Rachel Heng
Henry Holt and Co. ($35)

by Rachel Hill

U.S.-based Singaporean writer Rachel Heng’s debut novel Suicide Club depicts a near-future dystopia in which optimized healthcare for the privileged few creates a society where the inevitability of death is replaced by the inevitability of living. In this governmentally mandated healthcare paradigm, suicide, as a criminalized expression of “non-life-loving, the antisanct,” becomes the ultimate assertion of agency. With this deployment of suicide as rebellion against a system of enforced health, Heng’s closest literary precursor is probably the 2008 novel Harmony by Japanese speculative writer Project Itoh, in which the societal imperative to maintain maximized conditions of health similarly subordinates individual autonomy to governmental control.

True to the dystopian tradition, each citizen in Suicide Club is assigned a number at birth, based upon the quality and viability of their genes. The genetic basis for quantifying worth and qualifying personhood imposes a two-tier class system striated between the genetically privileged ‘Lifers,’ who live for centuries, and the ‘sub-100’s,’ the rest of us. The privileged class are provided with transhuman augmentations such as “SmartBlood™, DiamondSkin™, and ToughMusc™,” representing a new economy of the body premised upon its division, technological mediation, and privatization into market-derived pieces.

The genetically poor on the other hand are cast aside to languish in a society which increasingly operates on scales of Lifer centuries, rather than the now subprime three score and ten. Personal health thus becomes the ultimate signifier of power, authority, and status, whilst denying the majority adequate healthcare becomes tantamount to algorithmic eugenics. The pervasiveness of dystopian levels of control meted out through medical procedures enforced on or withheld from different bodies is further visualized through the novel’s leitmotif of transparency.

With Suicide Club’s skyscrapers made entirely of glass, compared to a “great cathedral of empty space,” Heng riffs on the complicated history of glass cities within modernity as a source of both utopian desire and dystopian decline. A particularly pertinent point of reference here is Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian ur-text We (1924), in which transparent architectures literalize governmental panopticon-like oversight. Glass structures are used in Suicide Club as a signifier of perfectibility, endurance, and symmetry, making the bodies they contain literally transparent to society.

Suicide Club’s granular focus on the body is further performed at the level of language, demonstrated through the novel’s distinctive use of chemical and medical nomenclature. Peppered throughout the text are references to “deliberate inducement of cortisol generation,” “optimal circadian rhythm compliance,” and “Salmonella, Campylobacter, Listeria, Shigella.” A microscopic focus on physiological conditions has thus become absorbed into everyday speech and thought processes, materializing how internal bodily processes are made external (and hence transparent), as well as highlighting how external dictates are internalized by individuals.

Coming at a time when economic inequality is increasingly stark, and when public discourse around access to healthcare is gaining more attention, Suicide Club’s focus on the intersections of class, health, and economics is timely and pertinent. Although the novel has a fairly standard “one against the many” plot, it nonetheless succeeds in providing what the best dystopias should: an imaginative rendering of how accelerated contemporary conditions on a future trajectory render the ethical dubiousness of such conditions transparent.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2018-2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

Zachary Mason
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($26)

by Chris Via

Zachary Mason began his publishing career with a revitalization of Homer’s Odyssey, reserving his proclivities as a computer scientist for his second novel, Void Star, a work of science fiction with nods to William Gibson. Now he returns to revamping classics, this time following the historical trajectory from Greece to Rome with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Recasting such monolithic literary forebears is a tricky business, but Mason executes his vision with a poise unexpected of someone concerned with distilling matter into data and algorithms. He appears to have no problem suspending the impulse toward scientific exactitude in favor of artistic liberty and poetic flourish.

