Laura Elrick
The Elephants ($15)

by David Brazil

In an interview about the 1979 film Alien, director Ridley Scott stated that he understood the events of that film to be set in the same world as the urban dystopia of Blade Runner. With such classics of science fiction and apocalyptic cinema feeling especially relevant during our pandemic times, this observation regarding the convergent catastrophes of corporate cupidity in deep space and the unlivable environments left to rot down here on earth feels like a key to reading Laura Elrick’s What This Breathing. The space of the book is one of multiple overlapping disasters through which we navigate. The title itself, stripped of a verb that would animate the fragment into a sentence, might be asking “What [is] this breathing,” what is the nature of life right now? But it might also be asking, in the manner of “What, me worry?” (the tagline of Mad magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman), “What, this breathing?”

The book’s first text, “Mouth Starts,” is titled in the table of contents but not on the page where it appears, signaling that it is intended as a sort of overture. With our mouths we breathe, speak, eat, and sometimes vomit:

tremblingly my muscled mouth my uncontrolled control

is ownerless, my botanies, when it arcs it

or actual my mouth

starts many-ownered over

From the start the poem stages the question of what belongs to us and what is common or taken away by degraded collectivities. The possessive pronoun “my” is obsessively repeated in the text, perhaps because the speaker perceives that it is both “ownerless” and “many-ownered.”

A similar drama attends the deployment of the first-person pronoun, which sometimes functions grammatically as though it were third-person: “I begins to dance?” or “just tell me how much I owes.” The speaker’s estrangement from a language into which we are supposed to fall without reserve (we aren’t supposed to think about whether we are “I” when we say “I”) makes the mask of even what should be the most intimate, evident. As the physical environment is polluted by industrial waste and nuclear disasters, so the linguistic environment becomes toxified by the degradations of language that are its analogues and concomitants: “to be the lie repeatedly, day after day.”

Having seen the world and the word smashed, and being ourselves smashed, it seems that the right response might be to smash back:

You say: the state, police state, patriarchy and its breaks, broken backs and the tanks, bank windows, white power networks, official and unofficial, pharmaceutical capitalists misogynists and terfs, excessive feelings of fear or vulnerability, refugee camps, excessive feelings of power and self-righteousness, museums, cartesian space linear time, putting the brakes on, no brakes and no breaks

Elrick’s voices—for these poems are speeches, as surely as Browning’s are—find the solace of “her whom I loved” even in the battery of an MRI chamber. And since poets are, as Shelley says, “mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present,” it’s no wonder that a text preoccupied with emergencies should prefigure much of the tonal center of pandemic life: anxiety, confusion, isolation and broken communication. There are even mysterious visitors “from the epidemic / Center.”

In a short poem, “Slurry Pump,” which may be the book’s ars poetica, the speaker takes a break from wading “through sludge, toward the hull of a rusting ship rent / in half” where they live, to reflect on a past whose “lessons (guppy, minnow, porpoise, shark)” (the grades in YMCA swimming classes) “could have prepared you / for this type of breathing. A poem for the future then.” It is a poem that remembers a world before the devastation and brings that memory into relationship with what breathing is now: airways choked by methane seas, respiratory contagions, and cops. “The Great Dying will nevertheless be lived through / An intersubjective space.” In the midst, the task of speaking and naming abides.

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

Molly Aitken
Vintage ($16)

by Jane Ainslie

In The Island Child, Molly Aitken’s first novel, readers are taken to a barren, Irish island, where only America lies beyond the horizon. It may be the 1980s, but Inis is a place where idols of Jesus and the Virgin Mary live alongside tales of selkies and faerie children. When it comes to gender roles, the place also remains in the past: only boys get to experience the reckless freedom of childhood. Girls are shut away in the house until they are old enough to marry.

The story alternates between Oona’s childhood on Inis and her adulthood in Canada, where Oona settles with her husband Pat and raises their daughter. Oona’s childhood is poisoned by superstitious beliefs instilled in her by her mother and the crude moral carrots and sticks of her religion. The reader feels acutely how trapped Oona is in that hut with Mam, who uses religion to justify the hatred she feels for her daughter.

One of Aitken’s gifts as a writer is her ability to evoke a world, and the immediacy of the detail is at times astounding—the bed cover that is “smooth as a church window,” the broken umbrella flapping in a rainy Galway street “like a dead crow’s wing,” elderly Aunt Kate standing in the doorway with her smear of pink lipstick. It is often said, though, that a writer’s strength is also her weakness, and this is true when it comes to Aitken’s remarkable descriptive abilities. The prose is so packed with detail that it often leaves little room for the story to breathe, and the characters are not given the chance to inhabit Aitken’s carefully crafted settings as fully as they might. The constant transition between time periods is also an obstacle to becoming immersed in the story.

