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INTERVIEWS

Christine Sneed: Please Be Advised  |  by Justin Courter
Zack Kopp: A Guide to Happiness, Aliens, False Spiritualism, Brain Drugs, and Punk  |  by Hillary Leftwich

ESSAYS

Grand Prix: A Memory of Russell Banks  |  by Madison Smartt Bell
James Weldon Johnson: The Poet-Bureaucrat  |  by Richard Kostelanetz

FEATURES

If and Only If  |  by Scott F. Parker
The New Life  |  a comic by Gary Sullivan

PLUS: cover art by David Amdur

FICTION REVIEWS

Headless World or The Problem of Time  |  Ascher/Straus  |  by Alvin Lu
Ex-Members  |  Tobias Carroll  |  by Jesi Buell
The Beloved of the Dawn  |  Franz Fühmann  |  by Greg Bem
Revenge of the Scapegoat  |  Caren Beilin  |  by Zoe Berkovitz
It Falls Gently All Around  |  Ramona Reeves  |  by Nick Hilbourn
Brother Alive  |  Zain Khalid  |  by Brian Watson
At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf  |  Tara Ison  |  by Eleanor J. Bader
No Excuses  |  Stephen L. Harris  |  by George Longenecker

NONFICTION / ART REVIEWS

The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution, 1968–69  |  by Chris Funkhouser
Under My Bed and Other Essays  |  Jody Keisner  |  by Sandra Hager Eliason
We’re Not OK: Black Faculty Experiences and Higher Education Strategies  |  Antija M. Allen and Justin T. Stewart, eds.  |  by George Longenecker
Groundglass  |  Kathryn Savage  |  by Evan Youngs
The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature  |  Josh Lambert  |  by Richard Kostelanetz
The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, and Lovers Talkin’ Early Bob Dylan  |  Anthony Scaduto  |  by Scott F. Parker
A Horse At Night: On Writing  |  Amina Cain  |  by Garin Cycholl
Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal  |  John Yau  |  by W. C. Bamberger

POETRY REVIEWS

[To] The Last [Be] Human  |  Jorie Graham  |  by Walter Holland
How To Communicate  |  John Lee Clark  |  by Stephanie Burt
O  |  Zeina Hashem Beck  |  by Tara Ballard
Summer  |  Johannes Göransson  |  by K. Blasco Solér
The Collected Poems  |  Marguerite Young  |  by Zachary Tanner
The Sky Watched: Poems of Ojibwe Lives  |  Linda LeGarde Grover  |  by Warren Woessner
Translation of the Lilies Back Into Lists  |  Laynie Brown  |  by John Bradley
No Farther Than the End of the Street  |  Benjamin Niespodziany  |  by Justin Lacour
Damage  |  Mark Scroggins  |  by Joe Safdie

COMICS REVIEWS

Regarding the Matter of Oswald’s Body  |  Christopher Cantwell and Luca Casalanguida  |  by Chris Barsanti

To purchase issue #109 using Paypal, click here.

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Even before the pandemic, our culture was beset with isolation and conflict. In reaction, I have chosen to use my art to reach out to my community by depicting people coming together through music, art, festivals and social justice actions.

This painting represents the MayDay Parade, a community celebration which was organized annually for 45 years in South Minneapolis  by the In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre. Each April (before the pandemic), the community was invited to create hand-built puppets and masks for the parade— some over 15 feet tall. On the first Sunday of May, more than 50,000 diverse participants and spectators filed the streets in this celebration of local culture. 

—David Amdur

John Freeman
Copper Canyon Press ($17)

by Joanna Acevedo

John Freeman’s third collection of poetry, Wind, Trees, has Freeman’s characteristic quietness: an understated, restrained quality which lends itself particularly well to post-pandemic writing. As a follow up to 2017’s Maps and 2020’s The Park, both also from Copper Canyon Press, Wind, Trees has a similarly dedicated focus; it is split into two sections, “Wind” and “Trees,” each of which have their own tone and point of view. Through exploration of form, repetition of ideas, and meandering of thought, the collection quietly stirs up issues of loss, friendship and partnership, and how to coexist in this dark yet brave new world.

