by Zack Kopp
Patrick James Dunagan and Joe Safdie in Conversation: The Poet As Other

FEATURES

An Ode to Odes: Poetry at Eighty | by James P. Lenfestey
The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan

PLUS: Cover art by Ziba Rajabi

NONFICTION

The Joan Didion Collection | Joan Didion | by Chris Barsanti
We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine | Alissa Wilkinson | by Chris Barsanti
Conversations with Michael McClure | David Stephen Calonne, ed. | by Christopher Luna
The Freaks Came Out To Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture | Tricia Romano | by Neal Lipschutz
Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood | Anna Farro Henderson | by Elizabeth J. Bailey
Splice of Life: A Memoir in 13 Film Genres | Charles Jensen | by Joshua Wetjen
Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: On Reading and Writing Poetry Forensically | Paisley Rekdal | by Jessica Gigot
The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It | Corey Brettschneider | by Jacob M. Appel

FICTION

POETRY

COMICS

Tell Me A Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund | Caitlin McGurk | by Paul Buhle

To purchase issue #117 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

2025 Rain Taxi Readings and Events

Independent Bookstore Passport 2025

April 23 through April 27, 2025

Hundreds of people took part in celebrating and supporting our local independent bookstores by picking up a free Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport and filling them up with stamps! See more info here.

Damion Searls

Sunday, June 8, 2025

Rain Taxi held a literary salon celebrating the publication of The Mariner's Mirror, poems by acclaimed writer and translator Damion Searls! You can purchase this chapbook here.

Vincent Katz

Thursday, June 12, Milkweed Books

Rain Taxi and Milkweed Books welcomed poet Vincent Katz to the Twin Cities! Katz will read from his newest collection, Daffodil and Other Poems, and then was joined in conversation by local poet Dobby Gibson.

Areca Roe

Minnesota Zoo, Apple Valley #2 by Areca Roe

Areca Roe is an artist based in Mankato and Minneapolis, Minnesota. She uses photography as well as video, sculpture, and installation to explore the interface between the natural and human domains.

Roe is an Associate Professor of photography and video at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a member of Rosalux Gallery, an artist collective in Minneapolis. Her work has been featured on several websites, including The New York Times, Lenscratch, Colossal, Slate, Juxtapoz, WIRED, National Geographic, and Fast Company; as well as in print for Der Spiegel Wissen and Le Monde. Her work recently became part of the permanent collection at the Minnesota Museum of American Art and the Minnesota Historical Society. Roe has received several grants and fellowships supporting her work, including the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and the Art(ists) on the Verge Fellowship. Visit her at arecaroe.com.

Vincent Katz

in conversation with Dobby Gibson

Thursday, June 12, 2025, 6:30pm
Milkweed Books
1011 S Washington Ave, Ste 107, Minneapolis
Free and open to the public—please RSVP here!

Rain Taxi and Milkweed Books are delighted to welcome poet Vincent Katz to the Twin Cities! Katz will read from his newest collection, Daffodil and Other Poems, then be joined in conversation by local poet Dobby Gibson. This event is free and open to the public.

About Daffodil and Other Poems

With his painterly eye and disarming concision on the page, Katz opens this book with a powerful image of “all time sequestered in the fold of a daffodil,” setting the stage for an encounter with the immediacy we must embrace to see the world around us with clarity. At the center of this collection are his captivating poems about animals—“The hope in fear / In thrill to run” of the rabbit, the snapping turtle “nestled // Next to brother rock”—as the poems continually engage with the heady passage of days and years, and the promise to honor a life in the here and now, to walk the street with the sense that, “It’s not about buying / But rather about feeling the air.”

“Whether in nature, or on a crowded or empty city street, was all a dream?” Katz writes, considering Daffodil. “Surely, there was and is still someone close, and that continues, as animals, despite war, despite incursions, continue. New York is a place of return, where we’re aware of faces and other things; there, or in a field of flowers, in places in the distant past and present, love has some inexorable way of continuing.”

These poems evoke the exact scenes that command our daily thoughts, that usher in grace and beauty, with their quietly urgent moral qualities, which, Katz suggests, can shape our days if we allow them to.

About the poets

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and critic. He is the author of the poetry collection Daffodil, out this year from Alfred A. Knopf, as well as the collections Broadway for Paul, Southness, and Swimming Home, among others. He collaborated with Anne Waldman on the book-length poem Fantastic Caryatids and with Andrei Codrescu on A Possible Epic of Care. Katz is the author of The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius, translations of the Roman love poet, and is currently translating the Works and Days and the Theogony of the ancient Greek poet Hesiod.

He is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, and his writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He lives in New York City.

Dobby Gibson is the author of Polar (Alice James Books), which won the Alice James Award; Skirmish (Graywolf Press); It Becomes You (Graywolf Press), which was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award; Little Glass Planet (Graywolf Press); and Hold Everything (Graywolf Press).

Gibson’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications, as well as anthologized in books including Good Poems American Places (Penguin Books). He’s been a visitor to colleges and universities including Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, New York University, UMass-Amherst, and the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in Saint Paul.

