Rachel Zucker
Wave Books ($18)

by Geula Geurts

Rachel Zucker's ninth book of poetry, The Pedestrians, is really a double collection, as it’s divided into two sections: “Fables” and “The Pedestrians.” Both sections form a cohesive whole that resonates like a mother's cry against the hustle and bustle of the New York City skyline. “Fables” leaves the city and seeks solitude in nature, whereas “The Pedestrians” delves into the turbulent bowels of the metropolis. Zucker makes a distinction between nature and city, but throughout she blurs lines between the two, as well as between animal nature and humanity, solitude and chaotic motherhood: all blend into one female howl of day-to-day survival.

Written in third-person narrative prose, “Fables” moves like a lost tourist meditating on place and nature. Focusing on a tired mother and housewife, Zucker skillfully creates a character with an emotionally detached voice, echoing the woman's attempt to detach herself from motherly duties and city life. Hungry for affection and serenity, the woman goes on holiday with her family, but experiences nothing of the expected relief:

She lay next to the snoring husband in the sublet bed and . . . the bedroom smelled like smoke and the wooden floors of the bathroom smelled like her three sons' urine . . . she realized that this city, so unlike her city, was exactly like her city and that everyone in her city was exactly like everyone in this city and that they were all animals and that animals can only be animals.

Zucker's boldness allows for honest encounters with raw marriage and motherhood:

She had a small copper wire inside her. . . . Without the chance of another child, sex lost some of its appeal, purposefulness, danger, pleasure . . .

"We're animals," he says, happily after sex.

"No," she thinks. Not anymore.

When the woman returns to her native city, which has transformed into an animal: "bridges curve like snakes," buses and trucks look like "chummy canines," buildings have bowels. The woman seems incapable of separating the blurred boundaries of nature and city life. Likewise, she can't ever really detach herself from her family, try as she might. “Fables” ends with this realization:

It's never safe to stay, she wanted to say. There is no such thing as leaving. . . .

There was no going away. Wherever she went they were with her.

In “The Pedestrians,” Zucker zooms in on the mother's busy life and creates poetic gems that echo her overwhelming day-to-day experience. The first-person narrative poems here create an intimacy with the speaker and her anxieties. In "mindful" we see Zucker's talent of connecting form with meaning; the poetic lines are mostly enjambed, which speeds up the tempo and creates a dizzying effect. Without a break between the lines, we feel out of breath, like the exhausted mother does:

want to ask why is this life so run-
run-run long underground train then crosstown bus
that is my son w/his 50 small feet kicking screaming
Too slow bus!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I've forgotten to oh! left my urgh!
meat in the freezer or oven on so what? don't
make dinner? ha ha who will? the military?

The poem "pedestrian" verbalizes the mother's fear of losing her humanity in a city that is slowly transforming her into a surviving animal:

taking the shuttle at Times Square during rush hour
causes me serious distress a human tsunami perhaps
we deserve a large-scale population reduction
it seems inevitable I'm dehumanized by NY & my
proximity to others fatal loneliness of crowds

Poetry itself seems to be the mother's only comfort; she knows "reading and writing creates a private sphere /in a way that thinking can't." In "i'd like a little flashlight" she is able to express her deepest desires:

& I'd like to get naked & into bed & be
HOT radiating heat from the inside . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I'd like a little flashlight to write poems w/this lousy day
not this poem I'm writing under the mostly flat
blaze of bulb but a poem written w/the light itself
a tiny fleeting love poem to life a poem that says
Look here a bright spot of life oh look another!

Zucker’s collection of poetry bears testimony to both her poetic brilliance and motherly ability to "juggle her family like eggs or oranges." Her hybrid style blends prose and verve into one urban stream, rendering her poems “worth their weight in ink” (as she puts in in “pedestrian”). Her words reverberate like the roar of an empowered lioness, as she emerges victoriously from the city jungle of her life, a mentor to all mothers.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Tishani Doshi
Copper Canyon Press ($16)

by James Naiden

Born in 1975 in Madras, India, Tishana Doshi reveals a delicate but febrile sensibility in her second collection, Everything Begins Elsewhere. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University writing program, she worked in advertising for a London firm before returning to live in India in 2001, and now resides in a “village by the sea in South India, and elsewhere.”

Doshi’s poems are wrought with a keen eye for subtlety and nuance, using exactly the right visual description for what she sees. She also captures ineffable aspects of human life, such as the dynamics between people and that never-to-be recaptured essence known as the past, as in these final lines from “Lines to a Lover from a Previous Century”:

Just come to me once again,
so when it’s time to meet my maker
I’ll know to ask the breeze
where to find the vagabond of love.
And when the breeze gathers up
a little dust into the air,
my love, I’ll know to end this wait,
and follow it like a prayer.