Culling material from so vast a pantheon, Metamorphica emerges as an Ovidian florilegium of fifty-three brief chapters organized into “septants” that correspond to one of seven predominant gods. Mason explains that he selected the myths he liked and made them his own, just as Ovid did with Hesiod, Homer, Aeschylus, et al. The generous selection includes myths familiar to most readers: Pygmalion and Galatea, Theseus and the Minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus, Narcissus and Echo, Jason and Medea, Orpheus and Eurydice, Phaedra and Minos. Ovid himself is brought into the narrative, though not in the manner of Dante’s Virgil—Mason uses Ovid as a totem for the invocation and epistolary closing of the book.

The epic mode—much in the manner of Ovid’s strongest English translator, Allen Mandelbaum—complements Mason’s strengths as a writer. Homeric epithets like “the wind-troubled night” and the use of anastrophe, as in “a nightmare unending,” punctuate the narrative with a classical verve. Gritty warlike imagery heightens the smallest of moments: “the rain cut pale streaks on my blackened hands.” King Minos rivals the modern Italian poet Leopardi in his existential despair: “I drank too much, but not enough to make life bearable.” Achilles is rendered with shades of Ecclesiastes’ Kohelet; Menelaus, in his afterlife, prefigures Darwin, a figure who could rightly be called the nineteenth-century incarnation of Ovid; Daedalus recalls a Borgesian character at his most aleph-obsessed. Of all the episodes, “Europa” is the crowning achievement of characterization, symbolism, and aesthetic power—its candidacy for extraction and anthology ranks with Moby-Dick’s “The Whiteness of the Whale.”

Metamorphica, like its predecessor, is ultimately a book of changes, and the ancient narrative thus becomes its latest metamorphosis: a prose poem placed into the mouths of its own representative stars. Achilles laments the endless, meaningless procession of people and events, and Daedalus, no doubt speaking as a surrogate for the author, beckons us to consider his revelation that “in the end, there’s only pattern.” Mason’s craft, however, rushes ahead of all rejoinder and galvanizes the revelation with the addendum that pattern itself can be beautiful.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2018-2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

Interviewed by Gavin Pate

Over the past decade Robert Kloss has steadily produced a haunting body of work. From his early chapbook How the Days of Love and Diphtheria, through his novels like The Alligators of Abraham and The Women Who Lived Amongst The Cannibals, Kloss has explored the dark corners of American history and the struggles of individuals against fanaticism and so-called progress. His books are at times anachronistic, at times poetic, and at times surreal, yet in each the reader encounters a singular voice seemingly of another time and detached from the fads of the present.

This fall sees the publication of his hybrid novel, A Light No More, a book that seems to push Kloss even further into his own literary territory. Blurring the lines between poetry and prose, A Light No More puts Kloss’s inventiveness on full display. While the book shares a loose affinity with horror, it transcends genre, and like the many images and photographs contained within it, it slowly infects the reader with its own harrowing vision of the world.

Gavin Pate: William Styron once remarked that “The business of the progression of time seems to me one of the most difficult problems a novelist has to cope with.” Since the progress of time is central to both the thematic and character arcs of your novels, I was wondering, what it is about history, and especially the changes that took place between the 19th and 20th centuries, that has such a hold on your work?

Robert Kloss: I absolutely agree that the progress of time is central, but it’s interesting to me, looking back now, how much that idea has changed for me. With Alligators in particular I was writing less about people than I was about large events, “history,” and that progression. I was really interested in all the little anachronistic qualities of history, or what seem like anachronisms, and how when you look back at the 19th century so much is recognizable in an unexpected way. There’s a dream quality to something as common as a mowing machine or pornography when it’s in this different context.

But the last two books in particular—Cannibals and A Light No More—have become more interior. There is some exterior progression of time and history in Cannibals, but it’s really tightly connected to character. The new book is almost set outside of history. There are a couple markers that let you know that it’s still the late 19th century, but it’s very interior, and very dreamlike.

I wrote Alligators and Revelator over two years and since then the books have come along at a different pace. And I think that’s partly due to how my understanding of time and what that means has developed—it’s forced me to slow down and relearn a lot of how I think. Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams came out while I was writing Cannibals and some of the ways time is discussed in that film really struck me—there’s this idea that cave painters were in conversation with each other, across thousands of years—so I began looking at how different cultures, and physicists, and dementia sufferers, all perceive time. You see some of that in Cannibals, and it’s heavily influenced the new book.

