Claudio Magris
Translated by Anne Milano Appel
Yale University Press ($25)

by John Toren

Writing in Italian but steeped in the literature and cultures of Mitteleuropa, Claudio Magris remains a "writer's writer" rather than a popular one, and Journeying will do little to alter the fact. That's too bad. These occasional pieces display the erudition and charm for which Magris is known, and have the added virtue of being relatively short. Is there any point in revisiting impressions of Berlin before the Wall fell, for example, or of Prague during that strange period when Czechoslovakia had come apart and was unsure how to reassemble itself? Magris says yes, and he's got a point:

History does not consist only of what has occurred, much less of absurd, far-fetched alternatives, but also of possibilities . . . The hopes of a generation in a specific historical period are part of the history of that time, and they too have therefore contributed to making us who we are, even if the course of events later overlooked them or proved them wrong.

It can be relaxing, in fact, to relive the dreams and anxieties of a historical place and moment with the knowledge that, after all, things turned out alright. In any case, little of the material Magris has gathered here is expressly political; far more of it is devoted to literary, cultural, and sociological observations. Although the essays have not been divided into sections, the book follows a pattern of sorts, with pieces about Spain—the least interesting part of the book—followed by impressions of Germany and specifically Berlin. In time we arrive in Poland and later the Balkans, where Magris introduces us to several obscure but enduring micro-cultures, including the Sorbs and the Cici.

Three attributes stand out in these pieces: their brevity (they seldom run to more than a few pages); Magris's command of the historical background and common lore of the cities and regions he's describing; and their overriding humanity. Magris tends to be less interested in monuments and past events than in individual people, friendships, and the fellow-feeling that animates any healthy community or culture. Mad Ludwig's castle interests him less than the personality of the Bavarian king himself, for which Magris feels a certain sympathy.

In one essay Magris journeys to California to examine exiled serial composer Arnold Schoenberg's desk. He describes the objects and papers, makes a few remarks about the character of Schoenberg's music, and discusses how disappointed Schoenberg was that Thomas Mann (who lived just down the street at the time) used him as a model for the diabolical artist in Dr. Faustus. But what interests Magris most are the family photos on the desk. Here he sees a man attached to his children and grandchildren, inventing ingenious games together and passing the days in an atmosphere of familial love than many would envy:

In that room of Schoenberg, maestro and creator of dissonance, we feel the mark of harmony, of a man who lived in harmony. It is the room of a fabulous father, grandfather, or uncle whom we per¬haps knew in our childhood, a family member who might not have amounted to much and whom others regarded with suspicion, but who for us was the magician who made things come alive, transform¬ing pieces of paper into mysterious creatures . . .

These impressions, which seem to have struck a chord from Magris's own childhood, are confirmed and amplified by Schoenberg's daughter Nuria, who now looks after the museum.

Magris has an abiding affection for the peoples and cultures of his home region of Istria, a peninsula at the head of the Adriatic Sea that has changed hands several times during the twentieth century and is now divided between three nations. Yet he avoids wading into the morass of crimes and counter-crimes that a detailed history would expose. His position is a simple one:

An ethnic group that asserts itself often does so at the expense of another, weaker group, thus violating the principle in whose name it protests against the stronger state or nation by which it in turn feels oppressed; history is one big frothy fermentation in which bubbles eager to emerge continuously destroy one another, bursting one by one.

In contrast, throughout these disparate pieces Magris not only champions but allows us to catch glimpses of expansive polyglot pockets of local culture. For example, on a journey to the land of the Ciribiri, he shares a meal with some of the local inhabitants:

At the table, deliciously laden, Italian, Istro-Romanian, and Croatian are spoken. For this free, relaxed people, the Istro-Romanian identity is not a visceral obsession, a purity to be protected from any contamination, but an added rich¬ness, which coexists peacefully with ties to Italy and being part of Croatia. That is how a border identity should be, an enrichment of the individual, whereas instead the border often exacerbates barriers, divisions, hatred.

Magris, too, is a creature of the borderlands, and he has been amply enriched by the experience. In Journeying he celebrates the Jews who have no home, exposes to a wider audience the obscure cultures in the midst of which he was raised, and casually offers up the fruits of a lifetime spent exploring the literature and customs of regions farther afield, all the way to Norway and Vietnam. Laced with both wisdom and fellow-feeling, these pieces support an ethos that has little, in the end, to do with journeying. We might meet up with it anywhere that people relax their guard and get to know one another well—maybe right down the street.