This poet knows her business and then some—perhaps because she is also a novelist and a dancer. In this book, there is a wistful but realistic hope measured against the shores of experience. She is not fooled by cant or self-delusion. At the same time, Doshi can wield a problematic instrument such as the question mark in her poems, and to great effect. Here are the opening, free-wheeling lines of “Homeland”:

What if the dead came back as bandits—
a whole army of them on herds of camels,
brandishing swords and Kalashnikovs?

What if they could reclaim our land
with weapons instead of words?

If they came to our roofless shelters
at night with salves for our wounds
and water for our lips?

This collection is impressive by any standard of aesthetic evaluation. Doshi has crafted her poems from a riveting sensibility and life journey into a beautiful gathering, not unlike the flowers and ethereal human beauty she cherishes. The difference is that we have these fragile essences and images down in print, statements that will not go away.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Maurizio de Giovanni
translated by Antony Shugaar
Europa Editions ($17)

by Kelsey Irving Beson

Across class, age, and experience, the characters that people Maurizio de Giovanni’s The Crocodile are defined by their injuries. The driving force behind the plot is grief, and a looming depression pervades the narrative. Like many noir heroes, the protagonist of The Crocodile is an outsider: Inspector Giuseppe Lojacono has been forced to relocate from his beloved Sicilian city of Agrigento northward to Naples, chained to a desk at a police station in a remote precinct. Though both cities are in Italy, Lojacono feels like he has been exiled to a vaguely hostile foreign country.

The fact that he is serving penance for a crime he did not commit adds a stinging resentment to his loneliness. When a series of seemingly motiveless murders across class lines sets the entire city reeling, the police have no lead and the magistrate assigns Lojacono to the case out of sheer desperation. The itinerant detective must delve deep into the pasts of several recalcitrant, secretive characters, each with something to hide, in order to apprehend the murderer whom the press has dubbed “the Crocodile”—so named because he leaves tear-stained tissues at each crime scene.

Even though Lojacono is the only literal exile in the book, mentally, all of these characters are outsiders motivated by alienation, angst, and loss. Each moves through life nursing their own private pain—the story is one of both modern estrangement and enduring grief. This isolation makes it easy for the Crocodile to make his way through the city unnoticed:

Who should bother to glance at him, no different from so many others like him, phantoms that populate the city of shadows? . . .
. . . No one sees those who walk in silence, head down, clearly beset by thoughts and problems; no one wants to run the risk of sharing thoughts and problems, even if it entails nothing more than exchanging a glance.

Naples is desperate to discover the author of these crimes, but, ironically, in an anonymous urban landscape, nobody wants to know. Lojacono’s shared outsider status gives him a special insight into the psyche of the Crocodile: “I can tell you that it’s very easy to be invisible here . . . the city’s full of phantoms, people who come and go unnoticed in your midst.”

At times, Lojacono almost seems to share some kind of psychic link with his nemesis. The other characters see this and recognize it as both expedient and chilling: “It kind of scares me how clearly you can see into the Crocodile’s head; it almost seems as if you’re in touch with him, somehow.” In this vein, The Crocodile’s narrative is also full of doubles and coincidence, which makes for a plot that legitimates a second read. The gray Naples landscape is populated with shadowy characters whose pasts are full of fatal accidents, chronic illness, abandonment, and stubborn ill-will. Tyrannical parents, lingering deaths, and private tragedies function as both aesthetic backdrop and motivating force. These parallels across the characters’ experience give them and their relationships gravity and relevance, even when they are not specifically connected.

Many readers may think of Naples as a sunny, culture-rich tourist haven. However, de Giovanni’s descriptions of the city are more evocative of a blank urban landscape akin to a car-strewn junkyard in a Fernando di Leo movie:

. . . the city waterfront, with thousands of indifferent cars whizzing past the barnacle-encrusted rocks, under spitting rain and a grey sky. The rancid stench, the white rocks piled up like a barricade, the casual litter, plastic bags bobbing in the stagnant water like so many jellyfish corpses.
. . . And it became clear to him that this was no seaside city; here the city and the sea vied in their mutual indifference, ostentatiously ignoring one another like a couple of cousins in the aftermath of a terrible feud.

