Check back as we add more features and reviews in the next months!

Interviews

Stop, Look, and Listen: An Interview with Rae Armantrout
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rae Armantrout talks about breaking “out of the evangelical cage” as well as the process of writing Finalists and topics from censorship to grandparenting. Interviewed by David Moscovich

Archival Woman: An Interview with Sarah Heady
In her new book Comfort, Sarah Heady offers a refreshing new history of American women and the world surrounding them; the result illuminates not only the past, but our own tremulous moment. Interviewed by Greg Bem

A Wild Vitality: An Interview with Jerome Sala
Poet Jerome Sala discusses satirizing the corporate content machine, his Chicago art and performance influences, looking for culture in the branding of everyday objects, and his new collection How Much. Interviewed by Jim Feast

Features

Three New Publishers' Self-Retrospectives
Anthologies like these have critical value because they portray what publishers think they have achieved — and thus how they wish to be remembered. Reviewed by Richard Kostelanetz

George Mackay Brown: An Appreciation
A virtuoso with words, the prolific Scottish poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist George Mackay Brown remains too little known in literary circles. Essay by Mike Dillon

Two New Translations of Max Jacob’s Poetry
These new translations of two of Max Jacob’s major collections should be recognized as welcome and essential. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan        

Poetry Reviews

Alive at the End of the World
Saeed Jones
Alive at the End of the World is the work of a maturing poet, and perhaps a transitional work: the already-accomplished Saeed Jones has moved from the subject of his boyhood to the volatile racist politics of the here and now, as well as his worries for the future. Reviewed by Walter Holland

psalmbook
Laura Walker
In her new book, Laura Walker manages to preserve a sense of prayer while also reshaping the psalm into something new—a significant literary achievement. Reviewed by John Bradley

How to Communicate
John Lee Clark
John Lee Clark hasn’t just put his life into verse and prose poems; he’s felt and manipulated and explored and expanded what poetry in English can do. Reviewed by Stephanie Burt

Water Has Many Colors
Kiriti Sengupta
Illustrated by Rochishnu Sanyal
From epics to succinct one-liners, Kiriti Sengupta suits his poetic form to the subject, just as the titular folk idiom reminds us that water takes shape from the container in which it is held. Reviewed by Malashri Lal

Nonfiction Reviews

Watershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress
Ranae Lenor Hanson
Ranae Lenor Hanson offers a personal map against which readers might chart their own ways through the uneasy waters of the climate crisis. Reviewed by Elizabeth Bailey

Tuesdays in Jail: What I Learned Teaching Journaling to Inmates
Tina Welling
These reflections on teaching by novelist Tina Welling, which include non-judgmental sketches of her incarcerated students, make for a beautifully written memoir. Reviewed by George Longenecker

I Need to Tell You
Cathryn Vogeley
In a memoir that details moving from the solitude of shame to the loving acceptance of family, Cathryn Vogeley also offers an enlightening examination of secret adoptions.  Reviewed by Sandra Eliason

Fiction Reviews

The Last Days of Terranova
Manuel Rivas
Translated by Jacob Rogers
The Last Days of Terranova is like a bookstore: One is pleasantly overwhelmed by the many rich stories that sit near one another. Reviewed by John Kazanjian   

Because I Loved You
Donnaldson Brown
Because I Loved You presents an adult assessment of the limits of love alongside a potent acknowledgment of the power of shared history. Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader

Participation
Anna Moschovakis
As she does in her poetry, Anna Moschovakis effectively employs and interrogates language in her latest novel, Participation. Reviewed by Joseph Houlihan

Multi-Genre Reviews

I Made An Accident
Kevin Sampsell
Just as collage allows one to reorder the universe, poetry uses language to forge or reconstitute personal connections that may have been lost or rendered remote. Reviewed by Christopher Luna

Young Adult Fiction Reviews

Blaine for the Win
Robbie Couch
As depictions of queer characters become increasingly nuanced in YA fiction, Blaine for the Win will garner readers’ votes. Reviewed by Nick Havey

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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

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

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