Still, there is much to be admired here. Besides her gift for atmosphere, Aitken also has a talent for revealing the invisible dynamics between characters. This is perhaps most poignantly demonstrated in the winding path Oona’s life follows; a girl who hated her Mam, she becomes a woman who puts up the same emotional walls between herself and her daughter.

Ultimately, the soft angst of Irish motherhood is at the heart of The Island Child. It hangs in the corners of a room, in the shadow of a lace curtain, and in Oona’s fingers as they trace the curves under the wooden table where she hides from her young daughter in a heartbreaking role reversal of mother and child. The story shines most in these quieter moments, when we are allowed to feel what remains unspoken between two people.

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Trung Le Nguyen
RH Graphic ($16.99)

by Stephanie Burt

The Magic Fish is everything.

Or—in a less colloquial, wordier way—The Magic Fish is everything I want at the moment in a graphic novel, especially in one meant for both kids and adults to read. This first narrative work from the accomplished Minnesota-based illustrator Trung Le Nguyen folds European and Vietnamese fairy tales (among them “Cinderella” and “The Little Mermaid”) into a braid that also includes realist stories about a second generation immigrant childhood; about parents who do their best and still sometimes fall down; about middle-school friendships that (amazingly) work out; about modern and wartime Vietnam; and—not to be forgotten—about kisses, love stories and happy endings, some of which are gay as all get out. And that’s without even mentioning the line art or color. Nguyen’s debut flew—or swam in the air—from my hands to the very small shelf of all-ages graphic novels I buy in multiples and give to everybody, alongside Laura Lee Gulledge’s Page by Paige and Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam. Like them, it’s a thing of surpassing, sweet, credible beauty, at once realistic in its treatment of human emotions and out-of-this-world in terms of what readers can see. Its happy endings (and there are several) could warm up a frozen room.

The Magic Fish begins as a pair of alternating stories. One, told in black and white line art with red backgrounds, follows thirteen-year-old Tiên Phong, who attends middle school with his best friend Claire and their jock friend Julian in 1998. At home, Tiên reads fairy tales to his hardworking, kind, attentive mom, who wants to improve her English; she came to the U.S. as an adult, and now works at a costume rental (modeled on Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater). Tiên has—Claire realizes—a big crush on Julian: will Julian reject him as a friend, return his love? Can Tiên ever come out to his immigrant mom, and will he get in trouble as a gay kid at their Catholic school?

While panels in red follow Tiên’s story, panels in black, white, and indigo follow the fairy tales that Tiên reads. All concern mermaids or magic fish, and all concern girls magically tied to the sea who make their way, and fall in love, on land. One is “Cinderella,” another “The Little Mermaid,” and another still has debts to “The Juniper Tree.” The first and longest concerns a girl in a Shakespearean boy-disguise and the boy who wins her love. All involve children and grandmothers, aunts, magic helpers, and older antagonists; all speak to the ocean, and to the generation, that separates immigrants both from their culture of birth and from their more Americanized children. They also evoke the spells, the determination, and the compassion that come with the right kinds of love.

If The Magic Fish were nothing but what its first third promises—red realist childhood stories and blue fairy-fish stories—the book would end up good enough to recommend, not only for its sensitive storytelling pace, its lovely, expectant faces and tender poses, but for the way that Nguyen deploys ink and monochrome color. One particularly expressive panel where Claire comforts Tiên uses at least five intensities of red, from Claire’s dark skin to the pale-pink of Tiên’s much-mended and plot-relevant jacket. Nguyen’s line art, meanwhile, is its own pleasure: his many sinuous curves and filigree traceries bring exceptional beauty to long hair, fish fins and tails, waves, and showers of magic stars from a twilit sky, but he is also more than capable of following them with cartoony middle school kids, whether they’re credibly happy or quietly angsty or, in one case, sweaty.

And yet—for all the delights its first segments delivers—The Magic Fish is far more than that. There’s a third storyline colored in tangerine: yellow-orange panels, beginning less than halfway through the book, denote flashbacks, mostly to Vietnam and the days when Tiên’s mother and her new husband became refugees. Now that the Phong family have become US citizens, Tiên’s mother can go back to visit her family, and once there, she learns other, Vietnamese fairy tales, linked by motif to the Western versions her son has told her before. These tales, in turn, illuminate Tiên’s coming out story at home and his wish for a romantic happy ending. That wish finds support in the way that his mom, her relatives in Vietnam, and, by extension, Nguyen himself self-consciously tweak, transform, and reinvent matters of heritage so that they can inform, rather than contradict, modern, queer lives.

