photo by Ebru Yildiz

by Benjamin P. Davis

I first encountered the work of Jordan Kisner via her essay about the scholar and activist Silvia Federici entitled “The Lockdown Shows How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew,” a piece that teems with the transformative possibilities of social action. In the context of pandemic-related pessimism, I felt energized by Kisner and Federici’s conversations. While they took place on simple walks through a park, these conversations were also global, looking to Indigenous politics across the Americas in order to consider ways of living in human community that offer alternatives to the exploitation of capitalism. This led me to seek out Kisner’s essay collection, Thin Places: Essays from In Between (Picador, $18), where I found that her analysis of big issues was set alongside generous personal reflection and insightful commentary on the symbols, habits, and gestures that make everyday life meaningful. To talk more about these connections between the structural and the personal, I reached out to Kisner in early 2021. What follows is the result of our slowly thinking together over the course of the year.

Benjamin P. Davis: In your essays you take the tone of a fellow traveler, as opposed to an omniscient commentator. For example, there’s a moment in Thin Places, in the piece “Habitus,” where you pause to tell your reader about what had been preventing you from writing that essay: “I had it all in mind, and still I experienced that feeling of inability every time I sat down to write, a panic more precise than writer’s block, more a failure of ethics than of imagination or creativity.” Speaking about what prevents her from writing is something Gloria Anzaldúa, a key figure in “Habitus,” does as well. Can you say more about that decision—to tell your reader about your difficulty in finishing the essay?

Jordan Kisner: I love the phrase you use, “fellow traveler,” because that describes the way I want a relationship between a writer and a reader to feel—companionable and bonded by shared curiosity. I find myself attracted to that feeling as a reader, and I want to cultivate it when I write. Still, the moment you point to in “Habitus,” where I hit a wall in the process and confess that directly to the reader, felt like a risk. Writers struggle often with the writing process, and that is rarely as interesting as the subject they’re struggling with. In this case, I decided to include it because the reason I was having a hard time writing turned out to be an example of the phenomenon the essay was trying to describe: In many places in this country, your goodness, your respectability, even your safety are contingent on your compliance with a version of “American-ness” that champions nationalism, whiteness, affluence, and conformity—and living in that kind of cultural atmosphere leads some people who don’t fit those descriptors to feel obliged to contort or hide parts of themselves and their histories to fit the script, so to speak.

I was struggling to say what I wanted to say about these dynamics because the only way I could do so with any reasonable authority was to relay my own experience as a daughter and granddaughter of a Mexican-American family from South Texas with a complicated relationship to American identity, whiteness, passing, and shame—and I had the sense that to write about that in public would cause conflict with and embarrassment for my family. (I also look more like my father’s side of the family, which adds a layer of anxiety and impostor syndrome to the prospect of writing about these subjects.)

When I had gotten my mother’s blessing to write about some of her experiences growing up, I knew that I wanted to include a mention of my block and anxiety to emphasize how intense and intergenerational the pressure not to talk about these subjects can be. It also simply felt like the most honest thing I could do at that point in the essay—to admit failure and proceed from there.

BPD: In the line I quoted above, you wrote of a “failure of ethics” in drafting the piece. When I write more personal essays, I always run into the fact that life as it is lived is so much more complicated than life as it is told—I find myself choosing between portraying the experience as I recall it, with all the missteps and complications, or making it more palatable. In Thin Places, you consistently portray experience through all of its imperfect recollection, showing us ethical complications of life as it is lived while acknowledging that most of us consider “the fantasy of escaping into some system of blinding simplicity and idealism.” Why is it important to stay close to reality in essays, even and especially as that involves sharing moments of ethical failure?

JK: I think there’s a strong ethical argument for choosing to retain nuance and complication in an essay, but honestly, I make that choice—when I do, which I hope is more often than not—for reasons of practicality and aesthetics. Complication, messiness, hesitation, and fallibility are interesting! An untidy narrative is more engaging than a tidy one, and a writer wrestling with her own fallibility is more exciting to me than one who elides it. The impulse to present a seamless, unimpeachable story or argument is so strong, but it’s worth asking: who and what purpose does that serve? If you are trying to write what is true, useful, and compelling, the reality of the situation is typically better than what you might invent to smooth the rough edges.

BPD: “Habitus” is not only the title of the aforementioned essay, but it is also a key word running through Thin Places, one that reverberates across other essays. In “The Big Empty,” for instance, you define it as “a sociological term for the ways habits of body and mind are created by imitating those around you, and the way groups of people form coherent social practices.” What about this concept holds so much significance for you?

JK: I find myself susceptible to this phenomenon, and so it intrigues and vexes me. I have a strong mimicking impulse, whether it’s accidentally picking up other people’s gestures, accents, or turns of phrase. I’ve always chalked this up to curiosity and delight—I like people, and I like discovering all the various ways of being one can manifest. I’ve also always suspected that this trait makes me more susceptible to having a worldview, or a habitus, that is heavily influenced by my surroundings. This seems both like a beautiful thing (communities form coherent identities because we need and care for each other; I love that I carry the mannerisms of people I have loved) and a fraught one: how much do I determine my own worldview? Is such a thing even possible? Desirable? What are the habits of mind and body I am absorbing from the culture(s) in which I live—can I even see them clearly?