Freeman is at his sharpest when he’s working with narrative—like in “Boxing,” one of the earliest poems of the collection, when the speaker tells the story of Carla, his sparring partner in London:

                                               What, I don’t
work you hard enough? she said once,
catching me outside, still sweaty
in my trainers, then ran
me until I puked. What do you
want, she asked. Are you here
to hurt someone? We can do
that.

Many of the poems tell stories, and these are the most successful; they allow a window into the poet’s life and are more engaging than the more abstract poems, which tend to blur together. That’s not to say there aren’t some beautiful lines in the more enigmatic poems—there certainly are, and Freeman has a knack for distilling an observation about life or pain into a pithy one-liner—but the narrative poems have a true sense of grit to them.

As for the collection’s understated title, Wind, Trees does in fact elicit a sense of the wind in the trees—the sonic sense is very strong, and Freeman puts lines together masterfully, playing often with internal rhyme and meter. In “The Heat Is Coming,” he brings this sonic play to a high level, with lines that rhyme and break and rhyme again:

The ocean is dying but we’re dying of
thirst, the power grid over Paris just burst,
they think it’s hackers from Novosibirsk . . .

This has a humorous effect, but the theme of the poem is grave. The juxtaposition of humor and significance is one that appears throughout the collection, and often to great success. At other times, Freeman turns tender; in “Nothing To Declare,” he writes:

What kind of heaven
would it be if I
couldn’t take you

This poem emerges as the heart of the collection: For all the stories told, jokes made, and fears shared and overcome, the answer to all these big questions is love. It is a redemptive mission, and one that has been hard-fought. In this way, Wind, Trees is a meditation on not only loss, but also love, and the way that although love can cause us pain, it can also heal even the deepest of wounds. We are not alone, Freeman argues. And perhaps we never were. Wind, Trees is a fascinating exploration not only of pandemic loneliness, but of the ways we begin to cope with our own isolation and process loss. The collection comes at the perfect time; as a society, we are starting to heal, and poetry such as thismay be able to help those who are looking for ways to face their isolation and get better.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2022-2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Maya Marshall
Haymarket Books ($17)

by Rachel Slotnick

Maya Marshall does not mince words in All the Blood Involved in Love, her debut poetry collection. Twitter declares #believewomen and #sayhername, and Marshall claps back, “Down the maternity halls black women are dying.” Reading this book is like looking through a kaleidoscope at a cross section of violence: the violence of motherhood, the violence of race, the violence of illness, and of course, the violence of love.

Marshall begins by calling out lies. Our reality is a fiction, she declares: “The story is that there is so much loss, // so much waste in a woman who does not make // a body with her body // . . . // The story is that the black woman is safe.” In the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson, the news cycles have washed their hands of the residue of intersectional progress, and Marshall leans in: “I have the good fortune to be free: / to choose, / to have part of my cervix intact, // to change the locks after / I’m attacked.” Through the suspense of enjambment, she addresses the horrific historical use of hysterectomy. She also implicates its continued contemporary use with references to Dawn Wooten, the detention center nurse who came forward regarding the forced sterilization of immigrants at the border.

The pain of both having and not having circumvents the collection. In a poem titled, “An Abortion Ban,” Marshall weaves together the inequities of gender, race, and longing: “Semen is an innocent bystander. / Penises are just boys being.” The narrative splinters as the kaleidoscope turns. We move from logic and sequential design to metaphorical and abstract figures: “An embryo is a fingernail. / A fetus is a jail,” followed by “A uterus is a leash. / A stillbirth is a tether.” The synthesis of her words is unavoidable: whether a woman becomes a mother or not, she is imprisoned.

With each new atrocity, Marshall’s words build intimacy. Many stanzas are confessional in nature; they are loveless letters. They were drafted and stamped, but never sent: “He thinks we understand each / other because of his illness / and my blackness, / but my blackness / does not make me sick.” In weighing pain and adversity against heartbreak, the reader feels like a voyeur, spying on a woman who is hemorrhaging words. Marshall laments: “Our two bodies empty / of bodies. A friend and a widow on the shore.” Even before the violence of illness comes to fruition, a loss has taken place, and before that loss another loss, and before that another.

