Edited by Leslie Scalapino
O Books ($14)

by Michael Cross

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. —Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin's conception of progress still cogently applies to the wreckage piling high on our sullied political doorstep. War and Peace, the second in a series of anti-war anthologies published by Leslie Scalapino's O Books, attempts to turn toward the wreckage, taking as its impetus the living in war of Tolstoy's novel: "everything can go on—everything goes on—in war and peace. To see being a form of action" (from the anthology's back cover). Featuring a wide range of established writers and visual artists, Jackson Mac Low, Norma Cole, and Kiki Smith among the more recognizable, along with relatively fresh names such as Taylor Brady and Judith Goldman, the anthology seeks to offer modes of being in times of war—methods of articulating the wide range of affections that work upon the thinking subject in devastating political climes. As opposed to the vast majority of wartime prose and poetry, the writers here avoid trite sloganeering and off-hand rebuttals. Instead, they articulate frustration, anger, guilt, humor, and impotence in the face of all-too-real human tragedy. The result is an engaging document that incorporates the disaster of war into the mundanity of the every day. Juliana Spahr writes in her epistolary "March 27 and 30, 2003,"

During the bombing, beloveds, our life goes on as usual.

Oh the gentle pressing of our bodies together upon waking.

Oh the parrots and their squawking.

Oh the soft breeze at five to ten miles per hour.

Oh the harsh sun and the cool shade.

Oh the papaya and yogurt with just a little salt for breakfast.

Oh the cool shower that we take together.

This makes us feel more guilty and more unsure of what to do than ever.

And further,

Today, as this war begins, every word we say is indicted, ironic or not,
articulate or not and we feel it all in the room all day long.

When we speak of Lisa Marie Presley having sex with Michael Jackson we speak of JDAM and JSOW air-to-surface precision bombs.

Spahr's long poem is a perfect metonymy for the work of the anthology in general: here, the necessarily tautological investigation attempts to make sense of our diurnal lives, our superficial desires, in the face of international tragedy. The poems in War and Peace serve as a fine memento mori of the Other, as the absence of constant warfare on our soil is absolutely present in the anxiety of the speakers.

Etal Adnan's contribution animates the cathexis of the diurnal in her daybook "To Keep a Diary in a Time of War":

. . . read WAR again, to look at the word as if it were a spider, to feel paralyzed, to look for help within oneself, to know helplessness, to pick up the phone, to give up, to get dressed, to look through the windows, to suffer from the day's beauty, to hate to death the authors of such crimes, to realize that it's useless to think, to pick up the purse, to go down the stairs, to see people smashed to a pulp, to say yes indeed the day is beautiful, not to know anything, to go on walking, to take notice of people's indifference towards each other.

The anthology makes seamless transitions through a multiplicity of representations of being with grief, from Fanny Howe's elegant prose lines in "Vigilance" to the absurd alliteration, malapropistic "mishearings," and relentless puns of Alan Davies "Bad Dad:"

Sheer seersucker sadists
stand wiltingly
over all grave matter.
(I wake at night a hardon
in my hand.)
Terror dactyles mute
where nothing mates

What is perhaps most interesting about this anthology is Scalapino's editorial privilege of serial work and long poems. Judith Goldman's "case senSitive," a poem literally breaking through the static of war, is represented by nineteen pages, while Davies series clocks in just over 30 independent stanzas, easily a chapbook length project in another forum.

Overall, there are very few drawbacks to this fabulous anthology. Rob Holloway and Taylor Brady, both of whom contribute two of the most important meditations in War and Peace, are also represented by two of the shortest pieces in the volume. Holloway's "Capa Trapped sur la plage" generally left me gasping for more: "Eyeing him, America's broadcast excites that image of soldiers into pig / skulls endlessly bucking. And ducking, his coat for cover, / he done scramble to a barge. Counting its closed exit doors." And while I applaud Scalapino for taking a stab at printing Robert Grenier's "scrawl" poems (a work that has long posed problems to printers, as to include these four-color prints as the author intended would cost a small fortune), I'm not sure her solution translates. Printing the poems in black and white with "translation and color key" does little justice to the work itself. For that matter, I would have liked to see all of the artwork in the anthology printed in color, although printing in black and white has kept the cost of the anthology to a reasonable $14.

Theodor Adorno writes, in his stunning collection of wartime aphorisms, Minima Moralia, "The violence that expelled me thereby denied me full knowledge of it. I did not yet admit to myself that complicity that enfolds those who, in face of unspeakable collective events, speak of individual matters at all." War and Peace directly engages Adorno's dialectic, at once problematizing the relationship between Western thinkers and Middle Eastern warfare, while sublimating our ethical and intellectual responsibilities from the television screen, from multiple fronts of remote and desultory feedback, to our littered porch of piling rubble. In effect, the anthology cathects our solipsistic American lifestyles with the question of responsibility itself.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Kim Addonizio
W. W. Norton & Company ($21.95)

by Mike Chasar

Despite all of the drugs, booze, and sex in Kim Addonizio's fourth book of poems, What Is This Thing Called Love?, the collection becomes a fascinating sort of love poem for the speaker's daughter. The book's narrator tries hard to convince us otherwise, however, drawing a picture of herself as a "bad girl" whose liberated sexual and chemical appetites leave men at her mercy and crumpled in her wake. "She's the one sleeping all day," Addonizio writes, the one who "wakes up / at the sound of a cork twisted free," who "wants / to stand on the rim of the glass, naked," and who sneaks out at night in her silk dress while the good girl is "crouched in a corner, coming undone."