BPD: On the point of soaking up our surroundings, your essays suggest that how we see and occupy space is not only a political question, but also, fascinatingly, a theological question. You argue that it matters if, with the twentieth-century mystic Simone Weil, we learn to cultivate a prayerful habit of attention; it matters if, with the contemporary poet and superb reader of Weil Christian Wiman, we feel a “universally animate energy.” What is it about attention that can lead to what you call “praying by looking”?

JK: I’m compelled by Weil’s idea that attention is prayer. It seems true to me that paying attention to something is a form of devotion, and that offering your absolute attention brings you closer to an experience of the absolute. I don’t pray in any religious sense, but I think the habit of paying true attention—to each other, to our environment, to the space we occupy together—makes us better, though it can also be uncomfortable. Cultivating that habit of attention makes me a better writer when I can manage it.

BPD: Can you say more about how attention can be uncomfortable?

JK: There’s a conference of mourning doves outside my window right now, which has been going on for probably a half an hour, though I only just noticed it. They’re having their breakfast, eating seeds off the ground. I’m happy to see them, my bird neighbors, though now that I’m looking at them I’m also thinking about the fact that the particular soil they’re eating their seeds off of isn’t safe for humans to grow our own food in due to decades of contamination and poor care. Is there anything I can do about this little patch of dirt to rehabilitate it? When would I have time for that? But what am I busy with, and is it really more important than that? Paying attention is always like that: delight and sorrow and self-implication.

BPD: Two other themes of your essays are waiting and listening. “I waited for the real moment when I’d know what to build a life on and how to be,” you write in “Attunement”; “It didn’t come.” And your epigraph cites Mary Ruefle’s line “I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.” What is the potential, perhaps even the ethical potential, you find in waiting and listening?

JK: Back when I was starting Thin Places, I said to a friend that I wanted to write a book full of people waiting for things. The emotional and spiritual tension of waiting for something as yet withheld is fascinating—for one thing, it mirrors the experience of reading a good story or essay, in which the reader is held artfully in suspense until the ending, with its answers or resolutions, arrives. To feel that feeling in real time—“Where does my own plot go next? What is its meaning?”—is an exciting, terrifying experience, and probably a universal one. It can be tempting (for me, at least) to want to force myself past the waiting and into some kind of action or determinative feeling or thought, but I started to realize that that’s often driven by impatience and anxiety—and that there’s a lot you’ll miss in the way of observations, opportunities, self-knowledge, creative potential, even relationships, if you’re unwilling to be held in suspense.

BPD: In what I take to be poking fun, in “Attunement” you describe your M.F.A. program as “going to classes with people who worked for hours on a single sentence and talk[ing] about devoting themselves to catching inspiration and channeling it into book form.” How does this dual sense of work and devotion play out in composing essays for you?

JK: I was poking fun, I suppose, but also I found it moving to be surrounded by people who treated as sacred something I feel to be sacred, especially after having worked in a corner of corporate publishing that was pretty mercenary and jaded. I find it’s important to be earnest about things—to really care about what you care about, without reservation or disguise—while trying to correct for an attitude of preciousness that can creep in when you’re doing creative work. Light self-mockery is a good way to bring myself back in line.

Early on, writing felt more to me like devotion than like work. I only knew how to write when “inspired,” which meant that I often didn’t write. Learning to treat it like work, like a practice that I sit down to do whether or not I’m feeling inspired, felt key to making a sustainable life and to making the amount and quality of work I wanted to. (Inasmuch as I have—this remains a work in progress.) I find it easier to think of writing as a practice than as a job. Maybe that’s because practices can retain a devotional quality. You engage an ongoing practice (like writing, painting, meditation, whatever) out of desire and curiosity rather than as a means to a 401k.

BPD: Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Lauren Christensen called your writing “ethnography.” Would you agree? How do you think about your method?

JK: I’ve never thought of my work as ethnography, but I understand why someone might suggest that. I do often find myself in the position of trying to decipher the ideologies or customs of some group of people. But I think where my work fails to be ethnography is that I’m always implicated in the group being observed. Because all these essays take place in America, I’m part of the culture that’s under inspection, and usually there’s some personal curiosity that has drawn me to the scene. The implied distance of the ethnographer can’t really exist in that case.

I don’t have a notion of my method, per se. When reporting or interviewing, I tend to think of myself as simply asking people to tell me what they care about, and working hard to be a critical, kind, worthy recipient of the confidence they’re placing in me by answering. When making essays I usually have two gestures in mind, one structural/intellectual and one relational: writing toward what I don’t yet understand and writing as though I’m speaking directly to someone I care about.

BPD: Also on the point of working very hard, in April of 2021, you spoke with the Marxist feminist Silvia Federici about how U.S. society undervalues domestic labor. In that article, you observe that the 2016 prayer camps at Standing Rock, and in particular the practice of “commoning” that occurred there, provide a corrective to unwaged domestic labor. “Everyday life is the primary terrain of social change,” you quote from Federici. Thin Places portrays everyday life across the country as well as across class and identities. What’s at stake for you in writing about this terrain?

JK: If you believe Federici that major social change happens at the level of the mundane or daily (which I do), then writing about “everyday life” could be part of producing the social change you wish to see. I’m not necessarily that kind of writer—if there’s any social change I hope to bring about with my writing then it will be pretty obliquely accomplished.

