Uncategorized

Fall 2019

INTERVIEWS

The Quixotic Search for Melancholy: An Interview with Mark Haber
Interviewed by Allan Vorda
Haber discusses his debut novel, Reinhardt's Garden, a unique and playful take of a journey into the heart of darkness as a Croatian attempts a treatise on melancholy.

“How Multiple and How Simultaneous”:
An Interview with Éireann Lorsung

Interviewed by Elizabeth Fontaine, Evelyn May, and Sarah Degner Riveros
Poet Éireann Lorsung discusses her recent work, and how poetry is the synaptic alchemy of all that is happening at any given moment.

A Shaming, Damning, Beautiful Moment:
An Interview with Stephen Markley

Interviewed by Benjamin Davis
Markley discusses his debut novel, Ohio, which combines a murder mystery with large-scale social commentary on the opioid crisis and the Midwest.

Unspeakable:
Conversation Between Michelle Lewis and Jeffrey Morgan

Winners of two Conduit book prizes, Michelle Lewis (for Animul/Flame) and Jeffrey Morgan (for The Last Note Becomes Its Listener), interview each other about the unique experiences that shaped their books and the challenges of translating inexpressible moments into language.

The Spatial Lattice of Consciousness:
An Interview with Neal Stephenson

Interviewed by Allan Vorda
Renowned speculative fiction author Neal Stephenson discusses his newest contribution to his oeuvre with Fall, or, Dodge in Hell, a futuristic take on Paradise Lost.

FEATURES

A Body of Work: The Tour
Essay by Don Cummings

Author Don Cummings describes the trials, the tribulations, and the weight gain during the book tour for his memoir earlier this year.

Two Roads Diverged: Jack Kerouac and Robert Creeley
Essay by Jonah Raskin

Contemporary writers could learn from both Creeley and Kerouac—who came from opposite sides of New England—how difficult it can be to resist the temptations of ego and competition.

FICTION REVIEWS

Night School: A Reader for Grownups
Zsόfia Bán
Hungarian author Zsόfia Bán riffs on subjects far and wide in this assortment of "night school lectures" that mix the historical and meta-historical. Reviewed by John Toren

Save Your Eyes
Vicente Huidobro and Hans Arp
translated by Tom Raworth
Save Your Eyes, a previously ‘lost’ Surrealist manuscript discovered in a cupboard, was published with the blessing of its translator, poet Tom Raworth, shortly before his death. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan

Every Mask I Tried On
Alina Stefanescu
In her debut fiction collection, Stefanescu conducts an exploration of the self in order to give shape to the unshapable. Reviewed by Ralph Pennel

Aerialists
Mark Mayer
The short stories in Mark Mayer’s Aerialists are epicenters of rituals and patterns where characters ruggedly assemble themselves, appropriating whatever matter is around to fill themselves out. Reviewed by Nick Hilbourn

Practice Dying
Rachel Stolzman Gullo
Two chance encounters instigate the plot of Practice Dying, illustrating the way various forces (religious, political, cultural, economic) bring people into collisions or convergences that shape their lives. Reviewed by Andrew Draper

Time For Bed
Wendy Rawlings
Rawlings' stories in her recent collection offer a rich study in powerful contradictions, employing comic and absurdist modes of writing to produce dissonant effects. Reviewed by Hugh Sheehy

MIXED GENRE REVIEWS

Motion Studies
Jena Osman
Motion Studies is the most recent installment in Jena Osman’s ongoing interrogation of the intersections between human bodies and our technology-obsessed culture. Reviewed by Joseph Houlihan

NONFICTION REVIEWS

The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars
Meghan Daum
In eight chapters, Meghan Daum refreshingly pushes against “the weaponization of ‘social justice culture,’” herd mentalities, and nostalgia, giving readers a look at the state of America and themselves. Reviewed by Erin Lewenauer

Beat: The Latter Days of the Beat Generation: A First-Hand Account
Andy Clausen
Andy Clausen’s memoir of his relationships with Beat writers, including lesser known or unknown poets, is notable for its unpretentious working-class perspective. Reviewed by Christopher Luna

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway and the Left in the Late 1930s
Milton A. Cohen
The Pull of Politics tells the fascinating stories of John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway, who all wrote successful novels with leftist politics at the end of the 1930s. Reviewed by Ryder W. Miller

Straight Around Allen: On the Business of Being Allen Ginsberg
Bob Rosenthal
Written by Ginsberg’s literary secretary, who ran the home office for two decades while his boss traveled around the world, this memoir offers a new perspective on the poet. Reviewed by Richard Kostelanetz

POETRY REVIEWS

1919
Eve L. Ewing
Ewing, a poet and sociologist at the University of Chicago, sets out to elucidate the 1919 Chicago race riots through vibrant, poetic voices. Reviewed by Deborah Bacharach

Solar Perplexus
Dean Young
While the hallmarks of Young’s singular style are on display in Solar Perplexus, the tone of these poems is, on the whole, less wry than previous collections, and more candid, both somber and ecstatic. Reviewed by Thomas Moody

At the Last Minute
Estha Weiner
Weiner employs her theatrical background to her poetry, applying nimble precision, careful line breaks, rhythmic mastery, rhyme-sense, Shakespearean allusions, and, above all, simplicity. Reviewed by Walter Holland

Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader
Stephen Jonas
This first major gathering of work by Jonas, a poet of Boston who died in 1970 at the age of 49, reveals a brilliant wordsmith who introduced a gay, gender-bending, street hustling voice into the Modernist tradition. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan

Mea Roma: A Meditative Sampling from M. Valerius Martialis
M. Valerius Martialis
In Art Beck’s new Martial translation, Mea Roma, the blending of the aphoristic and the elegiac defines the Roman mastery of the epigram. Reviewed by Paul Vangelisti

Little Glass Planet
Dobby Gibson
In his fourth book, Dobby Gibson stands closer than ever to entropy, to inertia, to the middle-aged feeling that there can truly be nothing better than this life right now. Reviewed by Stephanie Burt

The Perseverance
Raymond Antrobus
In The Perseverance, Raymond Antrobus explores marginalized experiences and identity in the not-so-distant past and the post-Brexit world, alarming and unsettling his reader in necessary ways. Reviewed by Margaryta Golovchenko

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

Friedrich Hölderlin:
Selected Poems and Letters

Friedrich Hölderlin
translated by Christopher Middleton
The Last Books ($27)

by Patrick James Dunagan

The work of German poet and singular visionary Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) embodies the essence of the poet-as-seer. His ethereally divined poetic compositions manifest themselves primarily in regard to the individual’s engagement with the natural world, albeit telescoped beyond the confining lens of historical time and place. In Hölderlin’s writings, myths intermingle with experience as distant lands become one with the world outside his window. In 1796 he tragically fell in love with a married woman, Susette Gontard, while serving as pupil to her sons, but aside from one or two brief periods, they were never to be alone together. In 1802 he trekked across Europe through the aftermath of the French Revolutionary Wars; reaching Stuttgart “he appeared among friends looking ‘deathly pale, very thin, with hollow wild eyes, long hair, and a beard, and dressed like a beggar.’ Gontard died shortly thereafter without his ever having seen her again; their love is both mourned and celebrated in his work. From 1803-06 onward, Hölderlin wrote very little, gradually falling in to a state of madness from which he never recovered.

In 1967 the University of Texas issued a slim collection presenting a selection of Holderlin’s letters accompanied by those of fellow poet-seers Arthur Rimbaud and Hart Crane. William Burford oversaw the selections of the latter two, while British poet Christopher Middleton (1926-2015) undertook the selecting, translating, and notating of the Hölderlin. Over the ensuing decades Middleton continued pursuing his interest in Hölderlin’s work: In 1972 he published Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin and Eduard Mörike, and returned to translate further poems in later years, as well as penning critical essays regarding thornier intricacies faced when translating the poet. This new posthumous collection gathers all of Middleton’s endeavors regarding Hölderlin into one volume, making it ideal company for both the acquainted and unacquainted reader alike.

In an introduction, Middleton demonstrates a keen translator’s reckoning of language use by his subject, while also fully bringing it vividly to life for the reader:

Hölderlin is converting the involutions of German syntax into concentrated forms resembling Chinese ideograms. Certainly it is poetry departing from plain linear progression, or, to put it picturesquely, poetry as a field of vision crossed and recrossed by whirlwinds of fire. That, perhaps, is how Hölderlin experienced ‘ideas’: they crossed his mind like whirlwinds of formal sensation. One thus has to be careful when one asks what is the true axis of a particular word in its context, or what is its function in that context. One can intuit the radius of a word’s connotations, but one is hard put to define that radius. One has to allow for the fact that connotations valid then may not be perceptible (or translatable) now.

Middleton’s notes to the poems are equally indispensable. He describes how with poems such as “Patmos” (1803), he “opted for a freer layout” with the lines upon the page, breaking from Hölderlin’s original and aiming to “sharpen the profiles of particular words and phrases, and to invest the English with some of the glowing and vigorous rugosity which H. achieves by rhythmical turns, elliptical syntax, eccentric word order, and changes of key.” With the fragmentary later poems he also likewise moves into a freer layout, “prompted by the gaps and silences in some of the originals.” This is both startling and quite lyrically effective. For instance:

Wohl aber duftend den Jungfraun,
Und Biennen,
Wenn sie, vom Wohlgeruche
Der Frühlings trunken, der Geist
Der Sonne rühret, irren ihr nach
(from “Wenn Nemlich Der Rebe Saft . . .”)

is turned out as:

but fragrance
for girls
and bees
drunk with the scent
of springtime
when the spirit of the sun
touches them
possessed (131)

The result will likely rub the more purist-minded the wrong way, yet Middleton’s version is anything but stilted.

It’s remarkably edifying to have Middleton’s critical prose appended here to the poems and letters, as they detail his engagement with Hölderlin across the span of his mature writing life. His 1967 review of Michael Hamburger’s translation not only provides an inspiring openness to contrasting takes, but also allows opportunity to compare earlier versions of some lines as rendered by Middleton that he later revised when publishing his own efforts. Similarly, both “Syntax and Signification in Hölderlin’s ‘Andenken’” and “A Spirit Voice in Loose Alcaic Measure” are exactly the deep textual dives they sound to be. And when Middleton remarks in “The End of ‘Andenken’” that “Hölderlin hears first in the elements and then relayed into culture an infinite and terrible cry, such as Heraclitus and Yeats heard in the elements as a ‘clash of arms’, Milton as a ‘singing through all her [nature’s] works’, Boehme as a turbulence in the godhead itself,” we are left hungering for more from both poet and translator alike.