Between personal asides, Marshall ruminates on the implications of choices for women of color. She sometimes speaks with regret: “When I remember the man that I wanted to marry but couldn’t, / I think about the children we didn’t have. // My fibroids would have made room.” Fibroids affect nearly a quarter of young black women, and by mentioning the ailment, Marshall underscores the pain of motherhood with the ache of marginalization. She asks of an unnamed man in the text, “why he doesn’t walk on lit major streets. / He says he is afraid to be outside in his body. // In a museum, a white woman reaches for me // tells me she’s never thought / of black men being afraid.” Marshall seems to be asking, Where do we go from here?

The cumulative effect is that the distinction between forms of violence is narrowed. Moving from same sex desire to childbirth, Marshall writes of “the stretch marks that surround the /exit wound.” In so few words, she likens childbirth to gun violence. Elsewhere she equates queer love and viciousness: “I looked into the open cleft of a lover and watched / the month’s first rivulet descend as she called / on my tongue’s continued praise.” In other words, to love is to bleed and to make bleed.

In this collection, Marshall doesn’t lean on irony or falsehoods; she tells it like it is, unafraid of poetry that doesn’t sound like poetry. Perhaps this is most astutely demonstrated by her shrewd dedication: “To mothers, especially mine. And to those who choose not to.”

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Mary Ford Neal
Taproot Press (£9.99)

by Nick Hilbourn                            

The cryptic theme of distance pervades Mary Ford Neal’s second poetry collection, Relativism. Neal’s ethereal, almost anodyne verse masterfully introduces characters and objects that seem to float above the sediment.  At one time, a reader imagines they are witnessing the diatribe of a disillusioned lover, while in almost the same breath that character (often identified by only the pronoun “she”) laments an irreconcilable space within herself or between herself and a deceased (or inaccessible) other.  Neal layers the idea of distance over that of absence, asking how we determine whether something far from us was ever really there in the first place.  In light of this struggle, the collection troubles the binary of exteriority and interiority, often within the process of re-building a sense of self.  The speakers in Neal’s poems are recovering from losses and struggling to identify themselves in the rubble of defunct relationships.

What agonizes many of the narrators in Relativism is the distance between an event and its comprehension in words.  The mouth becomes an important symbol in this regard: “She hasn’t shut her mouth in thirty years. / Was it the shock of the savage afternoon…His mouth gaping, like his body—did hers open in silent answer and forget to close again?... Or is it just that putting lips together after all these years would feel like a denial of the bodies.” The closing of lips finishes a traumatic event that has no natural denouement. 

In “Pentecost,” Neal carries that troubled closure further, writing, “Sometimes when lips are forced apart in grief or fear / a bird flies in and mates with you for life… There is no why nor anything to do but be a gentle host.” The distance is reconciled by an invading guest (“a bird flies in”) and, in reconciling the physical distance between the speaker and the approaching party, Neal recreates that distance inside the speaker.

In “Elegy Before Time,” Neal further plumbs the burgeoning absence between two people: “I think I know the thrust of what the doctor told you /, but the fingers of your silence are on my lips. / If I could speak, the only thing I’d say would be / Don’t forget me.” To attempt to articulate such an event through speech would be to destroy it, or at least to embark on a foolish endeavor, as a speaker notes in “In expectation of disappointment”: “I believed in their permanence, but they slipped through me like ghosts.” In the world of Relativism, the mouth, whether open or closed, doesn’t consume; it is designed to receive, to be a “gentle host.” 

“Care Plan” suggests a starvation of the memory as the ideal mode of reception: “The restaurant was booked for half-past eight. / She said that starving was a gentle death. / Her partner and their friends would have to wait. / She knew that they would summon up the strength.” Don’t attempt to consume the event or process it, the poem implies; people should “have to wait” for the event to find its place naturally within them and form a sense of absence. To Neal, a “gentle death” means refusing to struggle through rationalization of trauma, and instead, allowing the event to disrupt, transform, and fracture one’s ego. The self is a space we walk through and become, not a possession.

Neal dedicates her poem “Apparition” to Mary Oliver and nods specifically to Oliver’s well-known “Wild Geese.”  The particular struggle of the self in Relativism parallels Oliver’s poem. Oliver writes, “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination…”  Neal matches that idea of outside interference, but her poems starve those external objects that we absorb to form a sense of self. 

