Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan
translated by Eliza Griswold
photographs by Seamus Murphy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($24)

by John Bradley

In my dream, I am the president.
When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.

This is a landay, an oral two-lined folk poem composed and sung by Afghanis. Consisting of twenty-two syllables—nine in the first line, and thirteen in the second—the poems usually do not rhyme, but in Eliza Griswold’s translations they often do, to add more zing to the English versions. The above landay, which provides the title phrase for this fascinating volume, gains even more poignancy when we know the circumstances behind it: in a refugee camp east of Jalalabad, an elderly woman named Ashaba watched over her dying husband. She felt helpless and afraid, emotions to which her landay gives a startling voice.

Landays are primarily composed and sung by Pashtun women in a culture where they are not to be seen or heard. That most of the women who compose and sing them are illiterate and voicing forbidden thoughts makes the folk couplets even more remarkable.

Griswold was initially drawn into the world of landays after hearing about an Afghani teenager who called herself Rahila Muska. Pulled out of school by her father, who feared she would be kidnapped or raped by warlords, Muska (“smile” in Pashto) turned to landays, which she heard on the radio. Soon she was calling the program to share her poems. When her brothers discovered she was composing poetry, they beat her. In protest, she set herself on fire and died. Here is the only landay that survives her (her notebooks were destroyed by her father and brothers):

I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look and find I’m gone.

Like many landays, this piece resonates because it speaks to the fate of most Afghani women, isolated by fathers and brothers in a society of arranged marriages, where a woman’s choice of her life partner is usually ignored. The lover in this poem, if not the male chosen by the family, may be afraid to respond to his beloved due to threats of violence. The second line of the landay can also be read as foreshadowing Muska’s demise.

Although landays are often about love and heartache, they cover other subjects, such as politics, separation, and war. While they usually comment on serious topics, when laced with humor they can sting, as seen in this poem:

Making love to an old man
is like fucking a shriveled cornstalk black with mold.

Griswold’s comments on the poems throughout the book provide needed context; her notes on this particular landay demonstrate the difficulties of translation. Here’s a literal translation of this poem: “Love or Sex or Marriage, Man, Old / Love or Sex or Marriage, Cornstalk, Black Fungal Blight.” Griswold didn’t know what to make of the poem until, she tells us, she was shown a blighted cornstalk—then she knew why the women who heard the poem recited were laughing. No wonder men fear landays!

Besides offering a window into Afghani culture, landays also relate the history of Afghanistan. Where a landay once referred to British soldiers occupying Afghanistan, this later became Russian, and now American. Words such as remote, for remote control weapons, and drone, for unmanned aerial vehicle, appear:

My Nabi was shot down by a drone.
May God destroy your sons, America, you murdered my own.

The author of this poem has lost her son to an American drone and vows vengeance, an all too common event in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The black and white photography by Seamus Murphy complements the poems in subtle ways. In a picture of dozens of tents pitched in the desert, we see how survivors must live when their villages are destroyed. The note on this photo, “Dasht-e-Qala, Takhar Province, November 2000,” however, provides only skeletal information—it’s a shame more background is not given. It’s also too bad that the book doesn’t include the stunning color photographs of Murphy’s in the issue of Poetry (June 2013) devoted entirely devoted to Griswold’s landays.

For those who want to know more about the people of Afghanistan, how they view love and war, how they mourn, and how they survive, the poems and photographs in I Am the Beggar of the World offers much to entrance and disturb.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet
Bull City Press ($14)

by J.G. McClure

Until reading Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s The Greenhouse, winner of the 2014 Frost Place Chapbook Competition, I didn’t know what a chapbook could do. I’d read plenty of moving chapbooks, sure. But to create, in only twelve poems, an experience as urgent, as real, and as necessary as The Greenhouse is astonishing. The chapbook traces the complex and conflicted feelings of a new mother caring for her son. Stonestreet’s language—lyrical yet intimate, expansive yet concise—renders vividly the speaker’s own birth into a new life.

Take a look at “Like That,” which opens:

The first time
I leaned over and swept the tip of my smallest fingernail down into

the whorl of your ear (bigger than your elbow), and you yelped
in violation:
forgive me

it is no longer my ear
(little boat, little shell I carved)

flushing pink, even now, at the embarrassment, the satisfaction—

sliver-moon of yellow wax:
tiny victory.