In this fine collection, the depth of Middleton’s knowledge of his subject is on full display, and his humble yet assertive authority is consistently revelatory. The Last Books thus not only delivers a fine tribute to Middleton, but also ushers into print an excellent introductory text to Hölderlin’s life and work.


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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

Sleep in a Strange House

Jessica Purdy
Nixes Mate Books ($9.95)

by Douglas Cole

There’s a beautiful mystery in Jessica Purdy’s poetry collection Sleep in a Strange House—it’s like we’re traveling through her dreams or watching a surrealist movie, the meaning of which lies just out of reach. Take the opening poem, “Architect,” for example, in which the poet creates a sort of house for “Everyone I know,” with enigmatic labels on their rooms: “I am a door. I am locked. / I am occupied. I am alone.” If in dreams a house represents the structure of consciousness, then what are these pieces of the poet, and what is the mysterious “staircase I didn’t build”?

In fact, there are many mentions of dreams and dream states in these poems: “the meaning of dead horses in dreams,” “The father dreams of being held down,” “In dreams I welcome prosthetic legs.” It offers a “blueprint,” if you will, one alluded to in “Architect,” as though the title were announcing the plan to come. But who is the architect, the poet or the unconscious?

Hence, it is interesting how the consciousness in these poems often seems disconnected from the scenes, like “the breath coming out of us in clouds.” The speaker, in fact, often feels like a reluctant inhabitant: “I don’t deserve my body. I should have/been born something else.” And it’s as if this consciousness were forever on the verge of leaving, whether in the petit mort of “Expiring in bed” or the invisible something that “makes you want to leave, / drive away in your car.”

As in the work of the great haiku poets, images of nature stand in for these layers of awareness: “How do the bugs know when to start work?” And like the haiku poets, Purdy fixates on the moon as the ultimate symbol of reflection, although her moon is “a square / framed by linear clouds.” We explore the subconscious with her like a “lurking burglar” about to stumble on a realization that will rip us from the world of sleep.


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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

The Perseverance

Raymond Antrobus
Penned in the Margins ($14)

by Margaryta Golovchenko

What language
would we speak
without ears?
—“Echo”

In The Perseverance, Raymond Antrobus explores marginalized experiences and identity in the not-so-distant past and the post-Brexit world, alarming and unsettling his reader in necessary ways. The poems not only call out famous figures like Alexander Graham Bell, but pluck from the abundant contemporary political and social landscape. The reader faces questions about how masculinity, language, and race are presented today, alongside how deafness is (mis)understood.

Antrobus’ poems explore what it means to have a voice in a variety of registers, from the poetic to the historical to the everyday. From a negotiation between wealth and poverty in “My Mother Remembers” to the frustration that refuses to admit defeat in “Dear Hearing World,” the speaker’s words glint with a sharp edge:

I have left Earth in search of an audible God.
I do not trust the sound of yours.

One of the central concerns in the collection is an exploration of language as a means of communication, a construct that for many is automatically associated with the auditory experience. Antrobus goes beyond familiar linguistic boundaries and points to people whose forms of expression continue to be silenced. The Perseverance does not set out to speak for, but to remember and challenge the repetitive cycle in which the victim is left to seek reconciliation within themselves. Poems like “Samantha” confront the reader with a simple fact:

I know the deaf are not lost
but they are certainly abandoned.

Not only do the poems speak on paper, they live beyond the page, for Antrobus’ poems belong in the mouth, ear, mind, and heart. The Perseverance creates a loud silence that lingers over the poems, which are both a poetic deconstruction of the author’s life and an exploration of various identities and experiences. Linking these poems is a desire to communicate that is never realized, because their conversation partner fails to accommodate any perspective other than their own. A frantic chorus, bursting out as soon as one opens the book and begins reading, The Perseverance presents a voice that is always coming through but is not always heard—not because it isn’t loud enough, but because some have still not learned how to shut up and listen.


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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

Little Glass Planet

Dobby Gibson
Graywolf Press ($16)

by Stephanie Burt

If Dobby Gibson can be said to have a single subject, it’s one that makes his collections (four so far) consistent and wondrous, but also makes them hard to praise in brief: he writes about what Sigmund Freud named “ordinary unhappiness,” the discontent and persistent pain that come, not from one or another specific event, not from an especially painful or heroic or unlucky life course, but from the daily repetitions of an American domestic adulthood, driveway to bedroom, sunrise to noon to night. Why can’t we like it? Why can’t we get totally satisfied with the way things are, and (as Blaise Pascal said) remain, contently and quietly, in our rooms?

Pascal also chose to believe in a supreme God, a guarantor of justice if not love. If there are divinities in Gibson’s world, on the other hand, they are plural, and small-scale, and ineffective. Gibson prays (in “Prayer for November”) “Loyal docents, restless spirits of lost chess-masters, / dogs with one eye, lead us home. . . . // Promise it won’t end in any of the ways / we think it will.” The neighborhood in this poem, with its “breeze” and its “skywriters,” promises only that “we can be loved after all.” “Can,” not “are,” not “will.” It’s a slender reed: how’s yours?