Everyday life is also all of life, practically speaking. We only get life in days, and all days combine something of the mundane and the marvelous, no matter whose day you’re considering. I enjoy writing with the daily in mind because I find it beautiful and strange and sometimes terrible. It’s what I want to spend my time thinking about.

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2021 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021

Jhumpa Lahiri
Knopf ($24)

by Erin Lewenauer

Originally written in Italian and now translated by the author, Jhumpa Lahiri's third novel contemplates a contemplative year. Broken into easy, melodic sections—"At the Bar," "On the Street," and "At the Trattoria"—Lahiri’s voice establishes a quick intimacy with the reader. The plot opens with an unnamed, middle-aged, woman narrator considering a year-long fellowship in an Italian city where she'd be free to work in the mornings and dine with scholars throughout the day.

Enchanting and moody, the story begins with an image of death when the narrator passes a roadside memorial: "I've never seen the mother or any other person in front of the plaque. Thinking of the mother just as much as the son, I keep walking, feeling slightly less alive." The scenes meander, as does the narrator along the streets of this foreign yet familiar place she's chosen. As she walks, she reflects on youth and age: "What did I do? I read books and studied. I listened to my parents and did what they asked me to. Even though, in the end, I never made them happy. I didn't like myself, and something told me I'd end up alone." She describes writing and living in another language, and more subtly, the way we translate ourselves throughout a day and a life.

Intensely bound to herself, the narrator explores her circumstances with a therapist, and from time to time we see sharp reflections about her life, past and present. The therapist, and thus the reader, is never truly let in, however:

At every session she would ask me to tell her something positive. Unfortunately my childhood harbors few happy memories. Instead I would tell her about the balcony off my apartment when the sun is shining and I'm having breakfast. And I would tell her how much I like to sit outside, pick up a warm pen in my hand, and write down a sentence or two.

Quiet, confrontational, and consistent, the narrator eloquently observes the layers of activity within each place and passerby, as well as how people shade and eclipse one another, come together and drift apart. Sometimes she's in her own head, sometimes she sifts the thoughts of others, but always she seems to stand just on the threshold. Her narration begs the question: What can we capture of life, especially with this contraption of writing?

Readers looking for easy or simple answers won't find them here. Questions serve as Lahiri’s plot points, and Whereabouts turns out to be a strikingly dark book despite taking place in sunny, charming Italy. But it's also an escape, each scene big as satisfying rain drops plunking down one by one during a long afternoon, and the author collects them, like bright marbles, in intense appreciation. The care Lahiri takes with these small moments is a comfort and a wonder, purporting that life is significant even when formless. It's scenes, not a play, this life. "There's no escaping the unforeseen. We live day by day."

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2021 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021

Adalbert Stifter
Translated by Isabel Fargo Cole
New York Review Books ($17.95)

by Barbara Roether

An early critic once accused Adalbert Stifter of being interested mostly in “beetles and buttercups,” poking fun at his apparent lack of great themes. In his preface to the first edition of Motley Stones in 1852, Stifter wrote in reply, “Fashioning great or small things was never the aim of my writings, I was guided by other laws entirely.”  Franz Kafka, on the other hand, famously called Stifter, who was born in 1805 in what is now the Czech Republic, his “fat brother.” Thomas Mann, W. H. Auden, and Marianne Moore have also been among his many admirers. The works of Jean Giono are somewhat reminiscent of Stifter, but overall his uniqueness is almost impossible to explain. For the fortunate reader about to discover him for the first time, Isabel Fargo Coles’s new translation from the German deftly captures the strange rhythm and flow of Stifter’s telling.

Whatever the other laws Stifter was guided by are or were remains a subject of great mystery, for it is almost impossible to say by what subtle technique Stifter enchants us, but he constantly does. Motley Stones is so infused with the deep magic of simply being that it borders on the transcendent, which is an impressive feat for a collection of stories in which people, mostly children, simply wander around the Alps doing things. And yet the world of Stifter’s prose feels eternal and elemental, much like the stones the stories are named for (Limestone, Tourmaline, Rock Crystal, Cat Silver).

In “Granite,” the first story, a boy has had a run-in with the “wagon oil man” and gotten into some trouble with his mother. His Grandfather, in order to console him, takes him for a long walk in the mountains, a walk that passes through all the temporal and geographical history of the region. Each forest grove, each alpine view is imbued with the stories of the lives that have been lived around it. The Grandfather tells the boy of the time the plague swept through, and half the people of the countryside vanished, but a young boy, left alone when his family died, found a young girl sick in the grass, and nursed her back to health. Everything turned out all right. The narrative, simple on the surface, is deftly complex in its shape, rising into the mountains then circling back to the village and to the starting point of the boy’s day, weaving even the wagon oil man into the full sweep of local history.

In “Rock Crystal,” the story most emblematic of Stifter’s style, a brother and sister walk across a mountain pass to visit their grandmother on Christmas, but are caught in a snowstorm on the way back. The simple innocence of the children is set against the brutal threat of the icy mountains around them, mountains that change in shape and character without ever allowing them to find a way down:

   But as they walked, they could not tell whether they were coming down the mountain or not. . . .
   “Where are we, Konrad?” asked the girl.
   “I don’t know,” he replied.
   “If only I could see something with these eyes of mine,” he went on, “so that I could get my bearings.”
   But there was nothing around them but blinding whiteness, everywhere that whiteness which itself merely drew a shrinking circle around them . . .

