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

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.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore:

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

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

Interviews

Documenting the Suburban Gothic: An Interview with Ryan Rivas
by Chrissy Kolaya
Author Ryan Rivas talks about his new book, Nextdoor in Colonialtown, the accidental “truth bombs” of his neighbors’ posts on Nextdoor, and what it means to illustrate the “slippery time” of our historical moment. 

History and Story: Madison Smartt Bell and Jane Delury in Conversation
Authors Madison Smartt Bell and Jane Delury discuss using language in historical fiction to transport characters through space, time, and identity—and the occasions language has done the same to them.

Poetry Reviews

The Lascaux Notebooks
Jean-Luc Champerret
Edited and translated by Philip Terry
The Lascaux Notebooks presents a window into the inner life of our Ice Age ancestors, transforming mysterious cave markings into poetic testimonials. Reviewed by John Bradley

Relativism
Mary Ford Neal
For Mary Ford Neal, the self is composed of absence: distances within us, between us, and outside of us. In Relativism, it is also a space we walk through and become, not a possession. Reviewed by Nick Hilbourn

Wind, Trees
John Freeman
Wind, Trees has John Freeman’s characteristic quietness: an understated, restrained quality which lends itself particularly well to post-pandemic writing. Reviewed by Joanna Acevedo

All the Blood Involved in Love
Maya Marshall
Reading All the Blood Involved in Love 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. Reviewed by Rachel Slotnick

Young Americans
Jackqueline Frost
Young Americans, Jackqueline Frost’s book-length project, is intense, intricate, lyrical, and lengthy, tracking the progress of a mind from young adult to not-so-young adult. Reviewed by Nadira Clare Wallace

Tangled Hologram
James Cushing
In his latest volume of poetry, James Cushing sees distress all around, but he offers his readers an alternative—not nihilism, but its sunnier cousin, anti-nihilism. Reviewed by Lee Rossi

Minor Secrets
Billie Chernicoff
Among their many virtues, Billie Chernicoff’s poems never let us forget the joys and fascinations of living in the physical world. Reviewed by Joe Safdie

Fiction Reviews

Boulder 
Eva Baltasar
Translated by Julia Sanches
Boulders have a way of making landscapes both formidable and absurd—and Eva Baltasar delves into this uneasy balance in Boulder, her idiosyncratic portrait of displacement. Reviewed by Abby Walthausen 

Telluria
Vladimir Sorokin 
Translated by Max Lawton 
Telluria asks: What rough consciousness is emerging along our frontlines and glowing screens? How do we rescale our existence along these spaces in more human terms? Reviewed by Garin Cycholl

Cat Brushing
Jane Campbell
The stories in Jane Campbell's debut book Cat Brushing feed empathy, ask uneasy questions, and jilt the denial of mortality. Reviewed by J. Van

The Missing Lover
Summer Brenner
Collages by Lewis Warsh
In endearing and fast-paced prose, Summer Brenner's The Missing Lover refuses to let the concept of love settle into a single qualitative experience. Reviewed by Evan Burkin    

Hollow
Matthew Cole Levine
Hollow, the new horror novel by Matthew Cole Levine, lives in the tenuous space between the safety of the hearth and the darkest parts of the Wisconsin woods, where the wind screams like a howl. Reviewed by Joseph Houlihan

Nonfiction Reviews

Transfixed by Prehistory: An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time
Maria Stavrinaki
Translated by Jane Marie Todd
This tome by art historian Maria Stavrinaki shows how the existence of prehistory drastically changes the science, the art, and even the concept of time in the modern world. Reviewed by W. C. Bamberger

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life
Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman
Joining the burgeoning genre of collective philosophical biography, Metaphysical Animals puts its subjects at the center of a story about friendship while detailing contemporary philosophy’s renewed interest in metaphysics and morals. Reviewed by Scott Parker

Graphic Novel Reviews

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths
Shigeru Mizuki
Translated by Jocelyne Allen
Long before Maus made comics serious business in the U.S., Shigeru Mizuki’s work, including Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, demonstrated the power and potential of the medium. Reviewed by Nicholas Burman

Roger Williamson is a visual artist, residing and creating in Minneapolis Minnesota. Born in Loughborough, England, in 1947 and growing up in Coventry he was inspired from an early age by the French Symbolist painters of late nineteenth century France. These artistic influences, in conjunction with his own esoteric upbringing and practical experiences of magick, mythology and dream control, form the matrix, a collective oeuvre upon which his paintings and writings are an extension.