GP: While your stories are rooted in history, they also contain these bizarre fabulist elements, be it alligators, black mountains, giant walls, or all types of “creatures.” In these historical settings, there always seems to be another world creeping in. How do you see these historical events and almost mythical elements in conversation with each other?

RK: I really idealize the way a child looks at the world—there’s a mystery and a strangeness to things. There’s that glow to everything. And there is less of a line between dream and imagination and reality—they bleed into each other constantly. I had a hard time as a child understanding that dinosaurs and humans did not coexist, probably because it’s just much more interesting to think otherwise.

There’s one memory in particular that I think explains things—Reagan’s re-election happened while I was in kindergarten. And I remember the teacher gathered us around to explain how this election was going to happen and who was up for election and all this stuff. Somehow in this wonderful way I came out thinking that the current president was a kind of timeless machine, a computer. And I remember picturing this computer filling a room. I have no idea how that misunderstanding happened—I do however wish I could go back to seeing the world that way.

The older I get, and the deeper I get into my writing and where I want to go with it, the more frustrated I am by my education. I’ve had to spend so many years unlearning how a book works, how a narrative works, and all this other garbage that I was indoctrinated with. There’s this misunderstanding that you need to be more educated or intellectual or whatever to understand or appreciate experimental writing or art films or modern art or whatever the terms are. I think it’s the opposite—or it should be the opposite—the less you know about technique or theory the better. I was really reluctant to allow my publishers to call Alligators a Civil War novel and Revelator a book about Joseph Smith, partly for those reasons. People get hung up on that stuff too much.

GP: I will resist where my brain wants to go here—namely, the horror show of a computerized Reagan running the world for eternity—and instead address your point about narrative indoctrination. You have this great line in Cannibals that I think sums up many of your characters’ struggles, as well as perhaps your larger vision: “the immortal soul not yet subdued by the mortal malaise.” There is something strikingly romantic here, as well as strikingly desperate. How do you take this line?

RK: I don’t remember that line at all! But you’re right, it does sum a lot up. Again, I think it goes back to childhood, and then the tedium of existence sets in. I sometimes say that I’m addicted to inspiration—and for me inspiration is that deeper something that makes this all meaningful and worthwhile, and it’s the thing that life seems designed to murder.

GP: Your books can definitely traffic in murderous urges—and yet, while there seems to be many ways the people in your novels have designed to destroy themselves, there is a kind of transformation of these urges, such as with the Player King’s Rabelaisian troupe, into something artful, if not still brutal. Do you think this destruction of childhood, which you reference, can actually be remedied through such artistic transformations, or is such thinking just a last-gasp effort against the inevitable? And can you say more about inspiration as both victim to and life-line from the tedium of meaninglessness?

RK: I think it depends on the person—some people are built for tedium and thrive in it. Society functions as well as it does because we don’t all malfunction. Capitalism works partly because something about humanity allows itself to be brutalized into a cog, and partly because it allows certain classes extravagant playtime. I tend to think the ability to believe in a god or in supernatural, magical occurrences, is probably a manifestation of the urge to creativity. You need something like that to keep you going.

I love the documentary about David Lynch, The Art Life, and I think that guy has set himself up pretty well. Some people will say well that’s privilege—a rich white man gets to hire people to address all of his real world concerns so that he can spend every moment of his life smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and creating art—and that’s absolutely so. He also had to sacrifice a lot, I think—you have to be an asshole to people to live the art life. Some people don’t have that in them. And some people don’t have the talent or vision to make it pay off. It’s a rare fucking thing. Now maybe David Lynch would say meditation is what saves him, or maybe he would say the tedium of meaningless is a constant opponent for him as well, but from the outside it looks pretty wonderful.