While the opening line could lead into any number of sentimental and expected firsts, Stonestreet turns instead to something much more surprising for its ordinariness: removing a bit of earwax. In noting that the baby’s ear is bigger than his elbow, Stonestreet subtly shows how strange, how other this little body is. The baby, too, recognizes his distinct identity, yelping in violation of the boundaries of his body. The divide between the two—represented visually through the stanzification hinging on “forgive me”—is vividly realized: the child has his own life, and the mother must ask forgiveness from that which was once part of her. The assertion of both affection and possession in “little boat, little shell that I carved” is a wonderful insight into the tiny power struggle playing out between them. And yet, though separation is everywhere in these lines, so is connection: the baby feels both embarrassment and satisfaction at this intrusion. In this way, when the section lands on “tiny victory,” there’s a rich ambiguity regarding who, exactly, has been victorious: both mother and child have won and lost. The poem continues:

Lovers say, I did not know

where my body ended and yours began.
I did not know. Even yesterday when you laughed,

reared back, your head

quick-snap against my upper lip, both of us

laughing and then me still laughing, eye-sting, drop of blood
at the crown of your head, panic—

oh, mine. This morning

holding, rough/soft, drawing my tongue
up under my lip, compelling—

Like that.

Again, we see the tension between separation and connection: the two are so connected that for a moment the speaker cannot tell the baby’s blood from hers. Again, Stonestreet’s talent for subtle yet telling moments shines: she is relieved to realize the separation between their bodies because it means that the baby has not been injured. But implicit in that feeling of relief is a deep connection: her care for the child is so great that she is relieved by her own injury.

There is much more to say about the poem, but for the sake of showing more of what The Greenhouse has accomplished, fast-forward to “After Dropping My Son Off at Preschool”:

The world slowly coming back. The luxury of stepping outside

myself

where is outside?
rehearsing for years now

I was a bubble, a greenhouse, a lens—

clear, like water, present like water, spreading, reflecting
ratcheting down the viewfinder

self being a place encompassing a small boy

Step outside yourself, ma’am, and no one will get hurt

Nobody got hurt, not seriously.
It’s a goddamn miracle.

Stonestreet again immerses us in complexity. From the seemingly straightforward celebration of “the world slowly coming back,” we move into the “luxury” not of free time, but of stepping outside of the self. And even that complication is further complicated: the speaker is unsure where “outside” might be. The most recent years of her life are seen as mere rehearsal, practice toward a goal she still has not reached. In contrast, the speaker is much more confident in describing what she was; in describing this past, she gains access to more lyrically beautiful language and a more certain tone, asserting that the self was “a place encompassing a small boy.” But in doing so, we are reminded that the boy is no longer encompassed; he is now going off into the world. At this moment, the reverie breaks, and the ironic voice of the mock policeman enters. This humor grounds the poem in the contemporary, negating the risk of becoming too elevated, too Poetic (with a capital P). At the same time, it highlights the absurdity of asking someone to step outside herself—how is such a thing possible?—while reminding us, too, of the urgency of the need to do so. Impossible as the demand may seem, the speaker has managed it: “Nobody got hurt, not seriously.” Yet even at this moment of apparent triumph, the speaker can’t take credit or satisfaction: it is not her own accomplishment, but “a goddamn miracle.”

Once again, there is much more to the poem, far more than a review can cover. Suffice to say that The Greenhouse is one of those rare and wonderful chapbooks that is brilliant on the first reading, and even more moving with each return. It accomplishes in only thirty-five pages what so many books fail to do in a hundred. This is masterful work.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Paper Lantern: Love Stories
Stuart Dybek
Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($24)

Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories
Stuart Dybek
Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($14)

by Robert Martin

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Stuart Dybek is a genius and a master of the short story form. His stories are anthologized, taught, scrutinized, and worshipped. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, winner of the Lannan Award and an O. Henry Award. His name is etched into MFA-program syllabi with the likes of Lorrie Moore, George Saunders, Alice Munro, Junot Díaz, and other writers who have perfected their corner of the genre. But something has always set Dybek apart, even in such company. The simultaneous release of Paper Lantern: Love Stories and Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories helps pin down what makes Stuart Dybek so unlike any other writer of short fiction today.