Headline news in the age of Trump, small parenting victories, and worries about the advance of digital technology all enter this book as shifting foregrounds while that ordinary unhappiness lights up the back. When Gibson picks up his phone, “I swipe down with my thumb / to refresh the present” and “the Next Now arrives in the nick of time. // Next Now, heal us with opportunity. / Next Later, assure us our preferences have been saved.” (They will not be saved.) The “antique Korean fishing bobber” that provides Gibson’s book title speaks to the gradual waste (so it seems on a bad day) or blessed utility (so it seems on a better day) of any human life, especially the poet’s own: “You are a beautiful bauble it’s hard to imagine / anyone hurling you into the sea, / but eventually we all have a job to do.”

The standard Gibson poem—and almost any Gibson poem before this book—consists of indicative sentences, arranged in free verse down the page, their tone either diffident or frustrated or else quietly appreciative, their standout nouns alternately concrete and abstract. It’s a kind of poem other people write too: Gibson is simply better (and quieter and more often realistically sad) than most of the other people who write it, few of whom could admit (as he does) “Most of my predictions are honestly / just hopes.” But Gibson has now determined not to make this demotic lyric the only kind of poem he writes. In between handfuls of typical Gibson constructions in Little Glass Planet come a poem called “Drone,” three pages of rhetorical questions; “Roll Call,” a page-long checklist; a “Litany,” some of whose lines are just first names; a list of rejected titles, called “Selected Poems.”

We also get two longish poems about time spent in Marfa, Texas, where—like other poets who have written about the experience (Peter Reading, Jeffrey Yang)—Gibson had a residency. His Marfa is fire trucks, signs for local elections, flatness, sunlight, and missing his family: “I can still hear the dishes // being put away in St. Paul”; “I tried / and failed to see // the Marfa lights.” There’s less here than in older books about Minnesota, where Gibson still lives, but when Gibson does refer to his Midwest, it shines: “The first time I walked / out onto a lake in the middle of January / I knew I could go anywhere.” Even this symbol of hope can and must crack in spring.

Despite the two long poems, Little Glass Planet feels shorter than Gibson’s prior books, and more powerful, and sadder too: the poet, now older, his neo-Surrealist roots thoroughly pruned, stands closer than ever to entropy, to inertia, to the middle-aged feeling that there can truly be nothing better than this life right now, or not for him, not any more. Few poets since Larkin have chronicled with such force the kind of middle-aged dejection Gibson presents in “What the Cold Wants”:

Room temperature is a miracle.
That’s what the cold wants you to believe,
that it’s perfectly normal
and should be allowed to feel
right at home as it slithers under your door
to begin making a meal of your toes.

Room temperature is a miracle—the existence of people you love, of people at all, including yourself, is a miracle; but it’s a logical fallacy to move from appreciating that miracle to believing things cannot get better, that you or your family or your neighborhood or your love life or your cuisine can’t change and improve. That’s what the cold would like you to believe, and Gibson keeps almost believing it. But hope creeps in.

Then it creeps out. Is hope only what we feed ourselves so we can go on raising children, being parents who don’t cash out? “For reasons no one can understand we believe / that for our children it will not be too late.” That’s how one poem ends. It’s scary: it’s self-erasure, not the dramatic, dangerous, Plathian kind but the kind where the poet may wish he could just fade away, or become a pure creature of habit, sans introspection: “remember being a person / is two thirds being a pattern.” Gibson’s demographics—he is a white cis male Midwestern father married to a woman—are the kind that in previous generations would have gone unremarked: they are what linguists call unmarked, and Gibson sometimes seems to fear that he is (therefore) uninteresting, unremarkable. He dubs himself, in the Marfa poems, “the Forgetmenaut,” as if he were sailing into oblivion: he, or his stand-in, muses “I can’t remember what it was // I urgently sent/ myself into this world to do.” And yet, he concludes (still in Marfa), “We’re trapped inside diamonds // but when we think of one another / we can make the diamonds spin.”

Approach this book in the right mood, and you may weep or smile or spin your own diamonds. Approach it in the wrong one and you may wish either for the poet to cry out that he can’t take this kind of life any more, or for a better life to reveal its shape. As with Thomas Hardy, that earlier pessimist, there’s a great deal of love in this poetry—love for other human beings, for those spinning diamonds, and for the future a post-Trump America might still bring, to Texas and to Minnesota. It’s a kind of poetry every generation may need.


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at your local independent bookstore
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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

Nicole Houff

To put it simply: I’m a Minneapolis photographer with a mild obsession with Barbie. Influenced by imagery from the ’50s and ’60s, I create scenes with the dolls in studio that have a sense of whimsy mixed with a little sarcasm. To me, Barbie is a positive, strong and empowering figure and I try to utilize her to create conversation. And to answer your question, I only have around 40 dolls.

Once I have a scene visualized in my head, I go on the hunt for all the components that need to go into the image. I set up the diorama with the dolls, props and backgrounds and design studio lighting around it. I’ve always felt that my Barbie series is the perfect hybrid of my BA from Macalester College with a major in Studio Art and a minor in Political Science, and my Associate Degree from Minneapolis Community and Technical College in Photography and Digital Imaging. I take an incredibly technical approach to my work; each shoot is a multi-hour event comprised of fine tuning lighting and great attention to detail. All of my Barbie scenes are photographed with a digital camera and subsequently printed at a local professional lab on archival paper (color, density, etc. approved by myself).