Roger Williamson’s works belong to a “theater” of life. Building upon classical myths and ancient themes the paintings invite the viewers into spheres of consciousness- characterized by ethereal portraits and kaleidoscopic color palettes. Williamson’s practice seeks to re-enliven a kind of mystery, revitalizing the senses and questioning reality.

Using diverse creative media, whether painting or writing books, Williamson endeavors to develop techniques that materialize the sensuous dreaming experience into the language of the waking world. Aspiring to reintroduce mystery and ambiguity back into the adventure of human existence through the creative process, encouraging artistic audiences towards "living effulgent and invigorating lives, revitalized from the secretions of our subconscious."

Roger Williamson is the creator of Tarot of the Morning Star deck and the author of The Sun at Night. He is also the founder of Magus Books and Herbs. Visit him and learn more at https://rogerwilliamsonart.com/

Rain Taxi’s annual Benefit Auction is taking place from December 11 through December 18!

Why simply buy your holiday book gifts when you could win them?

Up for grabs are a wide variety of books, chapbooks, and broadsides — many signed, some very rare! — and some other fun surprises. We’re selling out-of-print poetry, cool first editions, signed books, children’s treasures, vintage literary gems, Rain Taxi exclusives, and some terrific 2022 items, all at low starting bids.

When you bid on any item from our Benefit Auction, you are supporting our nonprofit organization and its programs, but you also obtain a wonderful literary treasure to delight yourself or someone you love. (We don’t do much online selling the rest of the year, so especially if you’re not local to the Twin Cities, now’s your chance to snag an item from the Rain Taxi vault!)

The auction begins Sunday, December 11, at 8 pm Central and concludes the evening of Sunday, December 18, at 8 pm Central.

On Sunday night, this page will go live and you can begin bidding:

Thank you for taking a look and for supporting Rain Taxi!  

Ish Klein
Canarium Books ($17)

by Robert Fernandez            

“The world is full of miracles; toys / are our blueprints for better living,” writes Ish Klein in her latest book, The New Sun Time, a riveting account of how life expresses itself in the world. Here, we see the world from the perspective of life and life from the perspective of one outside, but not quite separate from, the world:

Eh, allowing love
for it is outside
very like the nose
A lovely huge nose.

The New Sun Time ends with the masterful “Every Animal Is Your Mother,” which adapts the Tibetan Buddhist exercise of imagining every living thing implicated in every other living thing (such that a worm, say, could be your mother via the endless cycles of death and rebirth):

Cutthroat Trout eats small fish,
fish, eggs, algae, insects,
frogs and small rodents which
got delivered, I guess.
They’re et by bald eagles,
lake trout, otters, osprey—

      I will go toward commotion

The value of such an exercise is foregrounded in an era in which planetary life threatens to disrupt humanity’s homely domain. The New Sun Time reminds us that life can be threatening and indifferent, code-like and machinic, but it is also libidinal, funny, punning, spontaneous, shocking, innocent: “Iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb alive.”

The place of life—“a precious necklace [ringing] heart and breast”—can’t be penetrated, yet it draws the poet in: “I must only move towards life.” To be harassed by both the world and the invisible—the poet’s natural state—provokes cleansing utterances:

and he was like offended
and I was like you want me to do the German version
    of lick your asshole though you insult me

and he was like you are a prostitute in German
and I was like your mother is a prostitute
and he said destroy me in German    
and I said I’d like to see him try                                                                 

Klein’s poems are indebted to the New York School’s speed and immediacy (she was a student of Kenneth Koch's), modernist theater, film, Buster Keaton, Sherlock Holmes, games, Old English poems and riddles, and so on. Her idiosyncratic sensibility and formidable facility can lead to opacities, but the poems are also written with an eye to performance, and her readings reveal a sense of the poem as a complex body of feeling, tones, and thought integrated at the level of music.

The New Sun Time’s essential questions revolve around life, love, and freedom. Is life without love mere repetition? Is “loving a freedom state?” How does poetry access life? How does life access us? And do we feel it when the surface tension of the visible breaks and the invisible emerges: “When the stick figures leave / they go ‘Adios Bitcheros!’ Witty but will // their body get some spheres and arches?”

The poet is subject to the world and its conventions, limitations, and radioactive particles that “penetrate any place.” She can’t escape its scandalous rehearsals of law and power. But she is also prone to reversals, as when visitors from other zones enter and familiar orientations are turned on their head: “At the laundromat the earth shifted its / polarity. A child went missing.”