And Cannibals was obviously partly about that—what happens when we remove ourselves from the machine, from society, and just allow ourselves to dream and become the thing we are at our core? I think there’s a terror to that. Some people can’t give themselves fully over. Some people give themselves over to it and become monstrous. Freedom would be terrifying, I think. I feel like animals in the wild have a terrifying existence. Squirrels must live in constant fear of being murdered, but a domesticated squirrel gets bored and lethargic, so who knows.

GP: Images are a crucial part of your books. The artist Matt Kish did the covers and interior artwork on three of your books, and I believe your next book, A Light No More, will be filled with even more images of your own choosing and perhaps creation. How do these visual representations affect your writing, and would you dare say how you might hope they affect your reader?

RK: I have a few different ways of answering this, but I should begin by saying that A Light No More has maybe 100 images—either photographs from the 19th century that I heavily edited or images that I created and edited on my own.

Creatively, working with Matt changed my thinking a lot. He was brought in by J.A. Tyler to do the cover for Alligators after the manuscript was edited, so his art didn’t affect my writing at all—I had no idea there would be art. But it brought me back—again—to childhood. And I think most writers start out trying to draw. Before we have words and language we’re drawing little stories and binding little books with yarn. Most of the stories I wrote until I was 11 were heavily illustrated. So many times I’d just draw the cover, come up with a title, and that would satisfy the urge. But then, you know, something kills that inclination. I decided I wanted to be Stephen King somewhere in the fifth grade so I started writing a novel. You don’t illustrate novels.

But there’s something pure about an illustration. There’s something immediate. It’s closer to the thing than language can get. You understand that as a child. The word “dinosaur” is far less compelling than a drawing of a dinosaur. The word “dinosaur” I think begins killing the beauty of the image.

So working with Kish—on Revelator, Desert Places, and Cannibals—and some other projects—was partly about getting back to that original purpose. And that original way of looking at a project. When you’re a 4-year-old kid you’re just making a book because you love to do it. You don’t give a shit about anything else. There are no rules, no guidelines, no critics, no editors, no sales people, none of the bullshit.

I think that’s where I’m at now. I’m trying to make books, in a very private way, and a very rudimentary way. Other than the writing part, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m not an artist, I’m not a designer, I’m totally lost—it’s great. A professional would laugh at me, but there’s something pure about it, I think.

This is not answering your question at all, but it might eventually relate to it—I’ve made a point of telling people that this is not a novel. I always come back to Frost’s thing about free verse being akin to playing tennis without a net. I always found that a really dumb thing to say as an argument against free verse.; if you want to play tennis, then yes, absolutely, you need a net, but once you remove the net it becomes a different game, and maybe a more beautiful game. And for a while you’re essentially playing a netless variation of tennis but slowly over time, as you dig deeper into the game, it becomes something entirely different. Maybe that scares some people but that’s where I want to go—something entirely different.

GP: So is this the urge that has led you to self-publish? Did you have frustrations working with presses that go beyond this labeling, or were you just striving for a different kind of artistic experience and control?

RK: It was partly that, and it was partly that I wasn’t wanted. I was willing to make concessions, and I made several, as long as the text itself wasn’t affected. Cannibals was not meant to be self-published—I was very determined to find a publisher and a large audience for that book. The manuscript was more than twice as long as what I published—it was much closer in style and scope to Revelator than what I ended up with—and I thought it would be the one that broke through. I can’t tell you how confident I was in the quality of that manuscript, and I thought—I had such faith in the idea that if a book was good enough it didn’t matter how strange it was, that somebody in publishing would see the merits and take the risk. That was very naive.

That’s all it is. People will throw all sorts of hyperbole into a rejection—how great you are, how great your book is, and how many awards you will win—but what it comes down to is — Listen, clearly the system works for some people. I have friends who have been successful within it; they’ve written and published wonderful books and made nice careers for themselves. My wife works in publishing. But for me it just felt like it was destroying the creative act. So I think the best thing that happened to my writing is that my writing career failed so miserably that I was able to generate enough courage to kill the last of it and make the jump.