Stifter’s sentences, too, seem to be looking for a way out of the storm: “The way was always through the snow, always through the snow, and the surroundings never changed.” This sort of repetition and an often-racing rhythm in the language contribute to the feeling of enchantment so prevalent in this work.

One can be tempted to compare Stifter’s work to fairy tales, but there is no “Once upon a time” here; somehow everything is happening right now, and always has been. Each walk or journey passes landmarks that lead us to understand how the past is present in the narrative. And since children are almost always at the center of Stifter’s stories, we’re thinking of the future too, everything happening in an exaggerated fullness of time.

Stifter’s sensibility is pervasively aligned with the natural world, which is always, in its grandeur, its fierceness, and its plenty, somewhat supra-natural. Read today, when beetles and buttercups have a new cache, Motley Stones feels like a new kind of environmental writing. In Stifter it’s the people who are predictable, benevolent, and ultimately innocent. How rare it feels these days to imagine ourselves this way!

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2021 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021

Maggie Nelson
Graywolf Press ($27)

by Christina Schmid

Maggie Nelson’s latest book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, takes readers into the messy middle between liberation and obligation, where stories of damage and desire, complete with an ever-evolving cast of victims and villains, wrongdoers and the wronged, abound. Throughout, Nelson invites us to step out of dyadic thinking, suspend binaries, and hold space for discomfiting complexities and complicities. A supple thinker, she challenges us to stretch, asking in so many words, what would it take to hold this truth, and this one too, and that one over there? On Freedom is an exercise in “thinking aloud,” sifting and sorting, processing and parsing “the hold that certain ideas have on us, as individuals, a culture, a subculture.” Freedom is one of them.

Rather than a one-time, capital-L Liberation, the freedom Nelson has in mind consists of daily, mundane practices, the patient labor involved in honing a capacity for being free. This may involve, in the words of David Graeber that she returns to more than once, us acting—defiantly, irresistibly—as if we were already free. In the absence of readily available freedoms, as if becomes key: As if opens the door to speculation and to performative acts of make-believe. What might such acts of freedom look like? Not like hedonism or carelessness, not like denials of the material restraints of human existence, but like an ongoing rehearsal aimed at conjuring ways of being free that never negate “the web of relationality” we are all enmeshed in or ignore the pull of desire as life force and force field.

Nelson’s inquiry unfolds in four essays, one each on art, sex, drugs, and climate change. In each of these four sites, freedom is complicated: Creative license meets ethical accountability; the triumphant rhetoric of sexual liberation gives way to intimate disappointments, calls for safe spaces, and the wounded sisterhood of #MeToo; narratives of addicts as childlike victims collide with stories of transgressive if misguided drug-abusing villains; and freedom, untethered from any sense of reciprocal responsibility, looms large amid the ecocide known as global warming. When does a sense of entitlement to freedom morph into a convenient justification for causing others harm? When does the perceived justice of a cause grant immunity from facing the hurt inflicted on others, human and nonhuman alike? Nelson’s four chapters trace the contours, variations, and possibilities of this question in a song, a ballad, and a fugue, but it is the final essay’s title that most resonates: “Riding the Blinds” refers to the spaces in between train cars where freight hoppers hope to avoid detection, a precarious perch where the sound of metal wheels thrumming on the rails permeates bodies, and where passage means more than destination, more than arrival.

Parsing her prose into songs not only resonates with literary precedent but locates Nelson’s thinking in the body’s voice and breath. Raced, gendered, classed, abled, sexed and sexual, desiring and wounded, maternal and material, porous and open—the body, cathected to the comforts of a fossil-fuel powered way of life whose cost is catastrophic for the planet, is present always, not just as a theoretical reference point, but as the locus, the condition, the physical constraint of our experience: of freedom, unfreedom, and, in a riff on Aime Cesaire, a universal that is rich with the particular and vice versa. The body holds the knot, an entangled pursuit of shared vulnerability, a knot that weaves desire for freedom together with a longing for care.

Though wary of composing neat narrative arcs herself, Nelson is an astute observer of the stories we tell, blind spots and all, and of what mindset and structure of feeling they bring forth. “Concentrating solely” on “aspects of our disempowerment” does not “deliver us” to empowerment and freedom, she notes while writing about sex, consent, and #MeToo. “Each sexual exchange . . . is going to resemble a certain wandering in the woods, because of the fundamental unknowability of ourselves and each other, and the open questions of what any new interaction might summon. This inchoateness is not just a by-product of sexual experience. It is part of what makes it worthwhile.”

Rather than rely on ready-made scripts, she proposes we learn “to inhabit and articulate sexual experience outside the dyad of the wrongdoer and the wronged.” What if we dropped the need for storyline altogether and tended to the particular? Welcome to the messy middle, where practicing freedom promises an unending experiment.

In “Art Song,” Nelson reflects on the currency of a reparative aesthetic that aims to heal past rifts and trauma. Such good intentions are commendable, of course, but Nelson asks if they are a guarantor of good art. In a cultural landscape dedicated to repair, can there also be space for art that refuses to take up the burden of how your work may make others feel? Or for art that courts the unraveling of conscious intentions, eager to delve into the spaces beyond, in Erin Manning’s words, the triad of volition-intention-agency? How much freedom should creative license grant, and when do artists and cultural workers face the threshold of the forbidden, the taboo? Though Nelson finds clear words on recent art controversies, her restless mind keeps churning, asking, speculating. This, too, is the shape freedom can take.