Half of the poems in the book (and sixteen of the final nineteen) mention the drugs or alcohol she's done, and she goes to great lengths to convince us of her sex drive—she takes a younger lover and gets tied up, among other things, within the first ten poems, and concludes the book on a virtual orgy. In the end, though, the book's speaker talks the bad-girl talk more than she walks the bad-girl walk. Most of her exploits (like getting tied up) are fantasies, and while she does a lot of relatively chaste kissing—the book begins with "First Kiss" and ends with "Kisses"—the poems fall fairly silent when it comes to the issue of sex, as if making love were a self-evident act needing little elaboration. For a bad girl who insists at one point that "fucking" is "holy, / a psalm, a hymn," sex might have as many variations as Eskimos see in snow, but more often than not Addonizio's subordinated good-girl discretion gets the better of her.

We come to realize, then, that the book's "bad girl" is not a whole lot more than a blustery superhero persona protecting the inner good girl from real life insecurities, regrets, worries, emotions, and fears. The bad girl and good girl come together, however, in the figure of the speaker's daughter, for while rarely mentioned, she is present in the speaker's erotic experiences that open and close the book. In the book's first poem, kissing a new boyfriend makes the speaker remember breastfeeding her daughter. Similarly, as she imagines getting kissed simultaneously by everyone she's ever kissed in the book's final poem, she explains: "My breasts tingle the way they did when my milk came in after the birth, / when I was swollen, and sleepless, and my daughter fed and fed until I pried / her from me and laid her in her crib."

Framed in such a way, What Is This Thing Called Love? becomes a stimulating and erotic address from mother to daughter. While the bad girl and her lovers probably get too many pages overall, it's the description of love from mother to daughter that makes for the most interesting reading in the book.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Laurence Donovan
Pineapple Press ($12.95)

by Robert Zaller

For most people, the connection between Florida and poetry begins and ends with Wallace Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West." Yet several impressive Cuban-American poets have emerged from Florida in the past generation, and an older generation, dating back to the 1940s, laid the foundation of a distinctively regional literature. One member of this generation, Donald Justice, went on to make an international reputation, but several of his contemporaries deserve acknowledgment, chief among them Laurence Donovan.

Donovan, who died three years ago at the age of seventy-four, published no book of verse during his lifetime; the present volume, with an introduction by Justice, is his first. Partly this was due to Donovan's own modesty, for though he knew his own value, he was not one to trumpet it. Partly it was due to the fact that he pursued a parallel and ultimately primary career as a printmaker. When he died, he left some 2,500 works of art; the poems were far fewer. Yet they evoke the unique natural environment of Florida as no others I know.

"Dog Island" was Donovan's most sustained meditation. He twice visited and sketched the island, which lies off the Florida Panhandle, and the poem—which partly describes the printmaker at work—is illustrated by the suite of superb etchings. The discipline of line, evident in both the poetry and the art, is itself taken up as a metaphor of place; thus, the feeding of grackles is described in terms of "fluttery incisive / Stabs from the air, / Scratching swift glyphs," while elsewhere, Donovan speaks of "the waves' erasures. / Dimmer white against white, / Their pale negative's / An old sketch of creation." The waves' recurring, "redundant" creation, which exists in an eternal leisure, contrasts with the poet/artist's patient accretions, the pressure of time behind each stroke and line. Many things can spoil the latter, the haste of ambition among them. "Dog Island" is in this sense a manual of piety. Like prayer, artistic observation takes attention, concentration, and humility. Like prayer, its conclusions are provisional. And although landscape is apparent whereas divinity is not, it is no less jealous of its secrets, and no less parsimonious in revealing them.

As Justice suggests, "Dog Island" may be viewed as an earthly paradise, anchored by the poet and his unnamed companion (the painter Dee Clark), the dune pine that emerges as a central symbol (the tree of life?), and the water moccasin that makes its startling appearance in a crab trap. If so, however, it is a decidedly postlapsarian paradise, in which the serpent is far more at home than the human visitors, and, indeed, "Where the human presence / Looms like a ghost."

In the companion poems of the volume—each with its accompanying print—Donovan focuses closely on the rich life of the tidal margin, pine and mangrove, "Palmetto thickets [and] snake- / Whispering brush." In "Etching the Sea Grape Tree" he again describes one kind of artistic creation by means of another, at the end of which the "ghost-tree" emerges from its acid bath, at once a simulacrum and an "original" creation in its own right. In "The Mangroves," the human presence enters the picture directly as the "stormy walker" who "brings to swamp disorder, / Yet order too, for possibilities / Cannot be had among the mangrove selves, / However they twist by sea in thickest beauty." One hears in this passage, as elsewhere in Donovan, the pressure of Stevens's "Blessed rage for order," the act of reciprocal completion between the human and the natural that human need simultaneously satisfies and creates. Here, too, however, the kind of humility we call innocence is required (a bow not in Stevens's quiver), and in "The Pine" and "The Sandflats" Donovan revisits childhood to capture a sense of the world's emergence in human consciousness. But we are already on the other side of Eden; his children stage a mock-death and crush a scorpion under a rock.