And of course the moment I decided that I was just going to do it myself I felt incredibly good. I was terrified that I wouldn’t get enough preorders to print Cannibals, but all the limitations that I’d felt—and a lot of unconscious ones—were gone. Or I was free to throw them off. So now I’d never do otherwise than do this on my own. The freedom is too much. The control. No, it’s everything now.

But I also think the model I’ve been using is too limiting. I’ve been scrounging for enough preorders to pay for publication—my feeling is, foremost, if I can’t generate enough interest to pay for publication then I’m not going to force the issue. From now I’m going to do things a little differently, I think.

GP: Can I ask you a little more about your process and stylistic choices? Can you describe how you come to things like your use of dashes and white space and images? I wonder how much of this occurs in inception, drafting, revising, etc. And when you decide on using, say, the dashes in Cannibals or the images in A Light No More, how might that shape the story as you create it?

RK: My process changes all the time. Partly out of necessity—I’m an adjunct at three different colleges and my schedule is always changing and I’m always commuting or in some different place—and partly out of search for a key that unlocks whatever inspires me. It’s a constant fight, like I’ve said, and it’s so easy to get ground down teaching six courses a semester, shuffling from bus to bus, four hours a day—you fall into the motions, you end up sleepwalking. What worked on one book suddenly is drudgery, but you don’t realize it yet. There’s just this inkling that you were happier, or the act felt more alive, at an earlier time. So I have a million little devices, and when those fail, I have to invent new ones. And what works, works, and I trust it until it doesn’t work anymore.

So the dashes came out of that process. I was writing A Light No More while I edited Revelator for publication—and it looked a lot like that book for a while—dialogue, scenes, indentation, second person. For maybe a year and a half, two years, I was just generating language. I would feel enthusiastic for a day or a week and then it’d just feel dead. Things started feeling different about the time I realized that even if Cannibals were published, A Light No More would need to be self-published. I’d found that I couldn’t work at my laptop anymore—I was writing notes in longhand and then typing the notes into paragraphs, and expanding the paragraphs into pages, and all the things that one does when writing a novel. After a certain point I realized the notes I was writing—fragments, poetic phrases, glimpses of things, dashes—opened all these other possibilities, ways of looking at time and character and language.

So I’m not sure any of this is clear or interesting, but what I’m getting at is everything is the writing process—and in my mind it’s all about searching for the thing and shaping it until the moment comes when it feels like it’s close enough to wrap up. For this particular book that process was partly about generating ideas and content, and partly about devouring and destroying that content. I probably wrote 100,000 words for A Light No More and what I’m publishing is around 7,000 words. What ends up being the book is completely different from a manuscript I had less than a year ago.

Who knows how the next book will happen. Or what it will look like. It all has to emerge organically.

GP: So I can assume your use of the second person “you” in your work also emerged organically? It sure seems to fly in the face of that indoctrinated wisdom of MFA programs and listicle rules for writers.

RK: It really just felt like the thing to do at one point. It feels right. A Light No More uses second and first person pretty interchangeably, because that felt natural. The second person—like the dashes—don’t have any single purpose or meaning or intention. My understanding of the second person has changed and deepened a lot over the seven years I’ve been using it, as my understanding of these dashes has developed.

Now what I want to explore is my tendency to switch tenses, which is another rule that most everyone follows. I switch tenses constantly as I write—within paragraphs, sentences—and maybe there’s something there. I know I let a few go in A Light No More because keeping them in seemed meaningful.

GP: Thanks so much for your time, Robert. As a final question, can you talk about how film has informed your writing? You mentioned Herzog and Lynch earlier, and there are places in your work, especially some of the impressionistic parts or the way you handle transitions, where I detect a debt to film. What better way to end an interview with a novelist than by asking about cinema?