In Paper Lantern, the more traditional of Dybek’s two new books, each of the nine stories employs a hybrid of narrative and poetic structure that derails a plot in pursuit of a tone, a fleeting nuance of experience rather than a self-contained arc. The opening story, “Tosca,” uses the image of a man standing before a firing squad to examine operatic haunts of memory. “Oceanic” uses a common prop—a striped beach umbrella—to cohere disparate stories of longing, fantasy, and nostalgia; as the narrator of that story describes it, “Remembering was like trying to call back a dream whose fragmented imagery and troubling emotion had bled into her waking hours. Its protean transformations defied the logic of language and the linearity of a story.”

Dybek has long been interested in protean transformations—sudden and instinctual changes in a story’s direction are one of the qualities that set his work apart—and these stories are happy to defy the logic of language and the linearity of story. This, however, makes the volume’s subtitle troubling. To call the book a collection of “Love Stories” is a misnomer at best, at worst a red herring. These stories do each deal with passion, or romance, or longing, or multiple emotions that humans can endure when enduring other humans. But the endings of these tales (if you can call prolonged sequences of self-referential tangents “endings”) are rarely those of shared happiness or marital bliss or romantic stability. Dybek is at work with something more primal than convention. His stories meddle with the bond between language and emotion, between narrative and identity, between memory and experience.

This isn’t to say that story is entirely absent, it just isn’t located in the same places as in traditional narratives. Early on in Paper Lantern, Dybek provides a handy signpost for the reader: “I’ve never been conscripted to serve in a firing squad or condemned to stand facing death—at least, not any more than we all are—but in high school I once qualified for the state finals in the high hurdles, and I know that between the ‘Aim’ command and the shot there’s time for a story.” Indeed, the gaps in action are where Dybek finds his true subjects—the meandering and fluid impressions of his characters, the impulses that pull humans out of their habitual existences and back into the magic of actual life. These moments of quick diversion lead to new narrative avenues, and they read like the literary equivalent of taking a raft over a waterfall: free, frightening, exhilarating. They are the hallmark of Dybek’s craft as a writer, his definitive tactic as a stylist.

Perhaps for that reason, the companion volume, Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories, comes across as an enigma. By “Short Stories,” this subtitle means “short-short” or “flash fiction”—most of these tales clock in under two and a half pages, and some are as brief as a paragraph. Unfortunately this form doesn’t provide nearly enough time for Dybek’s trademark cascade of narrative misdirection. Some of these tales are playful, some are dour; on occasion they resonate, but often they read like abandoned experiments, failed ideas that the author was too fond of to discard entirely. After the repeated exhilarations in Paper Lantern, these exercises underwhelm.

The strongest pieces, it isn’t surprising, are those that would have felt at home in Paper Lantern. “The Kiss,” for example, is a clear companion to “Oceanic,” spanning books in a way that suggests a larger connection (Paper Lantern already has a loose “connected stories” feel, with many of the stories sharing a narrator or borrowing characters). Ecstatic Cahoots’ “Córdoba,” perhaps the best story in either book, is a paean to romantic longing—yet finds itself outside of the “Love Stories” collection. All this suggests that these books speak to one another, and given their simultaneous publication and similar branding, they deserve to be read as a single collection rather than separate books with separate aims. It can even be helpful to treat Ecstatic Cahoots as a single entry in the larger realm of Paper Lantern: the collection as a whole embodies the same structure as the longer stories. Making our way from story to story, we’re set loose on a current of language and impulse, and interrupted on occasion by startling moments of exhilaration.

Readers who are prepared for Dybek’s stretches of seemingly aimless drifting, who don’t expect to be steered toward the routine stops along a storyline, will find plenty to admire in both of these books. Anyone less confident in these challenging works, rest assured: you’re in the hands of a master.