A meandering meditation, On Freedom is not invested in presenting an air-tight argument to settle the matter once and for all; the text and Nelson’s thinking breathe. Unapologetic, she calls her writing “weak theory,” an approach reminiscent of Julietta Singh’s vulnerable reading, a porous and open-ended form of engagement forever at odds with fantasies of mastery. It bears comparison as well to Laura Marks’s haptic criticism that imagines an erotic shimmering in the space where words brush up against the very skin of the object under scrutiny, and to Dian Million’s “felt theory,” which insists on the significance of lived experience and felt knowledges passed between generations of Native women. Nelson’s book partakes in the project these thinkers share: to challenge the deracinated Enlightenment subject’s putative freedom, a freedom achieved only in subjection to an ideology of separation and autonomy. Singing of care and constraint in the same breath as she invokes freedom, Nelson invites us to imagine different desires, new ties of interdependence that we tend to eagerly.

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2021 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021

Jennifer Fliss
Okay Donkey Press ($15)

by Nick Hilbourn

Jennifer Fliss’s new collection, The Predatory Animal Ball, carries an eerie sentiment, like an abandoned location at midnight. Inanimate things take on the agency that people once held, concentrating space around them, and if humans enter they’re obliged to conform to the objects’ laws. In “Mise En Place,” for instance, a woman celebrates the birthday of her elderly father, who lives alone in a crowded house after the death of her mother. The story begins with the recipe for the dish she’s creating for the party, but quickly pivots into commentary: “1 tbsp paprika, and  few strands of saffron, sitting delicately in a white ramekin. The strands are small and fine like microorganisms, they are potent despite their size. If I look through a microscope, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are actually alive.” What starts as a throwaway observation quickly becomes the condition for her existence in the space.

The characters in Fliss’s stories deal with complex emotions by transferring them into physical things, trying to satisfy a need for intimacy. The narrator in “Mise En Place” sees her “father tracing the lace design with his fingers,” his fingers searching for some type of connection. After the party, the narrator says, “I drive my father home. Install the chair in front of the TV.” Thus “my father” becomes “a chair” in relation to “the TV”; an exchange has been made. In this world of relentless reification, Fliss’s characters relate to a given emotion as an object outside themselves, dismissing it without experiencing the severe stress were they able to feel the original, complex emotion.

In “Just the Air They Breathe,” for example, a woman’s melancholia becomes “a mysterious squatter . . . in the terrarium [who] was unsure of how she got there herself, but she went about her work anyway. She spoke to the plants in soft whispers. . . . She nourished the air around them and they, in turn, took it all in.” At the end of the story, the lingering absence is never addressed except as “a quiet breathing” that fills the house. This is where the weight of Fliss’s fiction resides: the studium, the “quiet breathing” that saturates spaces.

In several stories, narrators are lists, evidence, data, or schedules. “Degrees,” a story of extinction and environmental collapse, is an annotated list of increasing temperatures. At 200 degrees, the absence surrounding life supersedes it:

The empty desert expanse undulates under its breath. The scorched earth was a map of three-dimensional hieroglyphics depicting the life that was. The phantom rolls up the sand, balls it up, feels the grittiness of it, and drops it down, down, down to the earth, burying bodies—ignored carrion—creating dunes where there were none.

The background supersedes the foreground. “The phantom,” much like the “quiet breathing” discussed earlier, sashays in to fill an empty space without fanfare. This piece is amusing in its deadpan, understated description of the apocalypse, and throughout the book Fliss’s sparsity and sardonic wit come across like a defeated sigh, her stories moving like thick night fog. There’s no beginning or end here; rather, each story is a positionality within a changeless space where the reader is obliged to sit, be quiet, and inertly watch. This is no longer your space; in fact, it never was.

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2021 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021

Glenn Mott
Turtle Point Press ($18.95)

by Simon Schuchat

Eclogue, originally from the Greek, is a short poem on a pastoral subject. The Mustard Seed Garden is a Chinese painting manual from the 17th Century, explaining with model drawings the correct way to paint bamboo, plum blossoms, people, insects, and so on. How could these two things possibly go together? Glenn Mott, an erudite and well-traveled poet, has the answer—though pastoral specifically singles out shepherds and shepherdesses, and if the topic is not herding animals but rather growing plants, it should properly be called a Georgic.

Our mental space is, or ought to be, global. This book encompasses that mind. Mott’s previous book, Analects on a Chinese Screen (Chax Press, 2007), drew on his residence in modern China. It was a complete whole, built out of lines with their subordination and organization left, to some extent, to the reader. This paratactic way of structuring a poem draws on the classical Chinese tradition, where multiple poems reside in one text. Eclogues draws again on this technique.

There are twenty pieces in the book; the majority consist of a title in capitals, followed by a line. For example:

NOBODY

Is too good to be true.

Or

ARBITRATION

Ideally, each party will be slightly disappointed.

There’s an element of call and response, as well as the grammatical structure of topic: comment. In an ideal world, perhaps each of these elements might be printed on a separate page. In this edition, however, they are joined on the page, so that the sequential nature, the argument, is more evident. Mott has said that he came to this form through dissatisfaction with an earlier manuscript. In it he let in too much, surrounded the memorable with supposedly necessary furniture that might as well be discarded. His breakthrough was to keep only the lines he could easily call to mind. This principle of condensation was achieved, paradoxically, by putting space around the parts.