RK: Film is pretty much the ideal medium, I think. I’ve felt that way for most of my life. Most movies are absolutely terrible, and the film industry is even more corrupt and bankrupt than the book industry, but the art form itself is ideal. So I’m always trying to figure out how to achieve what this or that filmmaker achieves, or to affect the reader the way a film affects the audience. And it’s doomed to fail, of course, because the mediums are different, the languages are totally different. A beautiful film is usually the thing that inspires me most and also leaves me the most despondent. The best inspiration is usually completely devastating.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2018-2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

Donald Quist
Awst Press ($17.50)

by Nick Hilbourn

Donald Quist’s For Other Ghosts follows a path traced by his award-winning nonfiction collection Harbors: narrative as a map and its trajectory as a layered rather than a linear move. Present are the disciplined narrative control, the intelligent caprice that holds onto the handlebars by its fingertips while flying down a hillside. More than his previous works though, this book emphasizes the contemplative over the confrontational. These stories investigate the proposition that linear mobility takes for granted: we are inclusive bodies moving to locations that seem to have nothing better to do than wait for us. In rebuttal, Quist’s stories suggest that the location, the person, and the event occur in each moment—that we live in a lineage of shadows rather than straight lines.

The discipline displays itself most furtively in the “false flags” Quist throws up, repeated techniques that distract from the true mechanism at work. He places these throughout his stories as gestures more than clues; the idea that answers would be so easy is part of the answer. For example, in “Takeaway,” Jason and Nahm, a married couple, meet their in-laws at a restaurant in Bangkok. The couple’s differing racial and economic backgrounds serve as a surface vehicle for the narrative, and are emphasized by a political protest taking place outside (the crowd’s chant “No vote” repeats onto a tense silence at the dinner table). These things seem like simple domestic angst, the exterior complementing the interior, but the real “takeaway” occurs during what seems like an insignificant moment of characterization: “During those long hours she [Nahm] would stare down at one of the cracks in the grimy sidewalk and count the number of expensive shoes that passed over, or she’d look up at the tangled thicket of telephone wires running above her head and imagine where each line finished and began.” The “telephone wires” appear later in the story during a flashback to one of Jason and Nahm’s earliest meetings: “Outside the building near the revolving doors, Nahm seemed preoccupied with the telephone wires above. . . . Jason asked what she saw, and she replied openly, ‘I’m thinking about the messages going over my head. I’m trying to imagine the senders and receivers.’” The gesture of looking for something invisible to explain the visible occurs multiple times in Quist’s collection; it’s the ethereal infrastructure that carries true valence.

Quist’s writing operates on an ethical assumption in the essential goodness of people—a metaphysical query that is never resolved but also never dismissed. His characters live within hopeless circumstances, yet they continue. They are not Camus’ Sisyphus though; this is not a noble tragedy. The end is never written because no one can determine the nature of what they’re facing. Are they resolvable problems or existential mysteries? At each story’s denouement, the verdict is still out. For example, in “A Selfish Invention,” DaYana, an MFA student, follows Philip Dawkins, a drunken visiting writer at her program, to his apartment where she listens to him mourn over his disappearance into the phantasm of his own reputation:

“I’m vanishing, but when I try to sit down and write about it I bore myself.”
“Maybe you should try writing for other ghosts.”
DaYana closes the door behind her as she leaves.

The conversation ends there, but the messages in the telephone wires have no beginning or end. Ghosts have no coattails and shadows no lineage. Although chasing a specter seems like a fruitless endeavor, Quist’s characters engage with the ineffable, attempt to re-understand what the “individual” means in relation to it. Does one become a ghost in the process of chasing a ghost? How much of ourselves are built on the foundation of ghosts?