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Click here to purchase Ecstatic Cahoots at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Edited by S. T. Joshi
Titan Books ($15.95)

by Ryder W. Miller

If one is interested in the eerie, dark, and cosmological instead of the gory and graphic, one might regularly return to the writings of Howard Philip Lovecraft (1890-1937). Lovecraft’s stories are more profound than scary, but they certainly can be eerie. He had a philosophy and style that, as scholar S.T. Joshi notes, conjoined the macabre and science fiction. Older supernatural horrors like vampires, witches, and werewolves had lost some of their terror in the Scientific Age of the twentieth century, but people could still worry about things that could come from the stars.

Inspired by authors such as Poe and Lord Dunsany and by the science of astronomy, Lovecraft hit a nerve when writing about cosmic horrors. He pointed out that there are things older than us to which we are vulnerable, strange things that we can barely imagine or comprehend. These ideas still resonate and chill, and Lovecraft has gained a following with his hybrid-genre tales.

As one sees here and in other tribute anthologies, Lovecraft has an almost cult-like following. Joshi, a weird tales expert, is an anthologist of note who does a fine job here. There are many famous authors included, including John Shirley, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Robert Silverberg, and most of them have penned original tales for this anthology. All the stories were inspired by Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936), a novella about cosmic visitors who situated themselves in Antarctica; accordingly, the assembled stories have mostly been set in the north and take place in both the present and the past.

Not everybody agreed with Lovecraft’s perspective—the opening story is Arthur C. Clarke’s satirical “At the Mountains of Murkiness” (1940). There is the occasional joke, but more often awe and pathos; most of the storytellers take Lovecraft seriously and passionately. While their tales are by definition derivative and do not posses the authenticity of Lovecraft’s originals, they testify to the fact that so many writers have shared and been inspired by his vision.

Though Lovecraft can be disturbing, he remains of interest for those who seek “the weird,” and stories such as “The Call of Cthulhu” have become downright canonical. Science may not have found the visiting intergalactic monsters that he wrote about, but it is still possible to worry about strange things from the night skies that might already be here, waiting. These authors assembled in The Madness of Cthulhu give credit to a writer whose angst has reverberated into the present; these stories are a dark reminder of the cosmos we cannot ignore.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Evie Wyld
Vintage ($15.95)

by Lori Feathers

Jake Whyte, the protagonist of Evie Wyld’s slim novel All the Birds, Singing, attracts attention despite her ardent desire to be left alone and farm sheep on a remote British isle. With her large, muscular frame and contempt for soft or pretty things, Jake exudes physical strength, but beneath her tough self-sufficiency she is emotionally vulnerable and fearful. In depicting how Jake gains self-awareness, Wyld has created an entertaining novel that is pleasurable and also deeply unsettling.

Jake’s self-imposed social and physical isolation is misunderstood by the locals. Apart from her neighbor Don she has no friends; her refusal to participate in the community and her masculine appearance make easy fodder for the village teens who taunt and harass her. When Jake finds the brutally maimed bodies of two sheep in her flock she automatically suspects the teens. But she begins to have doubts after she senses something large and menacing in the woods near her home, and when a stranger, Lloyd, shows up unexpectedly on her property.

The fast-paced narrative of Jake’s attempts to resolve who or what is killing her sheep is interspersed with flashbacks from her life in Australia. An unintended act of arson during high school caused her to run away from home for good. Homeless and hungry, she tried to scrape by with odd janitorial jobs until she discovered the relative easy money of working as a prostitute. Later, she is rescued from prostitution by Otto, a client, but flees his home after being victimized by his perverse need to control her and her suspicion that his wife’s death may not have been from natural causes. After running from Otto, Jake landed with an all-male crew of itinerant sheep shearers in the Australian outback and won their begrudging respect as their equal in strength and ability. These glimpses of Jake’s former life brings her personality and character into satisfying focus; we empathize with her and feel regret for the misfortunes that spiraled from her youthful mistake.

All the Birds, Singing is Wyld’s second novel and it has rightfully earned accolades and awards, most recently as the United Kingdom winner of the 2014 European Union Prize for Fiction. The writing is confident, and it shares a similar tone and context with Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses—both Petterson and Wyld use lean prose to reveal the interior lives of their protagonists; both Jake and Trond from Out Stealing Horses live in self-imposed isolation in a harsh, untamed locale that requires acute awareness of the natural environment in order to survive.

