Ashk (Tear) Acrylic on Muslin and Canvas, Found Fabric, Thread
Ziba Rajabi (b.Tehran, Iran) received her MFA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and her BFA from the Sooreh University, Tehran, Iran. Her primary practice is focused on painting, drawing, and fabric-based installation. She is the recipient of the Jerome Foundation Mid-Career Artists Fellowship and the Artist 360 Grant, a program sponsored by the Mid-America Arts Alliance. Her work has been included in a number of exhibitions, nationally and internationally, such as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; AR, CICA Museum; South Korea; Masur Museum; LA; 21C Museum, AR; Conkling Gallery Minnesota State University, MCAD Gallery, MN; Araan Gallery, Iran; The II Platform, UK, among many others. She has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center, Terrain Residency, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Visit her at zibarajabi.art.
Another successful Independent Bookstore Day is in the books! Thousands flocked to their favorite bookstores with Rain Taxi’s Passport in hand to visit new stores and meet challenges that allowed them to get discounts and prizes. Read below to learn all about the program.
Congratulations to Prize Pack winners Alyssa N., AnneMarie C., Brian F., Nick C., Beau B., Stephanie E., Colleen G., Abigail O., Selina C., Emma E., Adam B., Holly Z., Amanda H., and Lizz W.—and to our Grand Prize winners Lonnie E., Sophie B., and Dion S.!
Rain Taxi’s Twin Cities Literary Calendar is once again publishing its pocket-sized Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport—andoffering readers fun ways to visit the stores and win discounts and prizes. Our annual Bookstore Passport celebrates both Independent Bookstore Day (this year taking place on April 26, 2025) and our metropolitan area’s bounty of great community-based bookstores!
Illustrated by local artist Kevin Cannon, the Passport is FREE to pick up at any participating store between Wednesday, April 23, 2025 and Sunday, April 27, 2025. During these five days, travel to as many participating Twin Cities area bookstores as you can, because you can get your Passport stamped at each store you visit during that time span for a future discount at that store and a chance to win great prizes!
We encourage you to share your bookstore journey on social media and to tag us (@raintaxireview) on Instagram, Facebook, or X.
Thanks and best wishes on your travels with
the Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport!
How It Works
While this Passport can serve as a year-round guide, from Wednesday, April 23 to Sunday, April 27, Rain Taxi and the stores invite you to get your pages stamped! Each stamped page becomes a future discount coupon, and collecting ten or more can earn you even more perks:
10+ stamps
Activate all coupons!
Get your Passport stamped at 10 or more bookstores by Sunday, April 27, and ask the 10th one to stamp the special page in the back of your Passport to activate all 37 coupons — you’ll have savings for months to come!
20+ stamps
Enter to win a Prize Pack of treasures from our sponsors!
Get your Passport stamped at 20 or more bookstores by Sunday, April 27, and ask the 20th one to stamp the special page in the back of your Passport. Then follow the instructions below to enter the Prize Pack drawings!
30+ stamps
Enter to win the Grand Prize: $25 gift cards to twelve independent bookstores!
If you visit 30 or more participating stores by Sunday, April 27, ask the 30th one to stamp the special page in the back of your Passport. Then follow the instructions below to enter the Grand Prize drawings!
Participating Stores
There are 37 great bookstores participating in the Passport this year. Visit each link for their open hours, and for an interactive Google map, see below!
Readers who obtain at least 20 stamps can enter to win a Prize Pack full of treasures from our sponsors!
PRIZE PACK 1 • Enterby Jim Moore (Graywolf Press) • Pushing the River by Frank Bures (Minnesota Historical Society Press) • Lined notebook (StoryForge) • Graywolf Press tote bag
PRIZE PACK 2 • A Lesser Light by Peter Geye (University of Minnesota Press) • Songs, Blood Deepby Gwen Nell Westerman (Holy Cow! Press) • Voucher for three free audiobooks (Libro.fm) • University of Minnesota Press tote bag
PRIZE PACK 3 • The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda (City Lights) • The Pinchers and the Curse of the Egyptian Cat by Anders Sparring (Lerner Books) • Doing My Best hardcover journal (Publish Her Press) • University of St. Thomas tote bag
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Readers who visit at least 30 bookstores between Wednesday and Sunday can enter to win this year’s GRAND PRIZE: $25 gift cards to twelve of the participating bookstores — a $300 value! — plus a Rain Taxi tote bag and a copy of our recent chapbook, A Minnesota Book(ish) Miscellany!