In the final story in the collection, “The Ghosts of Takahiro Okyo,” Yamamoto, the chief of park rangers in Japan’s Suicide Forest, is charged with the unenviable task of collecting the dead. One of his rangers, Daisuke, contemplates the irresolvable atmosphere of a location that is forced to absorb the conceits of thousands: “Hundreds of confessions, the secrets kept by the undergrowth, were rooted in the soil and traveled the lengths of Japan like telephone wires.” (His contemplation becomes ever more eerie when compared to Nahm’s similar reverie as she gazes skyward at Bangkok’s electrical lines.) Chief Yamamoto, meanwhile, is haunted by the disappearance of a coworker, Takahiro, whose uncanny knack for finding the dead has earned him the nickname “god of death.” Quist’s narrative moves between the three rangers, but nothing is resolved by this shifting perspective. If anything, the story seems to fold further into a growing mise en abyme, until the beginning and end are indiscernible.

Taken as a whole, Quist’s stories are inclusive entities that only lightly touch on each other. On the surface, the organization seems ill-suited, the stories awkward in juxtaposition, but they are all connected. The connection is in the feeling created by his unique noir style, one that embraces a genuine sincerity in narrative exposition. It’s a style that acts as a kind of tone, a cadence that connects his characters variegated storylines: an ethereal geography of sound moving over an uncrossable crevasse separating singular entities staring at each other across a yawning depth.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2018-2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

Jennifer O’Grady
MadHat Press ($19.95)

by Eileen Murphy

Does your life feel safe? Perhaps it shouldn’t. “Our lives are not conceived with warrantees,” warns the speaker in Jennifer O’Grady’s tell-it-like-it-is second poetry collection Exclusions & Limitations. Suitably, this advice is found in a poem about the speaker’s own wedding ceremony, “where vows are made, [and] fates will be altered.” Later, in the poem “End of Summer,” the speaker notices that the sweet gum branch hanging over the walk “now seems a weight about to plummet / precisely on the spot where my child digs.” Exclusions & Limitations exposes the risky business of being a parent, of experiencing love, of being alive.

O’Grady’s poems about motherhood and infertility are the show stoppers of this collection, especially the ekphrastic poems about paintings of the Annunciation, created by John Collier, Fra Angelico, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Tissot. According to these poems, both Mary, Jesus’s mother, and the angel, messenger of God, appear in each of the Annunciation paintings, but each painter has a different interpretation of this event and of the personalities of the participants. For example, in “Annunciation,” the speaker describes the angel in Fra Angelico’s fresco as someone

who casts no shadow, who will never be anyone’s
lover or mother, smiles as one
forever unencumbered

Whereas in “The Annunciation According to John Collier” we hear that

the angel
is film-star handsome,
more a gift than bearing a gift

The character of Mary is revealed to be complex as well; the paintings, as deconstructed by O’Grady, tell us what a mixed blessing the Annunciation is from Mary’s viewpoint. In “The Annunciation According to Tissot” the “urgent message” of the Annunciation is frankly depicted as “one that will spoil her life.” “The Annunciation According to Henry Ossawa” explains this perspective even further:

She will always be
at a disadvantage, needing proof
needing pain to make everything
clear, and even the life
already growing inside her
is unbelievable, until it nearly
tears her apart.

Indeed, motherhood and domestic life are not necessarily safe, and O’Grady’s poems about these topics are not safe, either. This collection successfully takes risks in both form and content. The poems’ highly relatable themes, atmospheric details, and clear language draw us in as readers, carrying us along on their thought trails. Compassionate, elegant, edgy, and intelligent, these poems are deeply moving.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2018-2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

INTERVIEWS:

When I Think, I Listen the Hardest: An Interview with John T. Lysaker
Interviewed by Scott F. Parker
With prose full of wit, self-awareness, even self-doubt, and always good will, professor John T. Lysaker’s books take philosophy personally.

Poetry Is Thought As Feeling: An Interview with Karen Garthe
Interviewed by bart plantenga
Karen Garthe’s poetry is that ruminating bouquet, a cognitive dissonance of richness in the realm of austerity. She discusses her recent collection The hauntRoad with author bart plantenga.