Nguyen keeps these optimistic, queer-positive, kid-friendly claims aloft not just through his plots, but also through deft nets of elegant symbols. Mending clothes—as Tiên’s mom does all the time—is like adapting folktales. Patches are like peaches. Adapting folktales is like translation. Translating is like baking, but also like what Claire does at school, serving as a trustworthy go-between. And all these enterprises are like the larger enterprise of fixing a life, picking yourself up after a rent or a tear or a disaster—say, a war—and learning to go on. Fantastic visions meet their counterparts in the careful realist stories that link Nguyen’s generations, that link the troubles of immigrant parents to the emotional questions tweens (and not only gay tweens) try to handle. “I feel,” Tiên tells Claire, “like everybody’s problems are so much bigger than mine.” He’s not wrong. But his problems are real.

artwork from The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen

As the braided tales inform one another, fairy marine princess to immigrant mom to stressed-out, crushed-out kid, the colors do too: in one of Nyugen’s signature effects, single objects and then panels on pages with one color incorporate another—first the red peaches in the blue tale of Alera, then panels of tangerine or indigo inside pages of red. Asking “How can I return to a place I’ve never been” about the fierce ocean, looking brave and vulnerable in her blanket and cloth cap, young Alera echoes Tiên’s questions about his own relationship to Vietnam. His mom’s resolution, like Alera’s Happily Ever After, proves worth the wait.

Astonishingly beautiful all on its own, Nguyen’s story will still make sense to kids who have read few or no graphic novels before. It’s likely to be the first long story with an Asian, and especially Southeast Asian, protagonist that some of those kids have perused. Comparisons to the deservedly über-popular Raina Telgemeier, to Tillie Walden, or to Jen Wang’s also-elegant The Prince and the Dressmaker might prove hard to avoid.

Comparisons to the best-known comic about insecure Asian kids—MacArthur Fellowship winner Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese—show a welcome variety of difference. Graphically, panel by panel, the two are nothing alike (and, if it needs saying, China is not Southeast Asia). Structurally, they resemble each other. Nguyen’s volume, like Yang’s, brings together multiple narratives, one about a kid and one built from folktales. Yang tells an emphatic story about accepting the heritage, and the body, you’re given. The Monkey King comes all the way from legendary China so that Yang’s protagonist can stop his fits of self-hate, his futile attempts to be someone else (someone white), someone other than what he was at birth. It’s a perfectly told and deservedly famous story, but it can hit trans kids and artsy kids and kids who require assistive technology in very much the wrong way.

Nguyen hits us the right way. “It feels as though I’m not whole,” his Little Mermaid figure tells her elaborately drawn, marine-magical grandmother, who cautions the girl: “This is transgressive. Your yearning desire to be other than what you are may well be your undoing.” But, as we know and Tiên learns, that desire might instead build your best self. Your wish to dress different, to look different, to change your friends or your habits or your body or your pronouns, might be a culpable wish to run from yourself (as in Yang) but it also might be your way to become who you need to be, who nobody else knew you were. Self-acceptance can also be self-transformation, and that’s a lesson everybody—not only middle school second-gen kids—could use.

But I’m getting away from my initial claim. So let me call your attention to the striking, Art Nouveau-ish, transoceanic beauty on every page of The Magic Fish, which also tells sweet and credible stories about a girl in disguise and her peach tarts, a spectacular mentor who can’t leave the ocean, a mom and her kid and their family in Vietnam, a kid and his dad and his crush and their best friend. Ultimately, though, you have to read it yourself, because The Magic Fish is everything.

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

Sigutė Chlebinskaitė, Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, and Nissan N. Perez, eds.
Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Vilnius (€34)
by M. Kasper

Exquisitely designed, printed, and slipcased, this two-volume set includes a hardbound facsimile of The Ghetto Lane in Wilna, a masterpiece of book art from 1931, along with a companion paperback of bilingual essays. Deservedly, it was on the shortlist for best exhibition catalog in Aperture’s PhotoBook competition last year.