Donovan's Florida is still, but for the human footprint, primeval; it takes no account of the urban sprawl and tourist blight that has defaced so much of the peninsula. What he refuses to observe, or at least to record, is the macadamization of a landscape he has so deeply loved and inhabited. His gaze is turned resolutely outward, and what it wins is not subject to time:

Standing at this last portal,
Turned from where I'll return to—
The long channel, the drumming
Roads south—I watch the sea
Spread to its own horizon,
Lending grey washes of color
To hollow, white arches of sky
And in its empty vastness,
Through attenuations of light,
Draw me into that vastness.
Perhaps all I'll ever know
Remains at last in this light
Borne on the incoming waves
Into the beach's deep silence.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Christine Hume
New Issues Poetry & Prose ($14)

by Sun Yung Shin

The thesis of Alaskaphrenia, Christine Hume's second volume of poetry, is cleverly captured in its title, phrenia being a suffix from the Greek meaning mind that also connotes phrenology, the skull's peculiar tectonics and hidden topographies. Hume never lets her readers forget their mortality, the retractable scale of the human consciousness in a land that speaks an entirely different, indifferent language. Hers is an Alaska of the mind, an internalized landscape that invites a kind of submission to the contradictions of a state formed by irreconcilable psychological and psychic extremes: "If you sew yourself in, point toward a negative sublime. / . . . If you fear possession, try it on." This is the kind of dare that adventurous poetry readers admire.

Hume's poems have cerebral and ironic titles such as "Insert Your Eyes Here. Contemplate the Enchantment of Your View and Pleasurably Serve Your Mind." Like a good post-post modernist, she seems to know that "the subject wakes to discover that you cannot die in a portrait; you have to die in your body"; there is no one perspective attempting to approach something as vast as Alaska, with its multiple histories, languages, and geographies. And although this book has plenty of surface glitter and language play, most of Hume's lines are not mere showpieces for her virtuosity. The book as a whole is almost relentlessly severe, lonesome, and flavored throughout with pitiless admonitions such as, "Bears in spy skins approach. Never let what you think fool you."

The language of Alaskaphrenia is highly controlled and often pleasingly estranged from its own bodily sources—the throat, the tongue, the mouth. Hume relentlessly brings the body, especially the mouth, into the harsh, alien, almost apocalyptic outer world:

—then we mayde use
from corpse-smell
strong as if it were insyde
my own mouthe
thus deprivation coaxed
the God lying unclaymed
to spake like a lunge on a Coast

Her Alaska is a place of telepathic isolation and shifting scales where the body and its breath, its own rhythms of sense, are always at risk, as in the imagistic poem "Night Sentence," in which "a candle eats air from my mouth." In the fragmented question that is the title of "What'd You Come to Alaska for If You Don't Want?" Hume draws the mouth—like a lung—as a chamber, a channel:

When your rivermutter comes through
Pushing what's went out
Where is its source its mouth
The metal flavor of mouth

The plural and the singular collide in "Gargle Anthem for Get-of Sire and the Like":

Took so many mouths to discover
That song buried its notes in an owl jar
Said it was agony to speak
By not recognizing itself, escaped death
Switching places made it plural

These are poems obsessed with how the body's own vocalizations may violently consume a person:

Rhymed with whatever
Painted his esophagus white
Woke up his blood and sent it loinwards
He cast it off
That song was contraband
.................................................................
His chin was a plastic bag of sermon inhaling him

Ultimately, Alaskaphrenia is a book of abandonment, of lucid deprivations. Unnamed persons are often stricken and doomed, as in "The Sickness & the Magnet": "Birds went in & out of his mouth /…Then everything wanted to be / Killed at the rural spot." This morbid "living dead" theme is carried further in "Sampler City," which deftly paints a female site of slow-motion disaster, where "Girls resembled the state hospital, / and a plague slept between them." But take heart: though its "winter hunger weirds your mind-wires" and it's filled with fog, ice, hibernation, and suffocating terrors, Hume's Alaskaphrenia is a place of the hardiest imagination, where "Shut inside a cranium dark / Everything goes to prospect."

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Bill Knott
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($20)

by Cindra Halm

The surprise is that Bill Knott's poetry still surprises. After ten previous "official" volumes and a slew of self-published, proletariat-style chapbooks, The Unsubscriber elicits illumination by shaking up our complacency. Some would say by shtick or by trick, and certainly we recognize Knott's methods: the sonnet's development into a complicated or contradictory unity; the short fragments of lyric flush, biting sarcasm, or wildly unlikely images; the exaltations or excoriations of love, war, and death. But also Knott operates by lick, as in a capriciously placed lover's tongue; a guitar virtuoso's digressive and mischievously gorgeous phrasing; even an adversary's deliberate bruising. Since 1968, when his first volume appeared, Knott has had, and still has, the uncanny ability to simultaneously comfort and upend.

The Unsubscriber is organized in four sections, two of which are titled only by numbers and allow the variety and nuances of the poems to make connections among themselves within the reader's own organizing principles. Here are the familiar pointed observations, sexual innuendoes, tender love renderings, brash identity denunciations, and ubiquitous autumnal elegies. Another section adds the descriptor "An Interlude of Short Poems," and showcases the author's trademark stark punches, gloriously highlighted in his debut volume, The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans, and generously peppered in subsequent books. Here, contained in one section, they have a tamer feel about them, especially in their all-titled, neatly arranged format; fans of the more scattershot, fragmentary work may miss happening upon solitary blips of intensity, especially for the way they show a mind's lightning glimmers and pick-pocketed exhalations.