How to Enter
If you have obtained 20+ stamps, email a picture of the challenge stamps page near the back of your Passport to calendar [at] raintaxi [dot] com, including in the email your name and city/state of residence, by end of day on Monday, April 28, or tear it out and mail on Monday, April 28, to Rain Taxi, PO Box 3840, Mpls MN 55403 with your email address and name included. Winners will be notified by email on Friday, May 2.
Sponsors
Please join us in thanking these amazing sponsors for championing independent bookstores in the Twin Cities and beyond!
Alex Kuno is an artist and illustrator living and working out of his studio in the Lowertown arts district in Saint Paul. He’s currently working on two solo shows, opening in Seattle in December and Philadelphia in March of 2025. See more on Instagram @alexkuno; Etsy.com/shop/AlexKunoArtwork; and Alexkuno.bigcartel.com.
Minnesota is famous as a haven for literary genius. In this miscellany, you’ll find many of the puzzle pieces that explain why—from eclectic lists to booksellers of uncommon distinction to a writers hall of fame, this compilation is guaranteed to inform, annoy, and delight!
Chris Barsanti is a writer, editor, and consultant. He is the author of several books including Six Seasons and a Movie: How Community Broke Television (co-written with Brian Cogan and Jeff Massey) and the creator of The Writer’s YearPage-A-Day Calendar 2025. A member of National Book Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society, Barsanti writes on the semi-regular for Publishers Weekly, The Minnesota Star Tribune, Slant Magazine, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and PopMatters. He also writes about movies at Eyes Wide Open and has been published in places such as the Chicago Tribune, In These Times, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Millions.
This event is free and open to the public and a reception will follow!
Join us for some afternoon fun with the Eisner Award-winning, New York Times bestselling cartoonist Jeffrey Brown, who will treat us to a presentation on his new release this fall: Kids Are Still Weird And More Observations from Parenthood. In this book for readers of all ages, Brown offers sweet and surreal anecdotes from his life as a parent, comics that capture how curious, hilarious, and yes, weird, kids can be. When he was a kid, Jeffrey dreamed of growing up to draw comics for a living, and now he’s living that dream! Don’t miss this afternoon of fun with a comics legend. Book sales of Kids Are Still Weird and other titles by Jeffrey Brown will be available onsite thanks to Red Balloon Bookshop, and Brown will sign books in a reception after his presentation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey Brown is the bestselling author of the Darth Vader and Son and Jedi Academy series, as well as numerous other books, including middle grade comics (his Lucy & Andy Neanderthal was 40,000 years in the making), humorous superhero books (most recently Batman and Robin and Howard), relatable observational comics (Cats Are Weird), adult graphic memoirs (Clumsy, Unlikely), irreverent parodies (Incredible Change-Bots), and imaginative tributes (My Teacher Is A Robot).
To purchase issue #115 using Paypal, click here. To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.
INTERVIEWS
Charlotte Mandell: The Immense Noise of Céline’s War | interviewed by Barbara Roether Sally Franson: Big in Sweden | interviewed by Margaret LaFleur Leslie Sainz: Shedding Histories: Cubans in Exile | interviewed by Olivia Q. Pintair
FEATURES
The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan In Memoriam: Paul Auster | by Dennis Barone In Memoriam: John Barth | by Neal Lipschutz In Memoriam: Jerome Rothenberg | by John Bradley A Look Back: Anthony Heilbut’s The Fan Who Knew Too Much | by Richard Kostelanetz
Like Love: Essays and Conversations | Maggie Nelson | by Jeff Bursey Cactus Country | Zoë Bossiere | by Erica Watson Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live with Care and Purpose in an Endangered World | Kate Schapira | by Anna Farro Henderson The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony | Annabelle Tometich | by Mark Massaro Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War | Jason K. Friedman | by Mike McClelland Rabbit Heart: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Story | Kristine S. Ervin | by George Longenecker
FICTION/MIXED GENRE REVIEWS
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other | Danielle Dutton | by Jonathon Atkinson Proses: Incomparable Parables! Fabulous Fables! Cruel Tales! | Garrett Caples | by Oli Peters Tidal Waters | Velia Vidal | by Diane Josefowicz The Material | Camille Bordas | by Lori O’Dea The Extinction of Irena Rey | Jennifer Croft | by Nancy Seidler Landscapes | Christine Lai | by Alex Gurtis Gretel and the Great War | Adam Ehrlich Sachs | by Seth Rogoff
POETRY REVIEWS
The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz | Delmore Schwartz | by Patrick James Dunagan And Yet Held | T. De Los Reyes | by Alex Gurtis Orders of Service: A Fugue | Willi Lee Kinard III | by Laura Berger The Lady of Elche | Amanda Berenguer | by Daniel Byronson Listening to the Golden Boomerang Return | CAConrad | by Greg Bem Bad Mexican, Bad American | Jose Hernandez Diaz | by Gale Hemmann The Sorrow Apartments | Andrea Cohen | by Bill Tremblay Bright-Eyed | Sarah Sarai | by Jim Feast
COMICS REVIEWS
My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two | Emil Ferris | by Paul Buhle
To purchase issue #115 using Paypal, click here. To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.