My work has been shown at a variety of galleries, festivals and exhibits including (but not limited to): Mpls Photo Center, The Knockdown Center, Gamut Gallery, Intermedia Arts, Nash Gallery, Robbin Gallery, Betty Danger’s, MN State Fair, Uptown Art Fair, Edina Art Fair and the Twin Cities Pride Festival. I was selected as one of the featured artists at our Minnesota State Fair Fine Art Exhibition in 2016 and the Commemorative Artist of the Uptown Art Fair in 2017. In 2018 the Hopkins Center for the Arts invited me to hang a solo exhibition of my series, accompanied by an artist talk.

Visit Nicole at nicolehouff.com.

Volume 24, Number 3, Fall 2019 (95)

Volume 24, Number 3, Fall 2019 (#95)

To purchase issue #95 using Paypal, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Thomas Larson: The Pleasures and Paradoxes of Spiritual Writing | interviewed by Renée E. D’Aoust
Richie Narvaez: Every Story is a Mystery | interviewed by Dustin Michael
Shira Dentz: The Arc, the Form, the Formless | interviewed by Kelly Lydick

FEATURES

Widely Unavailable: No Mean City | Alexander McArthur & H. Kingsley Long | by K.C. McKee
Kathleen Fraser: A Memorial | by Patricia Kirkpatrick
The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan

PLUS:

Cover art by Nicole Houff

NONFICTION/ART REVIEWS

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? | Bill McKibben | by George Longenecker
All the Fierce Tethers | Lia Purpura | by Marlie McGovern
Looking for Dragon Smoke: Essays on Poetry | Robert Bly | by James P. Lenfestey
Reinventing the People’s Library | Greg Gaut | by Paul Buhle
Fifty Things That Aren’t My Fault: Essays from the Grown-up Years | Cathy Guisewite | by Erin Lewenauer
Beyond Conspiracy Theory | Robert Anton Wilson interviewed by V. Vale | by Zack Kopp
Screen Tests | Kate Zambreno
The Undying | Anne Boyer | by Matthew Cheney
Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work | Tamara Schenkenberg, ed. | by Patrick James Dunagan
The Origins of Color | Vincent Tiley and Bryason Rand | by Michael Workman

COMICS REVIEWS

Giraffes on Horseback Salad | Josh Frank, Tim Heidecker, & Manuela Pertega | by Steve Matuszak

FICTION/DRAMA REVIEWS

The Remainder | Alia Trabucco Zerán | by Joseph Houlihan
Boy Swallows Universe | Trent Dalton | by Chris Via
A Lily in the Light | Kristin Fields | by Kaja Rae Lucas
The Females | Wolfgang Hilbig | by Erik Noonan
Nothing But the Night | John Williams | by Corey Mesler
Aug 9–Fog | Kathryn Scanlan | by Evelyn Hampton
Awayland | Ramona Ausubel | by Sophia Larson Wagner
Once into the Night | Aurelie Sheehan | by Nick Hilbourn
Rock, Paper, Scissors | Maxim Osipov | by Hilda Johnston
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden | Denis Johnson | by Corey Jensen
Bred from the Eyes of a Wolf | Kim Kyung Ju | by Joseph Houlihan

POETRY REVIEWS

The Low Passsions | Anders Carlson-Wee | by Todd Davis
Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford | Max Crinnin & Aidan Ryan, eds. | by Jack Christian
Our Lady of the Flood | Alison Pelegrin | by Jared Hanks
Druids | Tomaz Tomaž Šalamun | by John Bradley
Headline du Jour | mIEKAL aND | by James Yeary
The Davids Inside David | Sarah Wetzel | by Sharon Tracey
Sex & Other Slapsticks | Ellaraine Lockie | by Eileen Murphy
Deaf Republic | Ilya Kaminsky | by Geoffrey Hilsabeck
Grenade in Mouth: Some Poems of Miyó Vestrini | Miyó Vestrini | by John Bradley
Company | Sam Ross | by Jeremiah Moriarty

To purchase issue #95 using Paypal, click here.

Between Two Millstones
Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974-1978

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
translated by Peter Constantine
University of Notre Dame Press ($35)

by Jeff Bursey

The Publishers Weekly review of Between Two Millstones calls its author “a onetime giant in the world of letters.” There are indeed few figures like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008); among his major achievements, the three-volume The Gulag Archipelago revealed to the entire world the extent and purpose of the USSR’s penal system, and the novel cycle The Red Wheel revisits the origins of the Russian Revolution. August 1914 and November 1916, the first two books in this mammoth and compelling synthesis of disparate material, were recently succeeded in English translation by the first volume of March 1917, with three more volumes to follow, and the cycle will conclude with the two-volume April 1917.

Controversial in life and in death, this “onetime giant” doesn’t attract readers now the way he did in the 1970s. While we can’t hold dead writers responsible for the company that keeps them, invariably we look askance at them when we see them held up by those whose philosophy or ideology we don’t share. If someone unfamiliar with Solzhenitsyn decided that because conservatives touted him that this meant he was a cranky Orthodox Christian, a fascist, a czarist, or a traditional novelist—and therefore not worth reading—then this would be a lost opportunity to hear a distinct humane voice, like Dostoyevsky or Vollmann or Akhmatova.