The final section, "Poems After," presents primarily translations of, responses to, and meditations on the work of other poets, philosophers, and artists (Douglas Messerli's 1998 collection After memorably mined a similar vein). Though some of the poems in this section (and, indeed, in the whole volume) previously appeared in Knott's chapbooks, where an author's note claimed that "The order of the poems is random, neither thematic nor chronological," their intentional organization here is interesting; in addition to the "after" premise, the themes in this grouping are home, change, peace, words themselves, endings, beginnings. A contemporary reader can't help but resonate with the cultural echoes of "after" in the wake of Sept 11, 2001. In this section, the gestalt of the composition, along with contextualizing notes about people, ideas, and language, renders a musical, thought-provoking, deeply felt suite, one made stronger by the choice of proximity.

With the declaration in his chapbooks about the ordering of poems, along with their occasional listings of book contests his manuscripts failed to win and their engagement in the perceived illegitimacy of vanity printing to begin with, the state of contemporary publishing has long been one of Knott's main themes. What gets published and what doesn't, and why? What does the zeitgeist allow, control, and censor, in content and style? Whose book is it, anyway? (For more on this topic, see the Bill Knott interview in the Summer 2000 print issue of Rain Taxi.) These are important issues that further Knott's roles as literary participant, commentator, gadfly, and outsider. This rebel energy has always been part of his aesthetic and oeuvre; his ideas and language in poems are just as likely to offend as to delight. Strong and surprising assertions and images play among human relations, the Vietnam War, suicide, God, and more recently, the literary canon. In fact, the new book's title poem, though it speaks in generalities, could be implicitly critiquing the canon as insider's clique with these concluding lines: "No one loves that vain solipsistic sect / You'd never join, whose dues you've always paid." Notice too that the definitions of "subscribe," in addition to contracting to receive a periodical or service for payment, include signing one's name on a document and expressing concurrence or approval. Add the fact that the word comes from the Latin "under" and "to write," and The Unsubscriber becomes very resonant.

Bill Knott is our contemporary e.e. cummings, and just as kaleidoscopically prolific. His work continually makes us wonder: Is he ecstatic or caustic? Experimental or formal? Witty or crass? Which of his selves is real or contrived? Like cummings, he is brilliant at both micro and macro, slaying us with word choice and punctuation as well as with a cosmos of imagination in ideas. Here's an opening premise you might not have seen in a poem before (though it wouldn't be out of place in an O. Henry story):

We stole the rich couple's baby
and left our own infant with
a note demanding they raise our
child as if it were theirs and we

would do the same. Signed,
A Poor Couple.

His frequent use of "Poem" as a title (ten such entries in this volume alone)—a conscious choice different from "Untitled" or simply leaving a blank space—speaks to poetry itself as a theme consistent throughout his books. The Unsubscriber ultimately comes across as an old friend one hasn't seen in awhile: more experienced in years and scope, but punk as ever, still able to compel attention, and filled with the yearning for connection. As Knott writes in "Wrong," "I wish to be misunderstood; / that is, / to be understood from your perspective."

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Mark Wallace
Edge Books ($12)
by Karl Kraus

Haze, a collection of variations on poetics by Mark Wallace, takes its title from a semi-deconstructionist conceit of "how words go on where discourse breaks down, splits apart, no longer recognizes itself as discourse." To cover his bases, Wallace writes though various topics and forms to present an inquisitive view of organizational and individual elements of poetry and expression. Haze, Elegy, Genre, Marketing, Lyric, and Rimbaud are all treated to Wallace's tuned investigation in this terrifically mindful composition of poetry and essays.

Wallace's widespread speculations on the organizational dynamics (institutional, economic, even conversational) of the avant-garde cover an impressive range, extending from the poet laureate to the most basic concerns of the smallest publishers. Extensively questioning the motivations, limitations, and dangers of institutional art, Wallace does not sink teeth into these ideas so much as he pulls teeth from them, leaving as clear a view of the "meat" as possible. "Does the unestablished writer remain free of complicity? To what extent are you trying (or not) to sell your poetry? To whom and for what reasons?" To ignore these questions, Wallace contends, is a youthful effort to defy reality.

As subject to his questions and declarations as anyone's, Wallace's art, suitably, offers its own argument—or may be the argument itself. When Haze deploys a disagreeable or controversial statement on the dangers of poetry's organization, it returns with humor, respect for the past, and even wonder: "How can it be that, writing this in a reflective moment, I am still immersed in those experiences I am trying to write about? How can it be that having experienced what I have and knowing what I know of it, that I am still unprepared for experiences that may be readying themselves even at this instant?" Wallace's honest humility, whether in pieces such as the whimsically allegorical "Avant-Garde Deodorant" ("I'm proud to wear Avant Garde, and I hope you are too") or in the book's more sober discussions, leave liberty to shape a whole perspective, rather than simply weighing this perspective down.

The fruit of Wallace's confrontation with the problems of the avant-garde are poems that provide imagining room for his ideas. These are firm, extensive poems, often with sharp stylistic changes across clearly defined sections. Essays in tow, the poems are firmly linked to Wallace's arguments: "My Xmas Poem," for example, follows the essay "On Genre as a Conversion Experience," which links the institutional mechanisms of poetry to the religious practice of the rejection of non-believers. With such concrete anchors, the poems will not fly away.

While celebrating the reality of magic, that "undeniable mystery that the world exists," Wallace veers to arguing "not how to destroy superstition in the name of material reform but how to expose false magicians in hope of making magic live." Magic and argument arrive arm in arm in Haze, and Wallace's top hat stays firmly attached to his head during the performance.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Makoto Yukimura
Tokyopop ($9.99 each)

by Robert Boyd

Science fiction comics, like science fiction movies, differ drastically from literary science fiction. In the best science fiction novels, there are limits to how much you can bend the rules of science; plausibility is far more important, and the very best literary science fiction is not only believable, but emotionally involving as well.