Wyld’s pacing and deliberate ambiguities are highly effective in creating an atmosphere of suspense. When and how will the sheep-killing beast next strike? Is the creature real or just a product of Jake’s imagination? To heighten the sense of dread and in a nod to the novel’s title, Wyld punctuates some of the most suspenseful scenes with birds’ cries.
And she follows in the tradition of the literary horror genre by imbuing her novel with symbolism, in this case allusions to the Old Testament’s Samson to whom God granted great physical strength as long as he did not cut his hair. First, Jake’s neighbor, Don, has a son named Samson, and he is Jake’s alter ego. A troubled young man, Samson, like Jake in her youth, is homeless and on the run following acts of arson; also like Jake, Samson has sightings—the ghost of his deceased mother—that leave him with persistent anxiety. Second, both Don and Lloyd, at different points in the novel, try to persuade Jake to cut her long, unruly hair, and Jake refuses until almost the final page. When Jake, at last, allows Lloyd to cut her hair, contrary to the Old Testament story Jake gains newfound emotional and spiritual strength. For the very first time she doesn’t run from the monster in the night but stands and confronts it head on.

Like Jake’s visions, the novel’s ending is inconclusive and open to interpretation—great book club material. It is reported that a movie based on the novel is in development; one can only hope that the cinematic version of Wyld’s novel conveys her sharp observations of human nature, the need for community, and the universal wisdom that only by facing your fears can you take the first and necessary step to find your home and establish your place in the world.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

“50 Girls 50” and Other Stories
Illustrated by Al Williamson

“Came the Dawn” and Other Stories
Illustrated by Wallace Wood

“’Taint the Meat . . . It’s the Humanity!” and Other Stories
Illustrated by Jack Davis

“Corpse On the Imjin!” and Other Stories
Illustrated by Harvey Kurtzman

Fantagraphics ($28.99 each)

by Paul Buhle

The Age of Anxiety—the period from the mid-1940s to the 1950s during which World War 3 was on everyone’s mind— has never been captured better than in the line of comic books known as EC (“Educational Comics” changed to “Entertaining Comics” and then shortened to the initials) published during that time. Late 1940s noir films tried, but the half-dozen lines of EC comics that came toward the end of the comic-book boom and just before a virulent censorship landed its first blows offered the best narratives, the most meticulous art, and the most amazingly progressive social values that mainstream comics had experienced. In a post-war America that had lost the unity and spirit of wartime, these stories were downright subversive.

Only today are we getting a thorough look at the artwork. Like baseball cards, comics have long had their hoarders. They preserve their commodities in plastic, file them away, treasure the odd item, and perhaps contemplate the Big Score of something purchased for pennies and sold for thousands of dollars. In the 1970s, collecting and a growing interest in the history of comic art led to a widening field of book reprints, at first in low-priced paperbacks and then in pricier versions. These days, it is easy to find even banal comics from the middle 1940s in reprint editions.

EC reprints are a different matter. From the mid-1980s, when four volumes of Mad Comics (1950-54) reappeared in hardbacks—including interviews with some of the creators—a due respect has been obvious. The fan-scholarly volume Tales of Terror! (2000), a heavily annotated catalogue of EC productions with more interviews, set the tone in another way. For a large handful of readers, these offered the best comic art ever, at least ever published in the U.S.

In the last half-dozen years, mini-biographies of several key EC artists, with samples of their work, have added to this recovery, bridging the gap between a devoted fandom and something like academia. B. Krigstein (Fantagraphics, 2002), Against the Grain: Mad Artist Wallace Wood (TwoMorrows, 2003) and The Art of Harvey Kurtzman (Abrams, 2009) presumably whetted the tastes for more reprints of EC originals.