The heart of the matter is the little facsimile. The work, still so fresh and original, first came out as one in a series of inexpensive photobooks issued by a left-wing publisher for middle-class and working peoples’ self-education. A total of 12,500 copies were printed, with the texts in three bi-lingual versions: English-Hebrew, German-Hebrew, and German-Yiddish. A slightly enlarged reproduction of the German-Hebrew version was published in Berlin in 1984. This new facsimile, of the English-Hebrew edition, is much more faithful, truly duplicating the size, binding, and feel of the original.

Both the original and this edition are modest in appearance and format, measuring just 7¾” x 5⅛”. Counting the cover, there are 65 black-and-white “pictures” (some with a single photograph, some with several) of streetscapes and people in the old Jewish quarter in Vilna, Lithuania. Each image is accompanied by a brief title or caption, usually simply descriptive, but sometimes grander (“Man and Architecture”). The work was inspired, probably, by the Yiddish playwright An-Sky’s project to archive the dying Jewish cultures of the Russian Pale, earlier in the century, but the Wilna photos were shot, cut, combined, and placed on the pages in ways that make it much more than merely documentary.

The sequence of images hints at narrative. It’s as though we’re strolling through the neighborhood, looking up at architectural details on the rundown buildings, then down into puddles on cobblestoned streets, and then observing people—mostly old, poor, and threadbare—as they go about their business. Ten years before the pictures were taken, 80 had died there in an anti-Semitic pogrom; the celebrated Yiddish author Zalman Shneur’s sentimental preface to The Ghetto Lane in Wilna mentions neither that, nor, indeed, much of interest about the images that follow. The pictures more than make up for any lost background, however. They include brilliant collages and montages in the manner of the times, but even more surprising and memorable are the photos cropped by the artist into geometric discs and slices, or curvy shapes, and laid out with lots of white space around them. Above all, this is unique and noteworthy page design.

Although The Ghetto Lane in Wilna is only occasionally mentioned in histories of photography and collage, it was widely admired in European avant-garde circles before World War II (when most of the print run was destroyed) as a vibrant, distinctive album of exotic imagery and innovative, cinematic mise-en-page. Leafing through it now, the cut up pictures have an even deeper, more sorrowful significance as an eerie prefiguration of the Nazi dismemberment of European Jewry.

The prefiguring artist was Moyshe Vorobeychik (1904-1995), a young Jewish Bauhausler then resident in Paris who was studying photographic technique. In 1929 he went home for Passover and took the photos with his new Leica. Emil Schaeffer, the adventurous owner of the publisher Orell Füssli Verlag, saw some on exhibit at a Zionist convention in Zurich, and brought the book out in 1931. It was credited to “M. Vorobeichic,” a variant transliteration of his name.

That same year, a second stunning photobook by Vorobeychik came out, entitled Paris. Larger in format than Wilna, with an introduction by the famous painter Fernand Léger, it’s another album of urban images, but different from its predecessor. The pictures are semi-abstract, almost tactile montages of places, people, and traffic, multiple exposures and sandwich prints mixed into an engrossing, evocative portrait of a big city on the go. Paris was credited to “Moï Ver,” a short form suggested by André Malraux so Vorobeychik’s name would be easier to pronounce.

There was a third album, Ci-contre (Facing Page), compiled soon after, for Franz Roh’s Fototek books, but, as Vorobeychik wrote laconically in a note to a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1974, “it was not edited because of Hitler, etc.” The paste-ups, thought lost, resurfaced decades after World War II, but it took further years of effort by the artist and his family before Ci-contre was finally published, posthumously, in 2004.

Much information about the artist’s life and context is available in the elegant, illustrated companion volume to the new Wilna facsimile. In the first of two lucid essays of bio-criticism in both English and Lithuanian, Nissan Perez (who curated the Moï Ver retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, which this publication commemorates) summarizes Vorobeychik’s career and analyzes his artistic environments. In the other, Mindaugas Kvietkauskas digs deep into Vorobeychik’s early art education in Vilnius, before he left to attend the Bauhaus. Both scholars have mined family papers in Tel Aviv and Montreal, among other sources, for fascinating background details, to which they’ve added insightful commentary. These articles add a great deal that’s new and useful to the sadly meager literature on Vorobeychik.

Also included are a comprehensive chronology, as well as previously unseen photographs and copies of documents—including, most marvelously, Vorobeychik’s contract with Orell Füssli for The Ghetto Lane in Wilna. “The publisher hereby acquires the rights for all editions and issues,” it reads, “but if obligations remain unfulfilled, the publisher is authorized to find a substitute and deduct its cost from the publisher’s fee.” Thankfully for us all, the artist delivered.

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