Serialized in a Russian journal from 1998 to 2003 and revised by Solzhenitsyn in 2004 and 2008, Between Two Millstones, a memoir newly translated into English, is loosely structured so that two main topics can be covered: his life in Switzerland after he (and eventually his family) is removed from his homeland, and his search for a new place to live so he can work in peace on The Red Wheel and other projects. The former citizen-prisoner (he refers to the USSR as “the whole Great Soviet Prison”) had his life turned upside down by exile and the world’s attention. Though Solzhenitsyn describes what he’s going through with his usual directness, one can only imagine the impact of such a traumatic and abrupt separation, with no known future, from country and kin. He “emerged from a great tumult” within a repressive regime where he had to hide almost everything he did and guard almost everything he said; in an apparently welcoming world, reporters endangered his family while they were still in the USSR by hounding him for pronouncements on international affairs. Cautious, bewildered, and off-balance, Solzhenitsyn made missteps, and he often voices this refrain, with variations: “from the very outset the Western media and I were not to be friends, were not to understand one another.”

The five chapter titles summarize the strain of these first four years even after his reunion with his family: “Untethered”; “Predators and Dupes”; “Another Year Adrift”; “At Five Brooks”; and “Through the Fumes.” Solzhenitsyn felt overwhelmed by sudden fame. In Zurich, where he lived first, any stranger could open the gate of his garden and come knock on his door. Not all wished him well (“the police of two countries had already warned me that I was on the hit list of international terrorists, as I knew well enough; and these terrorists were trained and supplied by the Soviets”), but for a man accustomed to working discreetly and persistently, even the best-intentioned visitor could usurp his writing time—as did invitations, appeals, and messages from abroad that filled his house with mail. Alongside his painful adjustment to Western manners is a presentation of successive errors that started in the USSR and continued for some time after his exile, when he dealt with strangers, translators, publishers, and lawyers. “In the USSR, that hard and unforgiving land, all my steps turned into a series of victories,” Solzhenitsyn writes. “Yet in the West, with its limitless freedom, everything I did (or did not do) ended up in a string of defeats. Did I ever fail to make a mistake here?”

Of great interest to read about are the arguments Solzhenitsyn had with Andrei Sinyavsky and Andrei Sakharov, his suggestion to Vladimir Nabokov on subject matter, the KGB assassination and smear campaigns (also involving his ex-wife), and how he was praised or criticized by Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger, and Jimmy Carter. The book’s appendix contains letters and other documents that show how such public figures, as well as institutions, wished to honor him, use him for political purposes or, in the case of media outlets, transform his words and actions into stories that could be sober or sensationalist. Solzhenitsyn resists the allurements offered by various people, in part due to a well-honed suspicion of motivations—though as the book amply proves he was not infallible, nor did he think of himself that way. At times he comes across as overbearing, but this is understandable; to survive the carceral environment of the USSR demanded from him, apart from strength of character, a high self-regard and a pugnacious ego. In this first volume of Between Two Millstones (one more is due out next year), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spoke out for the many who survived or perished in the camps, tells an engaging tale of his initial exposure to Western ways.


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The Faun's Bookshelf
C. S. Lewis on Why Myth Matters

Charlie W. Starr
Black Squirrel Books ($16.95)

by Ryder W. Miller

Early in C. S. Lewis’s enduring fantasy The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, young Lucy meets the faun Tumnus, who takes her to his abode in Narnia. He cries there because he is now ruled by the White Witch, who has made all of Narnia winter, with no hope for Christmas. Lucy, a daughter of Eve, has now entered a Fairy kingdom she could not have fully imagined. And Tumnus has some interesting books on his shelves, some of which will have us view reality differently.

Charlie W. Starr, a C. S. Lewis expert, reads these titles as the faun might have, and goes on to tell us of their relevance to our times and situations. The titles listed by Lewis and explored by Starr include The Life and Letters of Silenus, Nymphs and Their Ways, Men, Monks and Gameskeepers, and Is Man a Myth? These titles have no authors, but Lewis and Starr have written of their significance as subjects and as mythology.

Lewis sought to keep Christianity relevant in an age which championed rationality and science over subjectivism, religion, and myth. Inkling friends and colleagues J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson helped convince him that the story told in the Gospels was a myth that had become a reality. Missing something in life and fearful of the horrors produced by modern science, Lewis found that he was longing for such a mythology.

Starr does a wonderful job exploring these subjects, showing that reading religious philosophy can be a captivating and inspiring experience. Centuries of thought have gone into some of these arguments, which puts "flesh and blood" on lessons that have existed for millennia. The book begins with literary explorations of Lewis's famous fantasies, an approachable starting point for readers who have not also read his philosophy, theology, religious apologetics, autobiography, and literary histories. There is explication here of the use of mythology through the ages, and though the book is brief—less than 150 pages of text—it covers a lot of ground.

While accessible at the outset, the book does become a bit more difficult as Starr delves deeper into puzzles of literary and philosophical exposition. There is a struggle to define mythology without the embrace of postmodernism, for example, which argues that there are no grand historical narratives. Lewis was also interested in more than just Christian beliefs and faith. Still, secular readers here are given an inside view into one of the great religious thinkers of the recent age, one who puzzled over questions that are still relevant to billions. Those who are filled with human longing and curiosity may find a remedy in myth, as Starr showed Lewis did.