And here are the first four volumes of an “EC Library” excavating a treasure trove of those originals. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to say in words alone how much this EC material means in comic art history, but these books will convince most readers of their significance. The semi-scholarly structure of the introductions is enhanced by afterwords, short bits of writing that range from memoir pieces of old-time fans to short biographies of the remembered and the forgotten. Noted jazz critic Ted White—a member of the early EC Fan Clubs, the small circles of devotees known for their scorn toward commercialized American culture—adds his bit to each volume, commentaries mostly in the range of who-hired (or fired)—who, at what moment some particular EC series rose and fell, why comics themselves rose and fell, and so on. The gossipy quality will appeal to many readers. Kurtzman’s volume has more added matter, including an essay and color reprints of the war comics covers that stand up as realistic antiwar classics, in effect so different from the celebration of conflict typical of other war comics. Kurtzman, the founding genius of the Mad enterprise and arguably the most influential editor at EC, also has two interviews, from 1979 and 1982, reprinted here.

The art itself in these four volumes, though it loses something in black and white, is the real stunner. Take “Corpse on the Imjin!” named for a story that is regarded as among Kurtzman’s best. It apparently grew, as many of his other comic tales, out of a Korean War GI’s own recollection, usually delivered in letters to Kurtzman from his faithful readers. Other stories here put on display his fanatical pursuit of details in war history, from the sixteenth century conquest of Mexico to the Civil War and World War I. His best tales are often narrated by a single soldier, the protagonist’s grasp limited by the danger in front of him, with his main hope being to get out alive. Not so much the blood and guts of battle here—although Kurtzman had a wonderful ear for sound and the unique talent for putting it into words—as the psychological state of warriors, the terrors and recurring sense of futility they experience. Remembered as a genius editor, Kurtzman would modestly change the subject when asked about his own comic art.

For many of the other, younger artists, EC became a place to unleash energies and crypto-politics of resistance against the climate of McCarthyism. Today’s readers will be amazed by the anti-Semites, racists, and assorted rednecks exposed as Americana in Wallace Wood’s “Shock Suspense Stories.” A bohemian, leftish folksong devotee, Wood probably never joined any political group in his life, but his critique of the self-proud post-war American public reached the edge of McCarthy Era acceptability and sometimes went way beyond. Wood was at least as famous for his curvy dames and (in Mad Comics not seen here) his capacity for satirizing mainstream comic genres. A depressive in a depressing time, he drank himself to death, but his art is brilliant. If anyone still thinks that comics were never more than time-wasters for escapist children, they will learn better here.

Jack Davis, the only one of these artists still living (he is hale and hearty in his nineties) was another of EC publisher Bill Gaines’ favorites, and for good reasons. Apart from his fabulous satires in issues of Mad, Davis was a master in the horror comic Crypt of Terror line. Typically, the stories’ locals, parents to average citizens, refuse to believe in the supernatural—until the surprise ending where all is revealed. Davis went on to mainstream success, with thirty years at Mad Magazine, public interest posters, and an armful of awards. Even so, the screaming lady who experiences unimaginable horror as her respectability and life drain away will always remain his signature.

Some close readers with a taste for crypto-politics (in Davis’ work, the crypt itself is never far away) may find some other qualities. Respectability is certainly on trial here. So is the feigned romance that hides potentially murderous materialistic craving. And the damned locale that pulls down everyone and everything. Perhaps the nearness of battlefield memories, or the re-emergence of the well-healed cocktail society unreformed, almost unaffected, by Depression and war, made this façade of civilization easy to tear down. Werewolves, very much in today’s television and evidently standing for something else, seem in Davis’ work a mere prop, but an awfully well-drawn, scary prop—at least for the cohort of EC Comics readers, reputed to be on average a few years older than enthusiasts of Batman and Donald Duck. This is gloom that the young and disillusioned grasped with delight or perhaps satisfaction. The national self-celebration of American society at mid-century was a fraud and with a little encouragement, practically anyone could see through it.

Al Williamson, described in the introduction to his volume as “an oddball among a collection of oddballs,” is the most old-fashioned of these four great artists. He loved adventure, with impossibly beautiful women and virile men, musculature and erotically taut flesh on display. He was perfect for the EC sci-fi series, perhaps because the extremity of surviving outer space and planets with weird monsters put these perfect human specimens on display. But there’s something else: some of the most telling EC stories of this kind are not set in outer space at all, but in humanity’s struggle for survival in the aftermath of atomic war. The old prophet of the survivors, centuries later, in one tale, warns that machines must never be rebuilt—but they worship the wheel! In another story two-eyed people are freaks, pursued violently by reptilian successors to radiation poisoning. And so on. In another decade, Williamson was one of the country’s most highly regarded illustrators. But the marvelous pathos of the EC days had vanished. Ray Bradbury—whose fiction was given visual form by Al Williamson in “A Sound of Thunder,” a sci-fi safari gone wrong—would never get a comic adaptation this good again.