Makoto Yukimura's Planetes is a manga series that reads like a great science fiction novel—no wacky aliens, no giant robots, no beautiful android maids. Set 70 years in the future, humans have conquered space as far as Mars, but the problems of Earth are very familiar. Having exhausted the Earth's oil supply, most energy is supplied by fusion powered by Helium-3, which has been discovered in abundance on the moon. This makes space-based industry necessary, but industrial civilization is still stuck with a finite energy source, a polluted world, and even garbage in outer space. Earth in 2074 is neither a utopia as in Star Trek nor a cataclysm as in The Terminator. Pretty much like Earth today, it's muddling through with short-term solutions to long-term problems.

Hachi, Yuri, and Fee are astronauts, working as a debris clearers—high-orbit garbage pickers. Their job is to clear out floating trash left over from over 100 years of space travel, this debris being a hazard to navigation—which makes their job very important, if not especially glamorous or well-respected. Yukimura takes real care to make the environment of space as realistic as possible; these astronauts have to worry continuously about osteoporosis (caused by low gravity) and radiation-induced sicknesses like cancer. Yukimura also devises a kind of astronaut culture not unlike that of sailors or roughnecks, characterized by staying away from home for long stretches, having difficult relationships with their families, and glorifying their own peripatetic existence.

With three volumes so far, Planetes has plenty of space to tell all of its characters' stories, but by volume 3, Hachi has become the focus. He's the one who buys the mythology of being an astronaut more than any of them, shunning Earth and the complications of humanity. When a mission to Jupiter is announced, he is one of 20,000 volunteers for the 18-person crew; to make the cut, he pushes himself relentlessly, shutting out all emotion except ambition. He is impatient with anything less than perfection, and takes it out on his replacement of the debris-collection ship, a green astronaut named Ai Tanabe.

Hachi is selected for the Jupiter crew, but becomes even more withdrawn, losing weight, zoning out, experiencing strange dreams. His crew mates worry about him, but what finally revives him is an unexpected love affair. This is the heart of Planetes—the struggle between the single-minded pursuit of one's goals, and the need for love and friendship. Yukimura seems to suggest that great achievements, like conquering space, are accomplished by people so dedicated and focused that they seem inhuman—but he also consistently undercuts this extreme view, showing the need for humanity underneath all that ambition.

Yukimura's art is beautiful, detailed when necessary and simple when it's appropriate. Compared to most manga, the style Yukimura employs in Planetes is quite restrained; there is a matter-of-fact quality to the art that helps give it verisimilitude without resorting to straightforward realism. His figures aren't heroically proportioned—they have an appealing normality which also helps the suspension of disbelief.

Planetes is an ongoing series. Presumably we'll see the Jupiter mission carried out with Hachi as part of the crew, as well as find out what happens in the lives of Yuri, Fee, and Tanabe. The only problem is that the story is so entertaining, the wait for future volumes is likely to be maddening!

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Warren Ellis, Darick Robertson, Rodney Ramos, et al.
Vertigo/DC Comics ($14.95)

by Rudi Dornemann

A comic about a gonzo journalist in a grim but not-quite-dystopian future, Transmetropolitan has managed to be unique in a field where uniqueness is more often aspired to than achieved. One More Time, the tenth and final graphic novel collection, is too dependent on the rest of the series to stand on its own, but it's a dynamic conclusion to the story that Warren Ellis and his cabal set out to tell—and an apt reminder of just how good the whole is, a case study in how to employ and/or subvert genre conventions and constraints to the best advantage of the work at hand.

During the time he was writing Transmetropolitan, Ellis was also writing a weekly internet column, later collected in the book Come in Alone. In one installment, titled "The Old Bastard's Manifesto," he laid out his credo of how comics should be done. One point rejects the notion that comics' nature is to be an ever-ongoing serial: "The graphic novel," he writes, "is the optimized form of 'comics.' Comics are not 'habitual entertainment' that need to remain static and require broadcasting regularly until death do us part . . . Comics, like their related media of novels and cinema, must be allowed to tell complete stories."

The average length of these "complete stories"—at least the somewhat quirky, more or less creator-driven sort in which DC's Vertigo imprint has come to specialize—seems to be about 60 to 70 issues. The standard practice that's evolved is to group these issues into story arcs and issue these collections as graphic novels. So there's still a form of serialization going on; however, since graphic novels have a much longer shelf-life than monthly comics, the long-term reader is more likely to encounter Transmetropolitan as a sequence of ten graphic novels rather than a series of 60 individual comic books. Thus, a comic like Transmetropolitan, unfolding over a period of five of six years of monthly issues, has roughly the same pop-cultural life span as a reasonably successful television show. The process of being collected and issued in graphic novel form is roughly analogous to a TV show being issued season by season on DVD.

What sets Transmetropolitan apart from most series—either in television on in the comics—is that Ellis and his collaborators have used the dimensions of the 60-issue/10 graphic-novel format to present one carefully constructed narrative. One More Time points up the nature of this long arc by providing a conclusive ending, not only pulling together the various plot threads in Spider Jerusalem's struggle against the President of the United States, but also rounding out the stories of several secondary characters and bringing Spider's journey full circle. Some of the earlier collected volumes contain what originally seemed to be standalone short stories illustrating facets of the comic's future world—vignettes in which both the art and writing are at their most lyrical. In One More Time (and the preceding graphic novel collection, The Cure), however, these apparent detours prove to be necessary parts of the overall story.