At the same time, narrative persists. This is particularly true when the poems are read aloud. The pauses between elements are simply breath, and thus they do not disrupt the flow of thought. That is, the book contains twenty poems, each of which are sequences of smaller poem—but isn’t that always the case: the poems come in stanzas that come in lines that come in words.

Though there are Chinese influences on this poetry, there are other traditions at work as well. Mott draws deeply and richly on the Western tradition, Greek and Latin, and the short form of the epigram, the way that remarks are transformed into literature. Writers and thinkers like Martial or Epictetus come to mind. Much of the thought relates to the pre-Socratics (so beloved of Olson, to draw another lineage).

The voice is not Chinese, and it isn’t ancient Greek either—it’s more “middle border high tone,” Midwestern regionalist, and frontier woodsman (even if Mott turns Buddhist monk at times):

YOU DIDN’T COME FOR ANSWERS

To a place like this.

And

WISDOM OF THE IMMORTALS

The sun doesn’t shine on the same dog’s ass every afternoon.

Mott has thought and written about our world and our place in it. Everything is included, all are welcome, but everything is what’s important. It’s funny, it’s wise, and, like the original Mustard Seed Garden manual, it’s a model for seeing and speaking and writing.

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2021 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021

by Marina Chen

Founded in 1966 by Robert Hershon, Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie, and Ron Schreiber, Hanging Loose Press has put hundreds of books and magazines into the world, much of it focused on emerging writers—including high school writers, regularly included in Hanging Loose magazine. The independent press that first published Sherman Alexie, Cathy Park Hong, Maggie Nelson, and many others, proves year after year that young writers are as important to them as their roster of professionals, even after six decades of publishing.

In the following interview, former HL intern and high school writer Marina Chen talks with the current co-editors Mark Pawlak, Dick Lourie, and Caroline Hagood about Hanging Loose history, philosophy, advice, and thoughts on literature and the writing youth of today.

Marina Chen: Hanging Loose has been publishing high school writing since the very first issue of the magazine in 1966, and for decades was the only magazine in the business doing that. Back then, what motivated the editors to include high school writing?

Mark Pawlak: I had just graduated high school when the first issue of Hanging Loose appeared, so we’ll need to hear from Dick on that count. But I will say that when I joined HL as an editor in 1980, one of the things that attracted me was its commitment to publishing teen writers.

Dick Lourie: Just before our first issue my cousin Martha, then thirteen, showed me two poems by a friend of hers, Deborah Deichler. “Knockout,” Bob and Ron and Emmett and I all agreed, so we thought OK, terrific poems, but really, by a high school student? Well, why not? A few issues later, we began the regular section.

MC: You’ve also published four anthologies of that high school writing. How did that come about?

MP: One frequent topic of discussion among the editors was how much readers liked the high school poetry, so we really should collect the best of the work and publish an anthology. But that idea always got tabled; our more immediate concerns were getting out the next issue and the individual authors’ books we had on the schedule. Eventually, I volunteered to take the lead in pulling the material together. Dick offered to help. And so Smart Like Me (1986), which gathered the best poetry from the first twenty years of the HL high school section, came into being.

Naively, we thought this anthology would appeal to a trade publisher; we made inquiries. In those days there were collections of poetry written for teens, but by adults. Although never explicitly stated, it became clear to us from the publishers’ responses that they were afraid such a collection wouldn’t sell well to schools and libraries. The poetry we’d collected was too raw, too honest, too frankly perceptive of the lives of teens, their parents, their teachers—their world. Censorship by local school boards combined with outcries from PTAs was no doubt also on their minds. But it was for just those reasons that we believed in our anthology project, so we went ahead and published it ourselves.

To our delight, it garnered very positive reviews: “The levels of insight and maturity are often astounding.” (School Library Journal). “Any teacher who’s worked with teen-age writers will be cheered and re-inspired.” (X. J. Kennedy). “Give it to old fogies who maunder on about what the younger generation’s coming to.” (Village Voice). And it sold very well.

MC: That response must have persuaded you that you were onto something.

MP: It certainly did. As you know, we’ve gone on to publish three subsequent anthologies, Bullseye (1995), Shooting the Rat (2003), and When We Were Countries (2010). I’m very proud of our role as forerunners in this regard, but it’s important to remember that innovative ideas are frequently of their times, floating in the cultural atmosphere, awaiting someone to pluck and develop them. With respect to poetry by young people, Teachers and Writers Collaborative started the same year as Hanging Loose. T&W hired poets to teach in schools and published curricula for teachers to use in teaching poetry, especially, although not exclusively, contemporary poetry. Many of the poets associated with T&W are friends of and published by HL. And like us they’re still going fifty-plus years later! So, we weren’t alone in valuing poetry written by young adults.

DL: Those early years in New York—Mark is right: it really was a movement, to have poets teach in schools, where they taught students and, in a way, mentored teachers by example. Organizations sprang up focused on poets working in particular states: both New York and New Jersey had “Poets in the Schools” programs, and the organizations were able to get grants from state governments. At various points in HL’s early years, Bob and I and Emmett all did poetry programs in schools. So, our direct contacts formed another conduit for high school writers to the magazine. Such programs still exist and there are still a few poets who can make a living by their work in schools, though funding for the arts has been cut in general.