What society lost with the end of the EC comic lines can hardly be grasped today. Congressional hearings led by Senator Estes Kefauver in 1954 set out to “expose” the corruption of American children by comic books; when EC’s publisher William M. Gaines was called to the stand as the first hostile witness and dragged across the coals for mostly imagined sins, the titans of a then-vibrant comics industry hit the panic button, and resolved to police themselves with a new “comics code.” EC and Classics Illustrated alone resisted, but EC nearly collapsed, re-emerging with exactly one publication: the black and white Mad Magazine, not a comic and thus free from code restrictions. The idea was to reach younger kids and the result was slight, in volume and in sharpness, compared to the days of EC glory.

The youngsters who became the artists and enthusiasts of “underground comix” beginning in the late ’60s retained a lifetime resistance against comic book censorship, and a taste for radical art in other ways. Among the Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton et. al., crowd, however, “action” artists were few—Spain Rodriguez was perhaps the singular disciple of the EC style—and so the link in the chain leading back to EC had been broken, never to be restored.

The appearance of the EC Library with these volumes and more to come offers, then, an extraordinary opportunity for readers to delve comic art history, and enjoy the real golden age of comics all over again. The art, the scripts, but above all the collective talent on display here will reward many close readings.

Click here to purchase "50 Girls 50" and Other Stories at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase “Came the Dawn” and Other Stories at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase “’Taint the Meat . . . It’s the Humanity!” and Other Storiesat your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase “Corpse On the Imjin!” and Other Storiesat your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Joseph Hutchison
Turning Point ($18)

by Dale Jacobson

Joseph Hutchison, recently appointed to the position of Poet Laureate of Colorado, is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections. His careful, patient voice nonetheless carries an undercurrent of intense inquiry and passion, as in these lines from the poem “Dark Matter”:

Odd, how the notion relaxes my knotted throat.
Everything must go! Cities. Farms. Nations.
Earth itself will be slag– a frozen tear . . .

Hutchison’s poetry often contemplates loss and suffering, both from a personal and, as above, an objective vantage. Regardless of perspective, we find compassion for those left out, critique of dishonesty that produces harm, and insistence that we confront ourselves.

While his poems can engage in very effective political criticism, Hutchison’s newest book, Marked Men, is somewhat different. It contains the long poem “A Marked Man,” a dramatic historical poem about the massacre at Sand Creek. On vivid display is the principled courage of the central character, Silas Soule, who refused to allow his men to engage in the massacre and afterward testified against the commander, Colonel Chivington. Soule’s unwillingness to agree to the prevailing prejudice against Indians resulted in his murder. His ability to challenge his times—a quality we hardly see enough today—marks him as an individual who could truly think for himself. At one point Soule declares, “Facts are not personal.” I am reminded of Arundhati Roy’s observation: “When the president of the most powerful country in the world doesn't need to care what the facts are, then we can be sure we have entered the Age of Empire.”

The poem itself is very well written, utilizing tension, drama, foreshadowing, varied points of view, all of which make it engaging to read. In addition, it is well researched and accurate. Brecht argued for historical plays as a method of gaining the detachment needed to assess and address contemporary issues; this poem successfully accomplishes the same result.

There are other motifs, too. A fake reporter sent by Chivington provides apt commentary on the self-censorship of our modern media. The murderer talks of how Soule’s testimony threatens “Our work. Our wealth. Our dreams,” and of how the law is “but a word,” again a reminder of how the powerful in our own era disregard and manipulate the law of the land for their own well being.