JoAnn Verburg’s current exhibit, Aftershocks, can be viewed at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through January 12, 2025. Click here for more info.
JoAnn Verburg received a BA in sociology from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MFA in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. From 1977 to 1979, she served as the research director and photographer for the Rephotographic Survey Project, traveling throughout the American West to replicate the same wilderness views made by 19th-century frontier photographers. While heading Polaroid’s Visiting Artist Program in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Verburg promoted technical innovation in the photographic field by inviting artists Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, and Jim Dine, among others, to experiment with new large format instant cameras.
Distinguished by its extraordinary sensitivity to the energy and sensuality of the natural world, Verburg’s own photographic work combines exquisite color, varied focus, and thoughtful composition to convey the beauty of its subject and setting. Often presented as diptychs and triptychs, her images of olive groves near her home in Spoleto, to which she has returned for over 30 years, envelop the viewer in a serene, dreamlike atmosphere and explore the passage of time both literally and figuratively. Verburg lives and works in Minneapolis and Spoleto, Italy. Visit her website for more info.
Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases Roque Dalton Translated by Jack Hirschman and Barbara Paschke Seven Stories Press ($18.95)
One Impossible Step: Selected Poems Orides Fontela Translated by Chris Daniels Nightboat Books ($17.95)
At first glance, not much connects the work of poets Roque Dalton (1935–1975) from El Salvador and Orides Fontela (1940–1998) from Brazil. Dalton, a committed revolutionary in the armed struggle leading up to his country’s civil war, writes poems in the direct, colloquial expression of everyday people—they are not didactic, yet they do wear their political and social concerns on their sleeves. Fontela’s poems, on the other hand, are far more hermetic; elusive, abstract, and philosophical. And of course, Fontela writes in Portuguese, Dalton in Spanish. Yet the two are contemporaries whose work responds to social conditions during turbulent times.
Looking at these two disparate poets together—that is, reading them through each other’s lenses—enhances the parameters with which the work of each might be framed. Dalton becomes more philosophical, while Fontela gains in political gravity. Take a short poem by each. Here is one of Fontela’s “Seven Bird Poems”:
We’ll never know such purity: bird devouring us while we sing it.
And this is Dalton’s “Poetic Art 1974”:
Poetry Forgive me for having helped you understand you’re not made of words alone.
In each case, the poet addresses their art, Dalton directly and Fontela through the archetypal image of a bird. While Fontela uses the universal “we”—as translator Chris Daniels notes, “Fontela almost never wrote the word ‘eu,’ the subjective form of the Portuguese first-person singular pronoun”—Dalton maintains an intimate “I-Thou” relationship, asking forgiveness for expanding poetry’s knowledge of itself. In both cases, the power of poetry to reach beyond language’s supposed meaning is stressed, albeit from opposing perspectives. Dalton implies the revolutionary context of his poem by including the year in the title, suggesting that poetry has a role to play in a time of cultural unrest and armed struggle, but Fontela also rejects the supposed rarification of poetry—“such purity”—in favor of the more active, even violent, “devouring us” that is within the art form’s transformative power. And while different in tone, both poems extol how poetry can elevate our ability to conceive the world anew.
Drawing from all of Fontela’s collections of poetry, One Impossible Step represents not only the broadest translation of her corpus into English, but, at only 130 pages, it also operates as a compact overview of her biography and poetics. Daniels (who has also translated Pessoa among other Lusophone authors) ingeniously includes some twenty pages of excerpts from three interviews with Fontela, and Brazilian poet Ricardo Domeneck contributes a succinct afterword that assesses the trajectory of her life and work. Domeneck describes Fontela as
A person who owned no property, who felt neither the need nor the desire for a love relationship, perhaps [she] was uninterested in praising anything but oxygen. Perhaps her poverty led her to abandon adornment and poetic beautification. . . . demonstrat[ing] the linguistic attention of a post-war poet living a historical moment that demanded, in the use of symbols, an awareness of their being signs.