MC: How have high school writers usually found HL?

MP: I think the answer has changed over time, but mostly it has been teachers who pointed students to HL, as Dick just mentioned. And the landscape has changed for teens who want to share their writing. There are many more outlets to publish their work, including journals specifically devoted to teen writing and summer writing classes and workshops.

DL: And I think the situation now is different from when Caroline was in high school.

Caroline Hagood: Yes, as Mark said, there was no “class assignment.” The idea of sending to HL was suggested to me by my amazing high school poetry teacher, Marty Skoble. I remember being so surprised that any magazine would be willing to consider the work of a high school writer. I think the way the climate has changed today is that now students might also hear about these kinds of opportunities on social media. I saw a Twitter conversation recently where someone was asking where she could send the poetry of her talented high school student, and I was so happy to see someone suggest Hanging Loose.

MC: How can young writers get involved? And for any prospective writers reading this, is there anything specific you are looking for?

MP: Our website has a page with guidelines for high school writer submissions. Our dear deceased Robert Hershon, a founding editor, liked to say, “the past is precedent.” Meaning, read a copy of HL magazine (there are 111 issues to date) or one of our high school anthologies.

DL: Yes, that’s really important. Poetry is like any other profession; you don’t go into it without knowing how it’s done. Poetry isn’t “expressing thoughts”—it uses thoughts and feelings to create art. That’s a skill. If you wanted to be an electrician, you might start as an apprentice. To be a poet, you start developing your skills by reading poetry. That’s the way you get a sense of it. So, I think it’s not necessarily something specific we’re looking for, other than some indication, in a person’s writing, of a familiarity with poetry, with how poets over the years have transformed their thoughts and feelings into poetry—in other words, keep writing and, just as important, keep reading.

CH: I am going to defer to Emily Dickinson on this one, in terms of what I’m looking for, at least: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

MC: It is an eternal human pursuit to want to know what came before. Especially for writers, knowing this is power and can enhance one’s writing. As a previous high school writer for Hanging Loose, your fourth high school collection When We Were Countries was a chance to meet my predecessors. How does being published in HL usually affect high school writers? What do they go on to do?

MP: As a former HL high school writer, Caroline can best answer how it affected her (Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel, her novel, was just published by HL). And in her essay in When We Were Countries, Joanna Fuhrman, who just published her sixth poetry collection with HL, writes about how it affected her. I keep a list of alumni of the HL high school poetry section who have gone on to writing careers. In just the past year, Donovan Hohn, for one, a New York Times bestselling author, published a new collection of essays, as did Sejal Shah, both to widespread acclaim. But there are many, many more.

But other alumni of the high school section go on to distinguish themselves in a great variety of fields as artists, journalists, economists, editors, scholars. Their subsequent career paths are documented in the contributor notes at the back of each anthology. They make fascinating reading, which brings me back to what the Village Voice said about “old fogies who maunder on about what the younger generation’s coming to.”

DL: And one of our early high school poets, Michael Rezendes, was part of the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team that received a Pulitzer Prize for their scathing revelations about clergy child abuse in the Catholic Church. Our very first high school poet, Deborah Deichler, became a painter and a professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

CH: I can’t answer for all poets who were published by HL in high school, but, for me, it really did contribute to my youthful belief that I could build a career out of poetry. I remember graduating high school thinking the world believed poetry to be as important as HL did and as my high school did, only to be quickly disabused of that belief. But I did go on to make a career out of poetry in a way, by getting my PhD in English at Fordham, and now by working as an Assistant Professor of Literature, Writing and Publishing and Director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, as well as my recent role as the Faculty Advisor for Unbound Brooklyn.

MC: The rise of slam poetry and an overall growth of the poetry world available to young writers have caused a rise in readings and oral competitions. How do you think the relationship between written and spoken word poetry has developed and affected high school writers across HL’s decades of interaction with them?

MP: Now it’s my turn to sound like an old fogy. I believe competition in that public sense is anathema to poetry. Friendly rivalry, challenging one another to greater achievements as artists is something different.

As to the questions of “page versus stage,” I think there is a genuine tension there. A poem that is powerfully achieved on the page can also affect listeners just as powerfully hearing it read aloud. However, a good “stage poet” can put over a poem that falls flat on the page. And I recognize that spoken word poetry has expanded interest in poetry to young people who might otherwise have been put off by poetry in books or in the classroom. If enjoying a spoken word reading leads them to a deeper immersion in all kinds of poetry, all the better.

DL: The only thing I would add is that one important aspect of the “page versus stage” tension is the need for mutual respect. The only thing I object to is the occasional characterization of us “page” poets as a bunch of stuffy aristocratic types whose readings reach heights of boredom.

MC: What does HL hope to achieve with these four high school anthologies? Why is it important to share young work, for the poets and the readers, and why should young readers read each other?

MP: The readership of a poetry magazine like Hanging Loose is limited, so by its very nature an anthology is a way to reach a wider audience. Much of what passes as representative of teen life and teen issues in the media and on the Internet is commodified cliché. Real poetry written by one’s peers speaks to teens differently. Our anthologies can and do play a role to enrich teen readers’ lives and their imaginations.