Another thing that's unique about Transmetropolitan is the stability of the art team over the life of the comic: penciller Darick Robertson is credited as Ellis's co-creator and sees the book through from start to finish; Rodney Ramos inks the vast majority of the stories; colorist Nathan Eyring and letterer Clem Robins are constant presences. In an industry where art teams tend to shift frequently, this is remarkable. It creates challenges for the artists—there are only so many ways to draw Spider's bald, tattooed, black-suited figure—but it also allows for more nuance, since small changes in a character's expression, posture, and gestures will read more easily against a background of a thousand earlier drawings of the same character. Since we see the world consistently through the same eyes, the comic's world is all the more solid; since characters and settings aren't reinterpreted by different hands, the resulting artistic unity reinforces the strange familiarity of the book's future city setting.

That setting is key to the work's story and success: Transmetropolitan takes place at some indeterminate point in the next few hundred years—far enough into the future to allow some fairly extreme technology but near enough that the recurring tropes of politics, media, and urban life retain their familiar contours. It's worth mentioning here that, give or take the occasional origin story maguffin (e.g., an exploding home planet or radioactive spider bite), there's relatively little science fiction in comics—at least science fiction of the extrapolate-present-social-and-technological-trends-and-imagine-what-life-in-such-a-future-would-really-be-like variety. That Transmetropolitan has a fair amount of such speculation embedded into its setting—and therefore integrated in its plot—is another element that sets the series apart from the usual.

To be sure, a great deal of the city that is Spider's loathed and beloved home is an exaggerated version of New York, often satirically so. This is a world where artificially intelligent home appliances can become addicted to drugs, where you can buy cloned human-flesh fast food, and where you can modify your body at the level of DNA to become literally alien. But Transmetropolitan's future isn't just a more extreme version of the present. However magical the technology, Ellis is careful to enmesh its use in concentric circles of cause and effect—for example, while Spider can break open a capsule of "source gas" that will allow him to walk into an interview without any visible recording devices and still transmit the conversation to nearby recorders, the politicians who are his quarry are capable of blocking the transmission, if they happen to be watching for it.

Another sign of Ellis's science-fictional savvy is his being unafraid to take the trend of minaturization—what Buckminster Fuller used to call "ephemeralization"—to extremes, even when such extrapolating leaves him without a gadget or prop. This is a risky move in a visual medium. It doesn't seem too radical when Spider's assistants take pills that will give them a "cancer trait" so that they can smoke with impunity, but when he uses a "phone trait" so that he can make phone calls without the aid of a mechanical device, we see conversations in which the only reason we know that the people talking in adjacent panels are talking to each other is the conversation itself. This technique requires intelligent and attentive readers—and shows that Ellis and Robertson expect and encourage such readers.

Such expectations are a far cry from the level at which most superhero fare is pitched, but that doesn't mean Transmetropolitan has nothing in common with superhero comics. Later in "The Old Bastard's Manifesto," Ellis writes: "Rip from their steaming corpses the things that led superhero comics to dominate the medium—the mad energy, the astonishing visuals, the fetishism, whatever—and apply them to the telling of stories in other genres." In Transmetropolitan, he puts this strategy into action. Spider Jerusalem doesn't dress in tights, but with his black clothes and tattoos, his appearance is nearly as iconic as any superhero's. Spider's glasses, with a rectangular green lens and a round red one, are so recognizably part of his image, and so perfect for merchandising, that one scene in the comic has Spider stumbling into a crowd of his fans who've bought replica glasses. And it isn't hard to see Spider's assistant Yelena and bodyguard Channon as sidekicks in the classic superhero comic mode—at least on the surface, since Spider often addresses them as mentors. The relationship is more complex, however, since Ellis makes it quite clear that Spider would be unable to function without the women's support.

Another superhero comic staple is the arch-nemesis, a role filled by the politician Spider nicknames "The Smiler." In name and appearance, The Smiler echoes Batman's arch-enemy The Joker—and with a bit of imagination, one can see Transmetropolitan's plot as a riff on Frank Miller's re-envisioning of Batman in The Dark Knight Returns. Both comics follow the return of a main character who had retired from the world in which they were previously active; both Batman and Spider are afflicted with a life-threatening illness near the end of the story; both comics feature an urban milieu that's central to the action, but end in an idyllicized non-urban retreat. Where Miller intercuts a chorus of television news talking heads as a counterpoint to his vigilante's activities, Ellis's hero has a more intimate connection to the wash of television images which he alternately culls, contributes to, or recoils from. In terms of "mad energy," Spider is presented as both verbally and physically kinetic—we don't just see him pacing in writerly fashion, but running down the street on the roofs of cars, or dashing up to a rooftop to dash off a column. Yet ultimately it's Spider's words and what they represent that charm—he is, after all, a writer, and words are both his livelihood and his lifeblood.