Dalton is much better known to U.S. readers; an earlier edition of this very book, published in the early 1980s under the title Poemas Clandestinos/Clandestine Poems, went through multiple printings. Now released as Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle as the first of a several Dalton translations to be issued over the coming years, it is actually the last, likely unfinished, work of Dalton’s; it comprises five sets of poems by distinct “authors” invented by the poet (though these pseudo-pseudonymous characters are nothing on the scale of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms). It’s unclear quite what Dalton had in mind by casting his voice into different personas, yet perhaps it is more important to draw attention to what these figures have in common: a belief in the necessity of cultural revolution and the use of poetry as a means towards that end. An opening “Declaration of Principles” signed by “the authors” closes by stating that the “enemy poet” (as opposed to the “servant poet” or “clown poet”) must have “a lucid and invincible confidence in the working class” and engage in “direct participation in its struggle.”
Fontela came from the working class, went to school to study philosophy on a scholarship, scraped by as a teacher, then “died in a public hospital in 1998, without a close family, destitute as a poet.” Dalton’s father was an American who financially provided for his education; he traveled internationally, spent time in Cuba honing his belief in communism and guerilla skills, and was tragically murdered in 1975 at the hands of his fellow revolutionaries in El Salvador , a victim of political infighting. Despite the vast differences in their lives, however, both poets created a body of literature hinged upon life—and because of this, these new translations of their work into English are vital.
Click below to purchase these books through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:
To purchase issue #114 using Paypal, click here. To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.
INTERVIEWS
Mark Dowie: Surrender to the Creation | interviewed by Mike Dillon Stacey Levine: Some Kind of Laughing Gas | interviewed by Ted Pelton Ben Tanzer: Lying Is So Much Easier | interviewed by Rachel Robbins Jessica Jacobs: These Striving Hymns of Contranyms | interviewed by Tiffany Troy
FEATURES
A Look Back: A Primer For Forgetting: Getting Past the Past | Lewis Hyde | by Abeer Hoque The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan Considering Charles Simic (1938–2023) | by Mike Schneider
No Harmless Power | Charlie Allison | by Paul Buhle The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays | Guy Davenport | by Eric Bies The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men | Manuel Betancourt | by Jackson Wyatt He, Leo: The Life and Poetry of Lew Welch | Ewan Clark | by Patrick James Dunagan No Judgment: On Being Criticial | Lauren Oyler | by Evan Youngs Muse of Fire: World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets | Michael Korda | by Chris Barsanti Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti | Jake Johnston | by Doug MacLeod Measure’s Measures: Poetry and Knowledge | Michael Boughn | by Bruce Holsapple
COMICS REVIEW
The Beautiful Idea | N.O. Bonzo | by Paul Buhle
CHAPBOOK REVIEW
The Mating Calls // of a // Specter | Kelly Gray | by Ali Beheler
FICTION REVIEWS
For Now, It Is Night | Hari Krishna Kaul | by Alex Lanz Neighbors and Other Stories | Diane Oliver | by George Longenecker You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grant: A Farcical Biography | Brad Neely | by Mark Dunbar The In-Betweeners | Khem Aryal | by Gemini Wahhaj
POETRY REVIEWS
Modern Poetry | Diane Seuss | by John Bradley Theophanies | Sarah Ghazal Ali | by Joanna Acevedo Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002–2022 | Major Jackson | by Beth Brown Preston Being Reflected Upon | Alice Notley | by Patrick James Dunagan The Life of Tu Fu | Eliot Weinberger | by Jon Cone The Inventor: A Poet’s Transcolonial Autobiography | Eileen R. Tabios | by William Allegrezza The Asking: New and Selected Poems | Jane Hirshfield | by George Longenecker A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us | Carla Sofia Ferreira | by Alex Gurtis The Ridge | Robert Bringhurst | by Greg Bem Hatch | Jenny Irish | by Matthew Duffus
Kristin Schue is a mixed media artist from St. Paul, MN who explores discarded ephemera and vintage material. Often using snippets of old newspapers, elements of old books, photographs and anything that has a bit of weathering she combines these found materials with contemporary elements to assemble new stories. She hopes viewers find something strange, yet familiar among the quirk, wit and wonder embedded in her work. You can see her works at the Northrup King Building in the NE Minneapolis Arts District and at kschue.com.
Title: Tale of Sorrow Size: 4” x 2 ⅞” Medium: wood, resin, book pages, beads, swarovski crystals, gold foil
Illustrated by local artist 
PRIZE PACK 1
PRIZE PACK 3