The poem offers no resolution of these issues; instead, we wait together, listening at the graveyard that is our past. And yet, the value of this well-constructed poem is that it provides a lens to examine the injustice of our past, one much needed as we look to the kind of tomorrow we might create.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Diogo Mainardi
translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Other Press ($20)

by Nicole Montalvo

Brazilian journalist and author Diogo Mainardi tells his story in a manner that is sentimental, intellectual, and without bitterness in The Fall: A Father’s Memoir in 424 Steps. The book is written in list format, composed of 424 items that represent the 424 steps the author’s son Tito, who has cerebral palsy, took to see the place of his birth. The winding narrative takes many detours, documenting the beginning of Tito’s life and Mainardi’s relationship with him. Using repetition to build messages about fate and faith, Mainardi has an eye for accuracy while still maintaining a unique narrative voice. Originally written in Portuguese, the words do not always hold the same significance in English that they did in the author’s native language. However, when Mainardi writes, “I am Tito’s father. I exist only because Tito exists,” these words feel universal.

While the list format could seem contrived, Mainardi’s use of the form pairs seamlessly with the content of his story. For example, when Mainardi concisely explains, “The amniotomy performed by Dottoressa F was described by experts as ‘highly inappropriate.’ . . . This in turn caused damage to the brain,” the bluntness of the statement and the shortness of the explanation help the reader understand what has happened without getting bogged down in unnecessary details. The pacing of the memoir is fast, but not rushed.

Mainardi, a world traveler, refers to a number of famous works and people throughout the book from a plethora of different cultures. The most interesting of these are about famous people with connections to cerebral palsy, such as comedian Francesca Martinez, who has the disease, and singer Neil Young, who is the father of two sons with CP. In discussing Young and his struggles, Mainardi explores his relationship with Tito, especially when he talks about Young’s song, “Transformer Man,” which Young wrote about his attempts to communicate with his son. This offers insight into Tito’s life and relationship with his father, and into the author’s difficulty connecting with his son and strategy of celebrating difference instead of yearning for healing.

Although the allusions to other works may be hard to follow at first, The Fall is still insightful and thought-provoking. A perfect mix of intellectual and emotional, this memoir delivers an engaging read.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

David Armstrong
Leapfrog Press ($15.95)

by Isaac Faleschini

David Armstrong’s collection of short stories, Going Anywhere, promises much. Eight of the thirteen stories have won awards from reputable literary publications such as Mississippi Review, the Miriam Rodriguez Short Story Contest, and others. In addition, ten of the thirteen stories have been published in places as diverse as The Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy and New South. Happily, Armstrong’s prose, characters, and plots deliver on those promises.

The many and varied characters in this compilation bring important themes to life. Family dynamics are explored in many of the tales: the teenager in “Their Own Resolution” must deal with his father’s homosexuality; Clarence goes on an AA-like spree of forgiveness for those wronged in his past in “Straw Man”; Arthur in “Butterscotch” wrestles with the anxiety of becoming a father; and in “Courier” sixth-grader Eliman steps over his mother, who is naked and passed out on the kitchen floor, as his parent’s marriage dissolves.

It isn’t just the characters that keep the pages turning in this collection; the style and slow confidence with which Armstrong delivers his plot twists is exceptional. Does the overheated narrator in “Hear It” really hear the dog, Sheila, growl out the word spaghetti? In “Patience is a Fruit,” Jessie thinks he is seeing angels, but can the reader believe an angel darts its hand under the kettle of molten steel that he drops on his co-workers foot? Why does Barnabus’ dad pick him up after school with shotguns in the bed of the truck, “White price tags [hanging] from the stock of each one”?

Armstrong has a knack for rendering the mundane beautiful through lyrical language. Take this sentence from “A Different-Sized Us,” for example: “The well, a little bigger than a manhole, was shadowed by the canted lid from the morning light and looked cool and quiet near the crystalline blades of grass exposed to the sun.” He also processes emotion with deft realism. In “Bethesda,” the name of the magic pool where an angel’s touch heals the first person who plunges inside, a father and his crippled son wait, and the father’s anxiety is bare: “What if the minute I walk away, there it is, the brilliant white light over the water, because it could come . . . and you’re stuck there, and all the mattress-diving and all the planning doesn’t do us any good?”

Good stories promise a feeling that one is continuously being led on a journey, that anything can, and does, happen. Armstrong’s prose wriggles around narrative expectations, which in turn build toward deliberate payoffs. From “Take Care” to “Fifty,” the sensation in reading this book is that one could be “going anywhere.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015