This brings us to what is perhaps Transmetropolitan's crowning achievement: aware that an information age calls for information heroes, Ellis and his collaborators present a vision of the journalist as hero. In a time of highly publicized story-fabricating scandals and the increasing partisan polarization of news, the journalist as a character who's not only sympathetic, but potentially heroic, is more and more difficult. Still, that's what Transmetropolitan delivers. Spider Jerusalem is cynical enough to see through the spin, half-truths, and disinformation, but (beneath his crazed/manic/gonzo exterior) still caring enough to act. The stories he uncovers—with their glib, hollow, ruthless politicians, their extremes of degradation and insulated privilege, and their lifelike sense of ambiguity—are both wildly fictional exaggerations and naggingly true to life. The plot, of course, is constructed so that Spider can save the world—or lose it—but he has no special powers beyond the ability to see the world and communicate his vision. In One More Time in particular and Transmetropolitan as a whole, Ellis, Robertson, and their talented crew demonstrate that they also have these abilities—and that they, too, will use them in the service of the truth.

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Edited by Ben Marcus
Anchor Books ($13)

by Laird Hunt

In his Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno writes of those artists, "of the highest rank," for whom "the sharpest sense of reality was joined with estrangement from reality." Future trajectories of taste and circumstance will determine just how many highest rankers The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories ultimately proves to contain, but it is certainly the case that many of the 29 works that make up this excellent gathering of contemporary American short fiction seem to echo the substantive portion of Adorno's phrase.

Whether in George Saunders intriguing neo-realist/neo-fabulist hybrid, in which shabby beefcake, trailer park particularities and resurrected relatives do a kind of double-time tango, or in Mary Caponegro's characteristically probing and quietly unsettling investigation of a priest who assigns himself expanded duties, or in Aleksandar Hemon's hilarious and strangely haunting mock biography of an individual whose gastro-intestinal "winds" excite the commentary of personages as historically foregrounded as Tito and Stalin, the world of appearances gets held up, even kissed, but then either shoved away or squeezed so hard it coughs, groans, and breaks into rivulets of fascinating multi-colored sweat. Consider, for example, the opening of Gary Lutz's "People Shouldn't Have to Be the Ones to Tell You":

He had a couple of grown daughters, dissapointers, with regretted curiosities and the heavy venture of having once looked alive. One night it was only the older one who came by. It was photos she brought: somebody she claimed was more recent. He started approvingly through the sequence. A man with capped-over hair and a face drowned out by sunlight was seen from unintimate range in decorated settings out-of-doors. The coat he wore was always a dark-blue thing of medium hang. But in one shot you could make out the ragged line of a zipper, and in another a column of buttons, and in still another the buttons were no longer the knobby kind but toggles, and in yet another they were not even buttons, just snaps. Sometimes the coat had grown a drawstring.

What could have been dreary domestic minimalism is here torched or torqued into something fresh and strange; gentle neologism, unabashed alliteration, off-beat rhythms, repetition, and observational obsessiveness collide into delightfully un-realist surfaces. The opening of Dawn Raffel's "Up the Old Goat Road" offers related pleasures as it fuses the pastoral with the paratactic:

We are here on the peninsula, where pie is made from scratch and the goats are getting fatter on a nearby roof. It is an upwind roof. This is industry, my father says. Company, my sister says. This is not the dells. All the supper clubs are shut or tight. The falls are somewhere else we have not been. Overhead is where it's lusher, fresh—green above this hard-luck thumb. But the goats, my sister says, look overwarm. The water is our neighbor, and what washes up is sorry or worse.

As in so many of the stories here, this is writing where style is not treated like varnish or ornamentation but rather as integral to the proceedings. For those who have read their Barthelme and Baudrillard, this might seem like old gravy, but the average mass-circulated compendium of short fiction in this country has continued to propagate the notion that language is just something to look through, not at. It's refreshing to open an anthology and find so many stories where style is celebrated as thoroughly as narrative, characterization, and plot—where, in short, the literary breakthroughs of the twentieth century are integrated, rather than ignored. As editor Ben Marcus puts it, "The writers here have absorbed the fiction methods of the past and added their own hunches, instincts, desires, fears, cravings, and artfulness to command a reader's attention in compelling ways."

In addition to the above-mentioned authors, it would be as relevant in this context to quote from the contributions of Stephen Dixon, Matthew Derby, Diane Williams, Lydia Davis, and others whose carefully constructed language fields engender or strongly amplify their far from under-determined narrative thrusts. In fact, I can't resist presenting one further example, this sentence from Brian Evenson's "Two Brothers": "He lay on the floor of the entry hall, the rug bunched under his back, a crubbed jab of bone tearing his trousers at the knee." Evenson is known in his fiction for shedding fresh light on the vicious give and take between language and violence, but it seems to me that in this assonance- and marrow-rich exemplum he sets a kind of standard.

It's important to point out that a significant part of the pleasure of reading this anthology derives from the variety of the work presented. Indeed, a number of the stories (e.g. Jhumpa Lahiri's "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine," Deborah Eisenberg's "Someone to Talk To," and Anthony Doerr's "The Caretaker") are handsome, even stately, examples of realism—stories that don't shove away or squeeze/throttle the real, but instead stare long and hard into its eyes before offering the reader full, if elliptical, status reports. If these works had been conjoined with a majority of the usual realist suspects, the results might have been tedious. Instead, Marcus has managed—while placing the emphasis of the anthology on formally and stylistically innovative writing—to set up a bracing conversation between a wide-ranging spectrum of contemporary works. The shift from Eisenberg's gorgeous Katherine-Anne-Porter-inflected prose to the high-octane abrasive intensity of David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" is a highlight in this regard, as is the striking distance between, say, Anne Carson's wonderfully gnomic paragraph-length prose/poetry hybrids in "Short Talks" and Lahiri's crystal-clear, classically understated contribution.