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The Beginning of His Excellent
and Eventful Career

Cameron MacKenzie
MadHat Press ($21.95)

by John Wall Barger

The leaves ran along my ears as I moved deeper into the dimness of the rows, and as I ran I heard the shouting of men around me, frightened and desperate to find a crazed killer, a demon boy. . . . The sky then opened simple and blue above me, my horse grazing peacefully in the adjacent field. I saw no man cutting stalks and I saw no man collecting wood and neither was I seen by them. Not ten minutes later I was high on a ridge, my belly flat on the warm stones, looking down at the comedy of the men I had left alive.

The “demon boy” of the passage above is Francisco “Pancho” Villa (1878-1923), long before he becomes the famous Mexican revolutionary, and he is hunting the man who raped his sister. From the first pages of The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career, when the above scene takes place, the reader is struck by Cameron MacKenzie’s dexterity with language. Long serpentine lines embellished with alliteration abound. MacKenzie not only takes pleasure in the music of his lines, but trusts the aural reverie so fully that at times in his novel, as in poetry, sound precedes sense, deliciously. And this music becomes intertwined with the unrelenting violence it describes. For example, listen to the galloping polyphonic prose, the consonance, and the knifelike simile from the line that precedes the ones above: “The remaining gunman panicked and turned, kicking up dirt onto the writhing bodies of his fellows where they clutched at their guts and moaned like calves.” MacKenzie’s use of music can be compared to Ennio Morricone’s score of Once Upon a Time in the West: Both melodies, however sweet on the surface, soon become inextricably linked with the shattered psychology of the characters, or with violence itself.

Judging from this novel, his debut, MacKenzie’s literary forebears include Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy: authors who tell a story of America, with enormous scope and music. In particular, the reader hears in MacKenzie some of McCarthy’s old testament King James Bible timbre, slathered with blood and mud. In McCarthy’s books, violence seems to emanate out of nature itself, as in this passage from Blood Meridian: “The sun was just down and to the west lay reefs of bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some great fire at the earth’s end.” McCarthy’s use of language is both simple and shockingly effective. The savage force within the language itself—as if the “great fire at the earth’s end” were speaking on its own behalf—seems to simultaneously emerge out of and obliterate both the illiterate kid of his tale and everything else it touches.

MacKenzie lets his own illiterate kid, manifested by Villa, speak a first-person version of this desolate poetic tongue. Villa talks with the blood-soaked voice of the land itself. In placing such formal, archaic, wise language (e.g., “The day was high and clean and the sky so depthless a blue as to hint at the pure black which lay in silence at the tip of its vault and to which all of this bent as though it be its imagining or its dream”) in the mouth of a child, MacKenzie is not trying for verisimilitude—he does not want to imitate that child’s voice. And how could he, 150 years later, in another country, in a language other than Spanish? The voice and characterization are not realistic, nor should they be. Rather, the child speaks for the land itself, and the land comprises violence, power, fear. For MacKenzie, as for McCarthy, violence is an inextricable part of human life, and must be faced. Certainly there is no way around it for young Villa. He must deal with the “comedy of the men,” or fall like those around him. It’s worth mentioning that, in this world of male violence, MacKenzie—unlike McCarthy—provides us with a number of powerful female characters, like Señora González, who acts a don and frequently challenges Villa.

The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career is divided into four sections, spanning about twenty-five years, from when Villa is a child until the Mexican Revolution begins in earnest, in 1910. The first two sections describe Villa’s years as a ruthless thief in Durango and Chihuahua. The last two sections describe the slow civilizing of Villa into a politician: as a general, gaining in power, negotiating with leaders like Madero, and fighting in the north against the forces of President Díaz. The structure of the novel is such that Villa seems to be stepping into focus, into the “light,” out of the blur of hearsay and legend.

As the years pass, in the first two sections, we watch the bandito Villa commit atrocious crimes, killing and raping without cause. We ask ourselves, who is Villa, and what does he believe? MacKenzie, to his credit, leaves these questions complicated; he walks us into very dark ethical terrain without reaching for spurious morality or for sentimentality, and lets readers decide for themselves what to think of every scene. For example, a seemingly innocuous episode in which Villa watches his mule slip off a mountain pass, turns out to be telling: “And even as its hooves scraped in agitation on the rocks for purchase its black eyes remained as they were and absent of fear. The animal went on to tumble over the edge and out into the air below us, quite without sound, its pack releasing its baubles and skins as though unfurling some new and horrible shape.” This, we are beginning to realize, is how Villa watches everything: impassively, without bias. MacKenzie excels in such passages, shining a light onto an event which is not in the history books. As well-researched as this historical novel is, the book finds liftoff the further it strays into liminal, non-biographical spaces. The hauntingly intimate details of the mule (“its hooves scraped . . . its black eyes remained as they were”) make us feel, uncomfortably, that we have actually witnessed the event.

We also ask ourselves, “What kind of human being watches a mule fall off a cliff without trying to help it?” Villa later says of himself, “I have never feared a man, nor could I, for no man could know me, for I am beyond men as men would be. I am a new man, newly made by my will, and none may touch me where I lie in my rectitude and strength.” So Villa imagines himself as an Übermensch; a creature of the new Mexico; a missing link between the agrarian farmers of the nineteenth century and the capitalists of our modern age. But it is frightening to think of Villa as “a new man,” since we are unable to really gauge where his morals lie. Is he a nihilist? Our disquiet is well-founded, as we discover, just moments after the mule falls, when Villa murders his best friend, Refugio Alvarado:

I removed my rifle from its holster in the saddle by my thigh and leveled it and fired once into his face. For some time, and I do not know how long, I looked at the space in the air where he had been. His face. I sat my horse and looked at his horse where it stood and I looked into the air. The day stretched out for ten thousand miles, ridge upon ridge and the brown plain beyond turned up like a table that would spill its careful contents upon the floor.