In a time of deadlocks and crises, The New Sun Time works toward liberation and healing. It argues for the transformative potential of the unseen and marginal over the captivating and narcissistic. The “new sun time” itself is perhaps the uncanny time of poetry, of approaching the sun’s place of “spheres and arches”—or life, which the poet moves inexorably toward.

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Mike Ingram
Awst Press ($14)

by Guillermo Rebollo Gil                        

The driver, about to turn thirty-eight, is driving his friend’s Subaru from Philadelphia to LA. It’s not like he drives for a living—he mostly reads and writes. He has a girlfriend but is unsure if they have a future together. He has a teaching job in a university but it’s not his dream job. Having written a few books that remain unfinished, he is doubting the course his life has taken. His friend, the car owner, just landed a job writing for television and it’s good money, more than the driver has ever made. He starts to cry, big, “embarrassing” tears. He pulls over; fortunately, he’s alone. Unfortunately, too.

Mike Ingram’s book-length essay Notes from the Road is about a low-key life crisis that leads the author to pack a bag and take a cross-country trip along Route 66. Personal crises are only low-key in comparison to obviously bigger phenomena, but they are not low-key if you happen to be in the middle of one. When writing about them, though, it’s important to avoid melodrama, and Ingram’s prose practices this subtle art of avoidance. He writes: “I ate lunch in Tucumcari, at a restaurant that billed itself as Mexican-American, which turned out to mean Mexican food prepared and served exclusively by white people. It was ok, in the way that about eighty-five percent of life is OK.”

The real trip is, of course, toward the self. Ingram is smart not to offer any big epiphanies in these pages, nor does he make any life-changing decisions. What he does, rather brilliantly, is inch closer to attaining some perspective—which, here, is not so much about seeing things any more clearly than before; it’s about seeing them with more honesty and vulnerability. Notes from the Road documents this process without spelling it out: “I’d been on the road for six days, but it felt like much longer. My back hurt. I’d developed a complicated relationship with the check engine light. I hadn’t smoked a cigarette in forty days . . . and the absence of chemicals in my bloodstream had left me feeling raw, exposed, as if everything inside my body was happening a little too close to the skin.”

At the end, Ingram is not in a better place. He’s in LA for a day and then must fly back home, where the same concerns and anxieties await. But he does manage to make a long list of things that bring him joy: apples, dad jokes, the first day of spring on a college campus. It’s unclear if these things make his life a good one, or if the doubts over the job, the girlfriend, and the unfinished books outmatch them. And isn’t that the crux of it?  With enough effort, we can come to recognize and count our many blessings, and still feel underwhelmed by the final tally. Ingram seems to know quite a bit about this process.

Importantly, though, Ingram has no expert advice to give, nor does he look to serve as our role model. He simply offers this earnest, moving account of his trip and his life, and it’s a generous gesture, like receiving the lecture notes from a loyal friend: You still feel somewhat lost upon returning to class, but at least you don’t have to start from nothing.

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Julie Doucet
Drawn & Quarterly ($29.95)

by Steve Matuszak                         

“I had vowed never to draw myself again,” Julie Doucet tells readers at the beginning of Time Zone J, her first graphic novel since her comics diary 365 Days was published in 2006.  Time Zone J seems to be an emphatic repudiation of that vow, since Doucet’s face appears on practically every page, the self-portraits piling up like images from a stuttering video.  But the Julie Doucet who appears in these pages is like none we’ve seen in her work before.  Gone is the cartoony persona from her earlier comics, a character who represented the young cartoonist and her dreams, desires, hopes, and fears.  In Time Zone J, she is replaced by a figure who, while still exaggerated, is rendered with a more realistic drawing technique and is largely limited to narrating the story rather than participating in it.  The immediate effect is that this new “Julie Doucet” is at once more and less real than her earlier incarnation, playing out Doucet’s antipathy toward autobiography and her ongoing interrogation of visual and verbal representation—especially as they relate to memory, which sets the novel in motion, and to desire, its beating heart.