Although Lojacono feels like an interloper in Naples, this filthy urban setting seems perfect for his vague angst. All this estranged brooding, however, does not mean that The Crocodile is not a narrative-driven novel—the book also works very satisfyingly as a giallo yarn, complete with a lingering, almost lovingly clinical description of a female corpse and the sort of savage, sardonic plot twists that define the genre.

One of the main themes of the book is a lack of justice, moral triumph, or vindication. At the end of the story, little has really changed for Lojacono—he’s still the same outsider, moving alone through a meaningless landscape. The Crocodile’s combination of enduring existentialist themes and giallo titillation blurs the line between literature and genre fiction, and the book is recommended for fans of either.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Virginia Zaharieva
translated by Angela Rodel
Black Balloon Publishing ($16)

by Chris Beal

Virginia Zaharieva’s Nine Rabbits, translated from Bulgarian, gives English-speaking readers a chance to sample literature from a part of the world about which most of us know little. Straddling the lines between literary genres, the book is classified as fiction, reads like memoir, and at the same time is chock full of recipes suitable for a book on home cooking.

The narrator, while bearing the fictional name “Manda,” seems but a thin disguise for the author. There is no defined fictional persona here; instead, the narrator doesn't seem to know who she is, and hopes to find out by writing. Thus, Nine Rabbits reads more like a memoir than a novel or series of stories.

Each chapter—usually just two to four pages and often ending with a recipe or two—centers around a theme, which might be abstract, concrete, or metaphorical. Examples are “Corset,” “Turkey,” “Exodus,” “Nobody,” “The Mad Hatter.” Usually some event has generated an idea, which is then teased open. The recipes—an eclectic mix of mostly East European dishes with natural, fresh ingredients—sound delicious, and they may also have the purpose of grounding the writer and the writing. It is as though she were saying that we need our connection to the physical world, and food best serves that purpose.

The story is told in two parts; the first explores Manda's childhood while the second records her adult thoughts and feelings. In the childhood section, no adjectives are spared in describing the cruelty of the grandmother who raised her. When things get really bad, Manda seeks solace and help from the nuns at a nearby monastery. Sometimes one or the other of her parents, whose work lives make it impossible to keep her with them, makes a rare appearance:

     “My dearest, sweetest little girl,” my mother whispered. “What has my crazy mother done to you? Does it hurt?”
     I snuggled up to her. My whole body shook with sobs. I begged her not to leave me with Nikula, to take me with her. But she couldn't. . . .”

If Zaharieva actually suffered abuse to the extent portrayed—and the description of it certainly rings true—she has transcended whatever temptation to ax-grind she may have had: while not excusing Manda's grandmother, she seeks to understand her. This is powerful, controlled writing.

As Part Two opens, years have passed and the narrator has become an adult with an abusive husband; she divorces him with much difficulty, taking her son and eventually making a life with a much younger lover, Christos. A selection from the chapter “Diary” gives a sense of the tone:

    I am afraid of life. Writing helps me bear it. I open up space. I pour out onto the pages, so as to free up a place. As I write, I forget living, I watch it from the outside, giving the slowest part of myself a chance to catch up with me. Some people call it soul.

Eventually, Manda becomes a prominent writer in Bulgaria. Still, she feels like a failure, so she studies psychoanalysis and body work. In fact, she explores nearly every avenue for self-discovery open to a modern person. The last chapter finds her at a Zen retreat.

One of the longest chapters describes a trip to Russia with a writers' organization. Manda feels so claustrophobic that she becomes ill as all of the repression during the Communist regime in Bulgaria comes back to her. She writes:

My head is spinning from this kaleidoscopic inversion of values. Here they're again telling me what to do and what not to do. With no choice. They drag me around to some monuments in Kaliningrad, plug my mouth with flowers when talk turns to their problems. They simply turn off the translator's microphone at mention of Chechnya. Poverty, destruction, absurdity, and lies. I feel like I'm caught in a trap.

This chapter is probably powerful for Bulgarian and other East European readers, but for Western readers there isn't enough development of the suffering endured under the Soviet regime to understand Manda’s extreme reaction to being in the “homeland” of this repression, now a thing of the past. Manda was a child during the Communist period, and the main act of the Communist government that she describes was to close down the monastery where she, as a small child, had often sought refuge. Yet her reactions in Russia seem to stem from other events, never mentioned.

Unfortunately, Part Two—which comprises more than two-thirds of the book—never gives the reader the sense that Zaharieva has integrated her experience as an adult. A lot of themes are explored, and yet there is nothing firm to grasp here, no defined sense of who Manda is. While writing Nine Rabbits may have been therapeutic for the author, the reader needs more.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014