CH: Reading poems from other high schoolers in Shooting the Rat was life-changing for me. These poems made me feel alive, electrified, less alone. I would also add that I don’t think it’s going too far to say that there are kids out there whose lives this kind of exposure could even save.

DL: And as history, reading through all four volumes gives a sense of how young people’s poetry, as a reflection of American poetry in general, underwent changes in style and focus.

MC: Over time, have the identities of HL high school writers changed as well? And how does this reflect upon HL as a traditionally safe space for young writers?

MP: Over more than five decades we have never needed to have a special issue of our magazine dedicated to LGBTQ+ writers because we’ve always been open to their work. Tim Robbins, then a high school student from the Midwest, started sending us poems with explicitly gay content in the early 1980s. I think he holds the record for the most poems by a writer of high school age to appear in Hanging Loose. He must have thought of HL as a safe place, and forty-plus years later he continues to send poems to HL. He recently asked me to write an endorsement for his first full poetry collection.

DL: And our late co-founder, Ron Schreiber was a militant, out, gay activist in the New York of the 1960s. He played a crucial role in mentoring young, gay writers.

MC:, The 2000s generation seemed particularly preoccupied with themes like reconnection of broken families, international diversity, and the immortal quality of first love—but most of all, the uplifting of one’s own voice. I also noticed the first hues of fierce racial-inequality-fueled rage that colors today’s current youth in When We Were Countries. Are these themes similar or different throughout each cycle of HL high school writing? What does this say about what high school writing offers to the literary community?

DL: Thoughtful question indeed. I think the high school poets and fiction writers today do reflect on how they live in the world that we, the elders have made (as each generation does) for them. To read their work is to read how they feel about where they find themselves now. I feel sometimes with a high school poet that I’m learning about someone in the most direct way. The poems bring us inside to experience and maybe understand this person so much younger than we are.

MC: Since When We Were Countries in 2010, HL has not published a more recent high school anthology. Have you noticed any particular sparks or new inspirations in the work since then? Should we be on the lookout for a fresh new voice bursting forth from the next HL high school collection?

MP: I have a very thick folder containing a draft of the next high school anthology—we’re just waiting to find the resources to publish it. The work of reaching out to the authors, updating their biographies since high school, etc., is very time consuming and the upfront cost of publishing a thick anthology is high. But I’m confident it will happen soon.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2021 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021

Kate Lister
Thames & Hudson ($35)

by Greg Baldino

The year was 1881 and teenager Elizabeth Burley had just leapt into the icy waters off the coast of Dover. Though an act of desperation, this was no suicide attempt—she flung herself off the Granville Dock to evade a pair of men who chased her with the clear intent to violate the agency and safety of her body. There was no point in calling for the police; they were the police. Suspected of being a "fallen woman" under the provision of the Contagious Diseases Act, she was to be subjected to a forcible vaginal examination for signs of sexually transmitted diseases; only seventeen years old, she took her chances with the Channel rather than face such invasion. It worked, because after seeing her go into waters cold enough to freeze her to death if she didn't drown first, the pursuing officers went on their way.

This is just one of the many stories in Harlots, Whores & Hackabouts, Kate Lister's five-thousand-year history of sex workers and the efforts to control, coerce, and abolish them. In her scholarship, Lister puts the empirical reality of sex workers front and center, debunking centuries of effort to cast them as vectors of disease, strife, and immorality, while also not playing into the other side of that coin, painting them as victims of vice in need of salvation.

Beginning with accounts of transactional sex in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the book covers a global range of cultures from the flower boats of China to the molly houses of London as it progresses toward the present day. Patterns emerge, and history shows itself to repeat as concurrently as it does consecutively. Although it takes different forms, the most prevalent strategy since the courtesan Phryne stood before the judges of Athens has been an attempt to find and enforce the right level of desperation. As the book documents, this strategy never works; it only pushes the trade into areas more dangerous and unpredictable for the workers themselves.

It's a disturbing history, but also a fascinating one. And it's a history beyond what many might assume, one of gay men and trans women, of artists and immigrants. Historical figures pop up in unexpected roles throughout. Lushly illustrated with photographs and artwork, Harlots, Whores & Hackabouts honors this history in its visuals and its design as well as its content. A significant effort is made to apply the names of sex workers to their images whenever possible, restoring humanity to people often labeled only as "a courtesan" or "prostitutes" in history books’ captions.

One of the most prominent revelations in this book is how much sex work has been suppressed from the documentation of history itself. Far from being a temporary aberration of social values, sex work is instead revealed as ever-present in the cultures we think we know. It's not a glossy romanticization, either; the book doesn't shy from portraying honestly the dangers and discomforts of those for whom sex work is their life’s work. In this, it is also a labor history, and a history of the devaluing of women's lives. Sex work is work, but work made unsafe by the design of those who would control it.

This design nearly killed Elizabeth Burley before her eighteenth birthday, but in the last hundred years it has come under greater opposition than ever before. The act that authorized the pursuit of young Burley in the first place was vehemently opposed by Christian philanthropist Josephine Butler, who considered the regulatory legislation "surgical rape." Butler was one of the first major advocates for sex workers in the modern age, writing and campaigning on behalf of their rights, dignity, and agency. Butler's efforts would be followed by sex workers confronting clergy in the streets, occupying churches, fist-fighting cops, and organizing for advocacy and self-defense—a struggle for worker rights that is far from over.

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2021 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021