For Neal, the self is composed of absence: distances within us, between us, and outside of us.  In “Nine colours of my hometown,” she writes, “my sorrow is the shape of his absence…all I know…is that life is a soft, apricot thing / that takes its own duration to ripen, / so that you never enjoy the ripening.” Who we are is formed around a vacuum.  As we distance ourselves to observe and organize what we see and experience, we come to understand ourselves, too. 

Yet, like Mary Oliver’s geese, Neal’s verse explains that life is an ongoing act of ripening, and so we never truly get to step outside of it and observe.  It’s only in the feeling of distance that we gather information about life, and have a chance at comprehending that, in Oliver’s words, we are “heading home again.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2022-2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Jean-Luc Champerret
Edited and translated by Philip Terry
Carcanet Press ($26.99)

by John Bradley

What if the Ice Age markings found on the walls of the famous cave of Lascaux, France, are poems? A Frenchman, Jean-Luc Champerret, while scouting the caves in the Dordogne in 1940 as a possible shelter for the local Resistance during World War II, copied the markings he saw into notebooks, where he then “decoded” them into words, and then into poems. Eventually the notebooks, packed in a wooden crate, were discovered by a friend of Philip Terry who was remodeling a house, and he passed the notebooks on to Terry. Terry saw the uniqueness and merit of Champerret’s work and translated the French into English, giving us this large volume. The hundreds of poems that constitute The Lascaux Notebooks make for fascinating reading.

Champerret had a multi-step process of translation. First, he copied the markings, which he broke into three lines of three marks. He then made a one-word translation for each mark. Here’s an example:

footprints     people                 river
mist             silhouettes            spears
eye               trees                     fire       

Three more expansive translations follow. Here is Champerret’s final translation of these nine words from his initial bare-bones translation:

By the bank of the river
        there are footprints in the mud
                    footprints of tribesmen from beyond the mountains

suddenly we see their forms
        appear out of the grey mist
                    carrying their long bone tipped spears

we crouch behind the cover of the trees
        watching their every step
                    burning inside with fear

The poem has come a long way from those initial nine words! Note how the triad “eye  trees  fire” becomes “burning inside with fear,” a rather audacious transformation—but then, it could be argued that this is exactly what all translators do.

However, there are some red flags in this book that will give pause to the careful reader. First, little is known about Jean-Luc Champerret. Terry says Champerret was born in the village of Le Moustier in 1910 and was the author of the poetry volume Chants de la Dordogne (Songs of the Dordogne), yet no copy of this book can be found. As mentioned above, Champerret allegedly worked with the French Resistance during World War II, and we learn from Champerret’s housemaid that his cell included “a tall wiry Irishman.” Surely Terry wants us to picture Samuel Beckett, who was part of the French Resistance then too. It seems a bit suspicious that this detail remains in the memory of a housemaid who knows so little about Champerret. Secondly, we have no photographs of the wooden crate that Terry was given or of the notebooks themselves, as they “remain fragile.” Instead, charcoal drawings have been reproduced for us in the book. These help our comprehension, but they do not boost confidence in the existence of the notebooks.

Thirdly, Philip Terry has been active in the Oulipo group, the literary group known for their love of linguistic play, puzzles, riddles, and trickery. Terry edited The Penguin Book of Oulipo and published two collections of poetry called Oulipoems. It’s not straining credulity to see The Lascaux Notebooks as an elaborate Oulipo creation. Fourthly, buried in a footnote, the reader learns that some of the marks Champerret recorded in his notebook from the Lascaux cave cannot be found on the cave walls. Terry explains this away by saying that “some of the signs . . . rapidly deteriorated” and that Champerret’s “light source . . . created shadow effects” causing the recorder “to see signs in the cave’s rock surface where they were not” due to his “overactive and overstimulated imagination.” The reader might wonder if Terry is having a good laugh as he composed this footnote. Fifthly, Terry’s introduction concludes with such gushing praise of Champerret’s translations as to raise even more doubts: “Champerret’s work amounts to no less than the greatest modern ‘defense’ of poetry that we have.”