Hailing Rain Taxi for years of service

City Pages | Wednesday, September 17, 2008 by Ed Huyck

It's a common story in the arts. Young, fresh, and brash group hits the scene, be it a band or a theater company, a visual arts group or a magazine. The group burns white hot for a time—six months, a year, maybe even a few years—before the fire burns out, the collective splits apart, and a new venture, hopefully, takes its place.

So you may consider it a minor miracle that Rain Taxi—the iconoclastic literary arts magazine dedicated to uncovering the best the world of print has to offer, no matter how obscure—published its 50th issue this summer.

"It's not typical for a literary venture like this to last," says Eric Lorberer, who has written for the magazine since its inception and has served as the journal's editor for many years. "It is largely dependent on people who have the energy to fight the system for a while. But there eventually is a danger for burnout, or not developing the level of funding you need."

Every quarter, about 18,000 copies of Rain Taxi are distributed nationwide, putting it in the middle of the market—large for a literary magazine of its type, but a far cry from the major players, like the New Yorker or Harper's.

Then again, considering its esoteric bent, its modest circulation shouldn't be surprising. Rain Taxi is a place to learn about Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish or to read an interview with music and cultural critic David Hajdu—you won't find reviews of Dan Brown's latest opus or this week's celebrity tell-all.

"There is a community for this writing, even though it's in a lot of little small pockets. If you aggregate them," Lorberer says, "you get a sense of the vitality of what is going on. If you look at it in dribs and drabs it may not seem impressive."

These are dicey times for serious literary writers, publishers, and reviewers. Many newspapers have drastically cut back their book review sections. And between increased media consolidation and the shrinking of independent booksellers, it seems as though non-mainstream works have been shut out of the discussion.

"I think the death of a lot of indie booksellers is hurting the culture," Lorberer says. "There is less choice and access. Writers and publishers who have something serious to say and have the tenacity to persevere will eventually persevere. We are trying to be a part of the voice for that and a mechanism for those endeavors to stay healthy."

Rain Taxi exists to explore these cracks in the facade. Since the beginning, the journal has championed little-known works.

"Generally there is a dearth of criticism for non-mainstream books. We are about shining a spotlight on non-mainstream publishing—work that has a smaller audience but has a real literary need," he says.

Still, Lorberer sees some promising avenues worth exploring in the book world. "Chapbook publishing is the underappreciated sibling in the community. These are small books [often 16 to 20 pages] that are printed in small runs. There's been a real explosion of them in the last few years."

Meanwhile, graphic novels and other comics continue their fight to get out of the superhero "funny book" ghetto. "We're seeing creators in this medium really pushing their boundaries, in the same way that poetry or visual art did in the early part of the 20th century."

Visitors to Rain Taxi's annual Twin Cities Book Festival this year on October 11 will get a chance to hear about the growth of that medium with Jaime Hernandez, who has worked on the leading edge for nearly three decades, either as the co-founder and contributor to the comic magazine Love and Rockets or in a bevy of limited series in the past three decades. "He's really been a part of the aesthetic maturity of the medium," Lorberer says.

The daylong event has a number of other attractions as well, including public radio commentator and writer Alan Cheuse and novelists Valerie Martin, Ana Clavel, Jess Winfield, and Bragi Olafsson, whom eccentric pop music fans with long memories may remember from his days with the Sugarcubes, but who has crafted a second career as an award-winning fiction writer. The event also includes the local launch of a book of selected poems by Olav H. Hauge, featuring Robert Bly and Robert Hedin; panel discussions; and an expo hall packed with books new and used.

Lorberer has no doubt that the Twin Cities is a perfect home for the festival and for a journal like Rain Taxi. The area has a strong writing and publishing community (and, Lorberer notes, a fine mainstream critical community), which help foster the environment.

"The greatness of the Twin Cities is the mixture we have. There are obviously large presses and organizations here, but there are also tiny and grassroots things happening," Lorberer says. "The book festival is a way to gather that ecosystem in one room for a day."

The eighth annual Twin Cities Book Festival runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, October 11, at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, 1501 Hennepin Ave. The event is free. For more information, visit www.raintaxi.com.

INTERVIEWS

FEATURES

FICTION

NONFICTION

POETRY

COMICS

INTERVIEWS

FEATURES

NONFICTION

FICTION

POETRY / MIXED GENRE

COMICS

Please join us to celebrate 30 years of Rain Taxi!

Open Book1011 Washington Avenue, MinneapolisDirectionsOctober 3 through November 16Free and open to the public!

INTERVIEWS

FEATURES

NONFICTION

FICTION

POETRY

COMICS

Independent Bookstore Passport 2025

Damion Searls

Vincent Katz

in conversation with Dobby Gibson

Rain Taxi and Milkweed Books are delighted to welcome poet Vincent Katz to the Twin Cities! Katz will read from his newest collection, Daffodil and Other Poems, then be joined in conversation by local poet Dobby Gibson. This event is free and open to the public.

About Daffodil and Other Poems

About the poets

Open Book
1011 Washington Avenue, Minneapolis
Directions
October 3 through November 16

Free and open to the public!