The Terror of Freedom: an interview with Robert Kloss
Interviewed by Gavin Pate
Robert Kloss discusses his early work, as well as his new novel, A Light No More, a hybrid work that infects the reader with a harrowing vision of the world.

COMICS REVIEWS

Freedom Hospital: A Syrian Story
Hamid Sulaiman
Harrowing, honest, and politically embedded in a way that Western readers will find devastatingly illuminating, Freedom Hospital tells an important modern story in a fresh and unconventional format. Reviewed by Jeff Alford

POETRY REVIEWS

We Step into the Sea: New and Selected Poems
Claudia Keelan
Keelan’s assured language, verbal clarity, and her commitment to finding the life that has been left out make this a book more than a sampling. Reviewed by Brian Evenson

Catafalque
Adam Tavel
Tavel taps the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe in his award-winning collection, exploring a gamut of personal pain with a heavy, heart-like rhythmic beat. Reviewed by Dana Wilde

Light Wind Light Light
Bin Ramke
Ramke’s thirteenth volume continues his questioning into subjective and objective realities, creating “lines and layers” where consciousness meets quantum and cosmic patterns. Reviewed by Cindra Halm

Exclusions & Limitations
Jennifer O’Grady
Exclusions & Limitations exposes the risky business of being a parent, of experiencing love, of being alive. Reviewed by Eileen Murphy

Poet and The Circus
Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge is a powerhouse among poets; over the years his sheer output has been nothing less than monumental, and at seventy-nine years of age shows no signs of stopping. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan

FICTION REVIEWS

My Struggle: Book Six
Karl Ove Knausgård
Apprehending and articulating the unspoken ephemera of life is this author’s obsession, and the form in which he dredges it out is a unique blend of diary and realist novel. Reviewed by Chris Via

The Bird Catcher and Other Stories
Fayeza Hasanat
Bangladeshi-American author Fayeza Hasanat's main characters are women and other marginalized people whose lives are determined by men. Reviewed by Laura Nicoara

Red Clocks
Lena Zumas
Lena Zumas’s Red Clocks brilliantly combines the forms of speculative fiction and thriller to tell the intertwined stories of four women in an Oregon fishing town. Reviewed by Julia Stein

Transit Comet Eclipse
Muharem Bazdulj
The movement of celestial bodies creates a thematic atmosphere throughout the novel, in counterpart with the more mundane movement of characters as they cross borders and travel through frontier lands. Reviewed by Seth Rogoff

For Other Ghosts
Donald Quist
Quist’s For Other Ghosts follows a path traced by his award-winning nonfiction collection Harbors: narrative as a map and its trajectory as a layered rather than a linear move. Reviewed by Nick Hilbourn

Suicide Club
Rachel Heng
Heng’s debut novel Suicide Club depicts a near-future dystopia in which optimized healthcare for the privileged few creates a society where the inevitability of death is replaced by the inevitability of living. Reviewed By Rachel Hill

Metamorphica
Zachary Mason
Mason returns to revamping classics with his turn at Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ably suspending his predilection toward scientific exactitude in favor of artistic liberty and poetic flourish. Reviewed by Chris Via

NONFICTION REVIEWS

16 Pills
Carley Moore
Moore’s essays are like quicksilver; they move from pithy pronouncements to TMI moments of confession to acute observations. Reviewed by Celia Bland

CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos & Sourcebook for Creative Writing
Edited by Rita Banerjee and Diana Norma Szokolyai
The relationship the individual has with their craft is explored via three different forms of writing-on-writing: manifestos, statements on craft, and writing exercises. Reviewed by Greg Bem

Dreamverse
Jindrich Štyrský
Dreamverse isn’t so much the atlas of Štyrský’s inner world as a set of picture postcards—often scandalous, just as often intoxicating—sent from this land of imagination. Reviewed by Paul McRandle

Preserving Fire: Selected Prose
Philip Lamantia
With entries dated from 1943 to 2001, Preserving Fire gathers an eclectic assortment of essential material by this often-overlooked American Surrealist. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2018-2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019