In addition to these lingering issues, one more red flag must be acknowledged. One of the poems, based on these nine words—“tooth     fruit     hut / man     tooth     root / tooth     fruit     happiness”—sounds rather like a poem by William Carlos Williams. Here’s Champerret’s final translation of these nine words:

To say I have eaten
        the fruit that
                    you were keeping in the hut

you will have to
        make do with
                    roots when you break fast

eating the fruit
        I thought
                    how delicious how cold

This reads like an Ice Age parody of Williams’s famed poem “This Is Just to Say”—so much so that it feels like Terry is poking an elbow into the reader’s ribs.

Yet putting these reservations aside, as difficult as that might be for some readers, there’s much to admire in this book, which often feels like a guide on how to compose a poem from the smallest seed. While this book of translations never intends to be such a “how to” poetry handbook, it’s still eye-opening to watch a poem grow from nine words. In fact, some of the poems grow from fewer than nine words, as at times some of the original nine are repeated. Here’s an example of that repetition: “forest     fire     fire / burning     burning     fog / people     river     eyes.” Champerret begins his translation with the flat statement “The forest / has caught / fire,” which becomes the next draft: “The forest of pines / has caught fire / and is blazing.” The line has gained energy and improves even more in the next, and final, draft of the poem:

The dark forest of pines
        has caught fire like dry moss
                    it blazes like the sun

the angry flames
        spit clouds of blackness
                    making the day night

the dark eyed villagers
        stand trembling by the crowded river crossing
                    crying leaping shouting watching

While the word “villagers” may feel a bit out of place for Ice Age cave dwellers, that last line of the poem, with the four gerunds, generates a visceral intensity. Champerret shows the reader how to take the most basic words—in this case, “people     river      eyes”—and make magic with them.

In this same way, the poems could be seen as lessons on how to translate. Each draft of a poem shows how the deeper meanings and nuances of language can be fleshed out with vivid detail if the translator explores the poem with persistence and imagination. Note how “burning     burning     fog” transforms into “angry flames / spit clouds of blackness.” The verb “spit,” conveying moisture, seems out of place at first, but it makes the fire a rather frightening living entity.

The Lascaux Notebooks presents a window on the inner life of our Ice Age ancestors, as mysterious cave markings become poetic testimonials. At the same time, the volume will leave some readers wondering if this is all an elaborate prank engineered by a skilled Oulipo poet. Either way, this provocative book is worthwhile.

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by Chrissy Kolaya

Writer, publisher, and community builder Ryan Rivas is a familiar face in the Florida literary community. As the founder and publisher of Burrow Press, Rivas has focused not only on developing a press devoted to taking artistic risks, but also on working to cultivate literary community by launching and supporting an impressive number of fun and creative literary events in and around Orlando. As Coordinator of MFA Publishing at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas creative writing program, Rivas is working to inspire a new generation of students to develop their own literary activism. Rivas’s own writing has appeared in The Believer, The Rumpus, and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, and has been recognized with a fellowship from the Macondo Writers Workshop, which supports writers engaged in activism.

Rivas’s debut book, Nextdoor in Colonialtown (Autofocus Books, $26), is an innovative pairing of photographs of Orlando’s Colonialtown, the author’s neighborhood for the last decade, juxtaposed with text from the area’s Nextdoor.com posts. The book is at once an exercise in examining one’s home and a powerful commentary of the role attitudes about land, property, race, and fear have played in the development of many of our country’s suburban communities.

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Chrissy Kolaya: What can you tell me about where the idea for this book came from?

Ryan Rivas: During the worst of COVID and while I was at work (still am) on what I think of as a “suburban gothic” novel, I started taking pictures of my neighborhood on my phone while I was out running. I am preoccupied with aspects of the gothic in relation to Whiteness, and maybe this led me to stop and document these innocuous and strange things. (Also, as a begrudging runner, I appreciate a good excuse to stop.) I started posting these photos on Instagram as a kind of series, but it was Autofocus Books publisher Michael Wheaton who prompted me to think more conceptually about what I was doing—to think about how the photos were related, and what it might mean to add text and present them as literary nonfiction.