At this point, still in the first section, we’ve been on the fence about Villa. We know that he is a murderer, and that he will later become a figurehead in the Mexican Revolution, but we don’t know for sure if we dislike him. We ask ourselves, “Is he redeemable?” When he kills Refugio, we understand that he is past hope. MacKenzie often pauses after such violent episodes (“I looked at the space in the air where he had been”) to allow a certain silence in, as if inviting us, or daring us, to place ourselves into the scene with our sense of humanity intact. It is bold for a novelist to remove the likeability of the main character—it means we are wading into murky waters—MacKenzie delights in such waters, happily wading in further still.

No character in the book epitomizes ethical murk better than Villa’s enforcer, Rodolfo Fierro. A loyal soldier of the revolution who is actually a psychopath, Fierro emerges as the horrifying “hero” of the second half of the novel. We can read about Fierro’s misdeeds on Wikipedia, but MacKenzie takes us far away from history and uncomfortably close to this lunatic, sculpting a character as weird and riveting as Conrad’s Kurtz or McCarthy’s Judge. Fierro has free reign to act as he likes, as long as he follows Villa’s orders, but becomes increasingly unpredictable and unhinged. He transcends traditional description. A blood-soaked trickster emerges in the form of Fierro, wearing a tattered white suit and speaking with cryptic poignancy (“There are times when the imbecility of others would occlude even the most patient of designs”). In one of the book’s most memorable scenes, Fierro has taken a series of prisoners into the desert to be executed, with a few soldiers. Without warning he orders a soldier to cut off the soldier’s own little finger, lets the prisoners go, and vanishes into the dark. We’re not sure where he’s gone, but days later, he appears before the prisoners:

The man was nude. He was dark. He wore a ragged straw hat and he squatted on his haunches on the flat top of the stump some three feet above the ground, his scrotum resting simply on the jagged wood. He watched the two men walk across the distance toward him, his dark hands loose around his knees. At their approach he doffed his hat, not without some ceremony.

The soldier sees him, at a distance, vanish into the desert with the prisoners: “They walked west, unhurried, hand-in-hand like children.” Now a fully-realized archetypal villain, Fierro simply steps out of the frame of the novel, into the murk.

In Part III, the Villa of yore emerges, as if called forth by our collective pop culture imagination. Now in his thirties, he wears military attire, jackboots, a dusty sombrero, two bandoliers, and sits behind a desk in a big chair, smoking cigars, deciding the fate of each citizen dragged before him. Armed men guard his door. The mandate of the revolution is the redistribution of land to peasants, and the removal of the greedy dons, the “great families,” and President Díaz. To some extent, Villa seems to be a simple appendage of the revolution, taking from the dons and giving to the poor, crossing Chihuahua in search of new patriotic recruits: “We spoke to them,” he says, “of pay and food, of rifles and horses. We spoke to them of killing rurales, marauders and roadmen. We spoke to them of uprooting the dons from the valleys where they grew fat on the labor of honest men like themselves. We told them that each soldier would get what was fair to him and at this they rejoiced.”

Nevertheless, Villa remains elusive, complex. We wonder, after watching him murder Refugio, if he cares about anything, or if he is just a psychopath. What does he really think of the revolution? Told he will advance to the rank of captain in the revolutionary army, Villa concedes, “These were strange moments for me, for they sounded at once upon the bottom of things. I admit freely that in these early days of the fight I feigned a conviction that only came upon me at intervals, and never quite the whole.” We now strongly suspect that Villa’s war with Díaz, the grand revolution, has simply been a continuation of Villa’s accumulation of power, a natural progression from his days as a bandito. Although he seems to speak in the voice of the land itself, we do not quite trust him. Or perhaps it is the land itself—which speaks the truth, always, but whose sense of justice is frighteningly barbarous—we do not want to trust:

I say that the revolution is not a series of events. I say that battles are not fought in return for battles which have been fought before. In the time of the revolution the betrayals are perpetual and the injustices flatten out into a mural of humiliation forever in need of bloody correction and all the facts have been lost.

Toward the end of The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career, MacKenzie allows the story to divide into fractured legends, splintered accounts of the infamous “Pancho” Villa. The first person narration slips. MacKenzie does not correct the accounts, or privilege one history over another. He refuses to help us decide whether Villa is, finally, a murderer, patriot, nihilist, or lover. Villa—palpably bewildered by the action around him—sometimes steps out of the frame to speak to us directly, soliloquizing, like Iago:

This is what I know of it. As you can see, it is a story. A story perhaps with even some truth, because that truth is one that speaks to the nature of its protagonist who is such only in the service of another, that other being myself. I am here a name alone, and one that stretches across this country . . .

MacKenzie provides us with an X-ray of human nature: Perhaps it’s meant to be a caveat against autocratic, charismatic leaders whose lust for power goes unchecked—perhaps he is telling us that it’s futile to struggle against the violent forces of nature. Like all art worth its salt, MacKenzie’s novel offers no definitive conclusions. I can only recommend that you visit his weirdly haunting visionary nightmare landscape yourself, and that you go unarmed.


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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019