That Time Zone J should be seen as an intentional break from the comics that established Doucet as one of the most important cartoonists of her generation is established before the book begins.  In an introductory note, Doucet instructs readers to read each page “from bottom to top,” essentially upending the traditional Euro-American comics page.  Even the notion of the page itself is undermined.  Images bleed over the edges of the book’s uncut pages, suggesting that the entire novel is one long page that could be unfurled if one undid the book’s binding.  Gone too is the notion of comics panels, either explicit or implied.  Instead, the reader encounters reiterations of Doucet’s face, sometimes with shoulders visible, at other times revealing a bit more of her body, within a collage of text, word balloons, and random people, animals, objects, doodles, and abstract geometrical patterns that have little to do with the text.  A character might crystallize from a dream, as when a woman smoking a cigar appears alongside Doucet, or when Johnny Rotten makes a memorable appearance as Doucet describes the dream in which he has a key role.  But those characters are rare and seem to have no more importance than the figures surrounding them.

Admittedly, it is disorienting.  Adding to the disorientation, the book refuses at first to coalesce around a discernible structure—narrative or otherwise.  The overlapping images do not repeat, except for the ones of Doucet.  And the words articulate disconnected statements and ideas, like those passing through the mind of someone just waking up, phrases rising to the surface in word balloons and popping like soda bubbles.  Eventually, after a few pages, short recitations of dreams cohere from out of the chaos, vanishing as suddenly as they appear.  These shards of story plant the seeds for a more extended autobiographical narrative of Doucet’s youthful friendship with two men that collapsed after she’d initiated an unsuccessful affair with one of them.  That narrative is the prelude—or, as Doucet utters in the book, a “prolegomena,” which she defines as “a critical or discursive introduction to a book or: goiter of the Alps”—to the story that takes up the remainder of Time Zone J: a romance, or more accurately an amour fou, with a Frenchman that began in 1989 over correspondence about Doucet’s zine Dirty Plotte (which transformed within a couple years into the bestselling comic book of the same name).

The story is both heady and frightening.  The Frenchman, a young conscript in the 3^rd Regiment of Hussars in the French army, writes frequent letters to Doucet, sometimes several a day, that become increasingly romantic and erotic; Doucet does not quite keep pace, but definitely stays in the game.  In time, an opportunity arises for them to meet in France where, after a few awkward phone calls and encounters, they consummate their relationship, Gothically, in a cemetery.  At times throughout their days together, Doucet fears for her safety—what does she really know about this guy?  Unfortunately, though she is able to quell her fears in the moment, they never quite abate over time.

In a way, the representational strategy of Time Zone J enacts its themes.  By ridding the graphic novel of panels, pages, and identifiable characters, Doucet strips Time Zone J of time, much as those who are madly in love occupy a place that feels outside of time.   In fact, the novel gets its title from one of the young man’s letters during a period when he is learning morse code: “julie [sic] everything reminds me of you: Earth is divided into 25 time zones, each being presented by a letter.  only j is not used.” But if, in this metaphor, Julie, the object of his love, is timeless, so too are the dead, an insidious connection reminiscent of German Romanticism’s Liebestod, an association wholly in line with this young man’s dark intensity.  Moreover, for those who fear impending violence, as Doucet does at moments throughout her relationship with the hussar, by trying to anticipate its unexpected blossoming in the placidity of one’s daily routines, each second can seem an eternity—minutes, hours, and days dragging out interminably. 

Doucet’s approach in Time Zone J also points to a discomfort with autobiography that she expressed in a 2010 interview for Ladygunn magazine: “For me autobiography is a disease.”  As she contemplated the possibility of returning to comics in a 2017 interview with cultural critic Anne Elizabeth Moore, Doucet pronounced, “I wouldn’t do autobiography.  Never again.  Impossible.”  One senses that aversion in the book’s form, sapping the material of some of its strength.  Granted, by not depicting the events from the past that the book recounts, by not giving the young man and the young Julie Doucet pictorial form, by not animating them through the sequential storytelling of comics, Doucet doesn’t misrepresent them.  They do not become subsumed, however subtly, to her current desires and thoughts, which remain clearly delegated, however parsimoniously, to the older Julie Doucet who is narrating the novel, somebody who remembers the events she’s telling us and comments on them from a distance.  In avoiding this question of representational truth, however, Doucet misses out on the aliveness of representation itself, a quality that pulsed in her earlier comics.  Then, her imagination played over the objects of her attention, transforming them by rendering them in pictures and narrative, creating meaning and pleasure by how they were presented, how they were brought to life for readers.  For all the pleasures that Time Zone J offers, it leaves us with a lingering impression more of Doucet’s memory and less of her beating heart.

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