Most of the photos are of houses, and so I began thinking about the people who might be looking back out at this sweaty bearded fellow taking pictures. And of course, it turns out there’s an app for that. I was aware of Nextdoor and the general suburban surveillance state, but I’d until then abstained. I borrowed a neighborhood friend’s account and discovered all the joys and horrors of the app, and I realized these are the people looking out—I’m going to let them speak, in a way, in relation to the photos.

CK: In the Acknowledgments, you mention the paintings of Ericka Sobrack as an inspiration, specifically for helping you “re-vision my residential surroundings.” Are there any particular paintings of hers that especially resonated with you? Which of the photos in the book do you see as most directly influenced by her work?

RR: A long time ago I was in a local café and saw an almost photo-realist painting of a single streetlight illuminating a grassy traffic median, and ever since then I was a fan of Sobrack’s paintings. Many of them are of houses at night. Shadow, light, and subtle details play a primary role in creating what I think of as suburban gothic moods. While much of her work is inspirational, maybe the best examples are clustered in her 2019 paintings: “Beacon,” “Reveal,” “Séance,” “Fortress,” “Threshold.” These are probably why I first stopped to take a photo, because I saw scenes that looked strikingly like her paintings in my own neighborhood. Then I couldn’t stop seeing that way.

You’ll notice there are more day shots than night shots in the book. That was me in part trying to carve out my own space, which (as I eventually realized) was a way of exploring what is gothic and ominous about the daytime. It was important to push against the trope of darkness being negative, scary, a threat.

A couple friends have also pointed out similarities between my photographs and the work of Todd Hido and Gregory Crewdson, who, in addition to Ericka Sobrack, I highly recommend. I’m not a trained visual artist, so there was a lot of anxiety of influence going on! I don’t think I’d have published the photos beyond social media without the addition of the text.

CK: I’d love to hear about your process for arranging the images, for pairing the images with the text, for choosing titles, and for dividing the book into four distinct sections. 

RR: The process was really fun most of the time, very intuitive, which is not the norm when I’m writing straight prose. I started by browsing Nextdoor and snagging posts or comments that stood out. After a while I’d search for certain keywords that had thematic relevance and browse those posts. Over time I started piecing together conversations into a massive Word doc.

A lot of the work was free association, especially pairing the images and the text. I’d look at a photo and see what words or ideas it evoked, and if there was an existing conversation that fit, or if I should search Nextdoor for those evoked words, and so on. The process was circular and self-perpetuating in that way. Sometimes a photo-text pairing would help me revise a given text.

I had a lot of material to work with, so I ultimately limited myself to thirty-four total pieces because that’s the number of neighborhoods Orlando was divided into during the period of “urban renewal” that occurred nationwide in the mid-twentieth century, that phrase being code for the destruction and displacement of thriving, primarily Black urban communities. Structurally, I wanted a certain circularity or repetition to happen in places, so the four parts helped spread out some recurring themes and patterns. The photos also, I hope, have a certain kind of movement and resonance within each section, as well as across the book.

CK: Do you know anything about the people who live in any of the homes you photographed? 

RR: No. Or at least not yet!

CK: I’m curious to know whether anyone ever stopped you to ask what you were doing. Getting into the spirit of Nextdoor here, I’m guessing that during this process you showed up on a lot of Ring cameras! Did you ever find that your photography was the source of conversation on the app?

RR: No one ever stopped me, and I haven’t seen any posts about an ethnically ambiguous bearded guy in running shorts taking pictures in the neighborhood. This says something about my legibility as White, despite also being Latino, and maybe it also says something about White guilt, because much of this photo-taking period overlapped with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery by racist vigilantes and the June 2020 uprisings. I was more aware than usual of my privileged mobility, while also being nervous about a potential confrontation, especially when I was photographing at night. One thing that’s clear from Nextdoor is that a lot of people are armed and perpetually half-cocked.