In his introduction, Marcus (whose own work could have been seamlessly included in the lineup) elucidates his selection process: "My idea was to read hundreds of stories, in as many styles as I could find. I wanted to align contemporary American story writers who might have radically different ways of getting to a similar place. In each case as I sat down to read, I had to be turned from a somewhat dull, unpromising person into one enlivened, antagonized, buttressed, awed, stunned by what he was reading." If some of the entries fall a little short of the transmogrifying mark, the majority will wake the reader out of whatever stupor they happen to be in. The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories is a book to own, read carefully, and keep close at hand.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Dan Simmons
EOS ($25.95)

by Allan Vorda

Dan Simmons's first foray into science fiction since his epic Hyperion saga Ilium stretches across over four thousand years in yet another astounding display of writing and ideas, not only about the potential future but the potential past. As with Hyperion, the reader must await the sequel for the story's conclusion, but there is plenty to digest until the sequel, to be titled Olympos, is published.

Ilium—the title comes from the Latin name for the ancient city of Troy—entails three seemingly disparate stories that eventually intertwine. The first story, a retelling of Homer's epic poem the Iliad, is narrated by one Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., an English teacher from the late 20th century who has died but has been brought back to life by the Greek gods to witness and help interpret the war between the Achaeans (Greeks) and Trojans.

Hockenberry is typical of Simmons's wonderful characters. He is no super-hero, and not particularly handsome or athletic. Because the gods are scheming (Aphrodite, for example, wants Hockenberry to spy on the gods and to kill Athena), Hockenberry knows that if he makes a mistake, his resurrected life will end. When Hockenberry displeases Aphrodite, the goddess of love threatens to split him open and use his "guts for my garters."

Yet Hockenberry has the guts to take matters into his own hands. Far from being a conscientious recorder of events, Hockenberry aspires to challenge the gods and change history. He has been given devices by Aphrodite to help him spy on others. The items include a quantum teleporter, a Hades helmet (which makes him invisible), and the ability to morph into other people. One wonderful scheme is when Hockenberry morphs into Paris and makes love to Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world.

Later on, Hockenberry muses to himself: "If I'm not allowed to speak, the events of this night will diverge from the Iliad. But I realize they already have diverged. What's going on here?" One thing going on here is a revisionist interpretation of history and the Iliad by Simmons. Not only does Simmons inject new dialogue and scenes, he even incorporates a science-fictional explanation as to why such warriors as Achilles, Diomedes, and Hector are so powerful: it's because the gods of Olympos have injected a modicum of nanotechnology into the most powerful warriors in order to influence the ongoing battle.

While the Trojan war is going on somewhere around 1200 B.C., events are taking place on Earth, in a place called Ardis Hall, in the year 3001 A.D. Here the story is set on the smaller scale of a love triangle: Daeman, an out-of-shape middle-aged man with Nabokovian tendencies, wants to seduce Ada, a physically beautiful young woman who sees the inner beauty of Harman, a ninety-nine year old man who prefers learning and dying to being waited on by strange creatures and the hope of immortality. The reader cannot help liking these characters—even Daeman, who thinks he is intelligent and a man who knows butterflies, though he is no more intelligent than he is a lepidopterist. Daeman's thought about Harman's desire to read "made no more sense than celebrating one's ninety-ninth year." Yet to Simmons's credit, it is Daeman who learns something about himself and becomes a better human being by the end of the novel.

Simmons also introduces some strange creatures in the future as well. There are the Zeks or Little Green Men (chlorophyll-based workers) who erect thousands of Great Stone Heads on the planet Mars. There are also the mysterious bipedal creatures called the Voynix, who are assumed to be simple servants for the people of Ardis Hall, but are as indecipherable and esoteric as their namesake (taken from the Voynich manuscript). Yet the most interesting of Simmons's creatures are the Moravecs, biomechanical robots with human traits who work under the extreme gravitational moons of Jupiter.

This brings us to the third ongoing story that takes place in Ilium. The two central Moravecs are the tiny Mahnmut and the larger and more powerful Orphu. At first glance, they appear simply to be like the good-natured robots from Star Wars, but they become perhaps the most complex of all the characters in Ilium. Mahnmut is first seen exploring the seas of Europa while Orphu is mining on Io. Before long, these two robots become pivotal characters in the struggle on Mars, but they also argue at every opportunity over the merits of Shakespeare and Proust. In Simmons's universe, literary arguments are debated by robots whereas the human race cannot even read; it is a scary thought (or is it?) that those who will keep literature alive are machines.

What is also frightening is that Simmons has projected the apparent demise of humanity by robotic creatures around the year 3001 A.D. Yet writers like Hans Moravec in his book Robot or Raymond Kurzweil in The Age of Spiritual Machines predict substantial robotic takeover by 2050 (Moravec) or as early as 2029 (Kurzweil). These writers see it not only as inevitable but as a good development.

To sum up Ilium is virtually impossible. Suffice it to say that by the end of the novel—with a cataclysmic battle looming between the Greek gods and a coalition of forces that include the Achaens, Trojans, Zeks, and the Moravec army—the stage is set for a sequel that will have readers waiting in anticipation. Having already written the magnificent Hyperion (and the subsequent Hyperion tetralogy, possibly the greatest SF saga ever), a brilliant novel about Hemingway set in 1942 Cuba (The Crook Factory), a superb suspense novel (Darwin's Blade) and a gothic horror novel (A Winter Haunting), the genre-defying Simmons here adds another startling epic to his already impressive oeuvre.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004