But if you’ll indulge a tangent here: There was also something gothic about the Black Lives Matter signs that emerged around this time in my mostly White neighborhood. Eight years before Arbery, almost to the day, Trayvon Martin was murdered by a racist vigilante not far from here. Amid the 2020 protests, though under slightly different circumstances, Salaythis Melvin was shot in the back by James Montiel for running away from Orange County sheriff’s deputies. And just last month in Kissimmee, deputies murdered Jayden Baez for shoplifting. And literally as I type this, Titusville police officer Joshua Payne was charged with manslaughter for murdering James Lowery, who had nothing to do with the alleged crime being pursued. The examples are everywhere and ongoing across the U.S.: Police kill roughly 1,110 people a year and injure thousands more! The racist logic and rhetoric around these killings is not much different than it was a hundred years ago. It’s become cliché to cite Emmett Till. And yet here is history repeating itself over and over.

I felt something terribly uncanny about how suburbanites react to these “reckonings” was present in those yard signs. The conditions in this neighborhood have not changed to make a tragedy of racist boundary policing any less likely. Part of the texture of this historical moment I wanted to capture in the book is a sense of slippery time, time overlayed, time collapsing. I nod to this in the short essay at the end of the book about the relationship between suburbia and colonialism. Suffice to say, when I’m out taking photos, I’m just as wary of “good liberals” in my neighborhood as I am about gun-toting nutjobs. Just as I try to be healthily wary of my own thoughts and actions.

CK: In terms of structure, I’m curious about the choice to end each section with Coyote section titles. We move from “Coyotes (Reason)” to “Coyotes (Solutions)” to “Coyotes (Humans)” to “Coyotes (Encounter).” What were you thinking about with this choice?

RR: The coyote pieces are the most explicit recurring structural element. People post about coyotes a lot on Nextdoorand they’ve really turned the animal into a symbol, a projection of their fears—which left room for me to play, with an obvious nod to the trickster Coyote of Native American storytelling. For these neighbors, the coyote is a problem that won’t go away, and a problem that most don’t fully understand as one of their own making—so for me at least, the recurring coyote pieces signal that this neighborhood is stuck in a kind of gothic White time.

This is related to what I was saying about recurrences in history that feel uncanny precisely because they are forms of Whiteness, which is an identity invested in concealing an understanding of its construction and roots in white supremacy. If there were infinite sections to this book, each would end on a coyote piece, again and again, for eternity.

CK: Do you have a favorite photograph or quotations? Mine, for sure, is on page 25: “We cannot let small dogs be virtual prisoners while letting gangster coyotes run the show.” It so perfectly captures the breathless, infuriated tone of the kinds of messages we encounter on this app, while also conjuring this hilariously cartoonish image of a neighborhood being “run” by “gangster coyotes.”

RR: So much of what people post is almost unbelievably, perfectly absurd. I could imagine some of these lines spoken by characters in Kafka or Joy Williams or Percival Everett or Tom Drury. It’s very hard to choose a favorite, but I think I gravitate to the minute quirks. The woman who says she likes to “sit out in her little area” when talking about her porch. Or “My former neighbor just alarmed me with news of . . .” The use of “alarmed” as a verb is perfect.

Then there are the truth bombs that I’m not convinced the poster always understands the implications of. My favorite among those is: “The police cannot be there to protect you, but they can exact revenge after the crime.”

CK: What’s going to be in the supplemental book content?

RR: This is publisher Michael Wheaton’s bright idea, which is to have a QR code at the end of the book that links to a page that is kept updated with author interviews and other supplemental goodies. I plan to include some photo/text “outtakes” there. This interview. Who knows what else!

CK: You end the book with other resources too, including alternatives to calling the police in your community, information on transformative justice, and a brief history of the land that now makes up suburban Orlando. Why were these important to you to include, and how do you see them contributing to the way a reader will encounter this book?

RR: I think some of these pieces can be easy to consume and laugh at. The book can be read and enjoyed uncritically, or even cynically, as in “I’m in on the joke and look how dumb all these Nextdoor people are!” So I felt the Orlando history and resources from transformharm.org were an important acknowledgement of how the city’s (and country’s) white supremacist origins are directly related to where we find ourselves now. There is an extremely unfunny reality behind many of these pieces, particularly some folks’ constant calls for police intervention.

As Aimé Césaire (who I quote in the epigraph) points out about colonialism, we are all being harmed by racist systems. I wanted to present readers with our innate complicity in the systems that are the legacy of colonialism, but also begin to imagine ways out of them. Many people have been doing this work for decades, so in addition to the above link, I’d point people to the work of Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba, to name only a few.

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