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2018

Deborah Nelson
The University of Chicago Press ($25)

by Esther Fishman

What makes up our public discourse? We seem to want to know everything that is going on around us, and we love to form opinions on a myriad of topics: baseball statistics; where to get the best pizza; strategies for the next election. But it doesn’t stop there; we also actively seek out the opinion of others. In fact, it could be said that our world is divided into two camps: those who agree with us, and those who don’t. Said another way, we receive information from the world around us—what we read, who we talk to, and what is projected by the ubiquitous media—and then choose what to believe, what to let in, what warrants a reaction.

In Tough Enough, Deborah Nelson examines the work of six women who were known for their strong opinions: Diane Arbus; Hannah Arendt; Joan Didion; Mary McCarthy; and Simone Weil. Nelson maintains that these women can be studied as a group, although their ideas are in no way similar, or even compatible. Their importance derives not only from the contents of their books, magazine articles, or art exhibits, but also from the tone in which they were presented. Collectively, these artists did not depend on any kind of sentimentality to explicate their opinions, even when their subjects were earthshakingly tragic. They all believed that as soon as emotions were introduced in public discourse, even in art, they obscure the clear light of understanding.

According to Nelson, this clear-sightedness kept these six very public figures grounded in reality. Indeed, the first sentence of her introduction proclaims: “This is a book on women writers, intellectuals, and artists who argued passionately for the aesthetic, political, and moral obligation to face panful reality unsentimentally.” But what is this reality? Even when writing about the twentieth century, it should be impossible to use this term without definition. After all, the philosophical ramifications behind quantum mechanics were already being explored in the post-World War II era. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, introduced in 1927, underlies today’s understanding that reality is in the eye of the beholder, that no one person or group possesses an ultimate, unchanging certainty. Therefore, an event such as the Holocaust should not be seen as monolithic and has as many stories as it had participants—and all of these stories are real, even if we do not want to hear some of them (Eichmann’s, for instance, as told by Hannah Arendt). Joan Didion didn’t make her husband come back from the dead, or cure her sick daughter, but writing The Year of Magical Thinking did make it possible for her to imagine a world in which these things were happening. Diane Arbus, by her choice of subject and atmosphere, made visible new realities. Susan Sontag writing about her illness and Mary McCarthy writing about her upbringing introduced new ways of thinking about experiences common to most people.

The true contribution of these six women was not a lack of emotion, but rather their reticence to rely on sentiment in their work. They were cognizant of their very public roles and could have given in to the easy play on gut reaction that usually prevails in public argument. There is a strong moral component to much of their collective work—a morality that suggests we ought to see that is deeper than any conclusions based on surface emotions, quick reactions that overwhelm critical thought.

“It seems almost unsporting to revisit the misogynist reactions to a woman intellectual in the 1950s, so obvious are they and so unsurprising,” Nelson points out, yet we would do a disservice to ourselves to discount the role that gender plays in this debate. Nelson writes without academic jargon, yet she uses the critical sources focused on a point of view that is primarily feminist, and sensitive to the plight of underrepresented minority populations. She does not present her subjects in any historical context, and therefore their roles as female artists, and their successes in a time when the majority male voice was codified as a unified worldview, are obscured. By concentrating on analyzing the work of these six women, however, she highlights their importance—not as popular tastemakers, embroiled in issues of their time, but as public philosophers, eager to point a way to a deeper understanding of our shared world. In this way, she helps to bring her subjects forward in time.

The women profiled in this book developed the ability to engage in theorical discourse in the wake of such horrors as the Holocaust, not to mention personal illness and death, and that is why their work continues to resonate; a Sontag or a McCarthy defines a subject long after their first introduction. These women are passionate, and able to express their particular passions without cant. Some of the very way we think is due to the concepts they developed. It is a wonderful thing to read such a cogent and thought-provoking analysis of their work.

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2018

by Brian Halley

Books offer some time away from the din of constant news coverage. There is no news ticker running across the bottom of the page, no big announcement of breaking news. But chosen wisely, these books can inform how we understand that constant news buzz, online or off. Those books published by our university presses are particularly well suited to fill in the backgrounds on the most pressing issues we face. This year, University Press Week runs from November 12-17, and the Association of University Presses chose a very appropriate theme: #TurnItUP, which emphasizes the role UPs can play in amplifying underrepresented work and ideas.

University press books run the gamut, to be sure, from lighter fare to more scholarly tomes. But in an age of rapid news, delivered in a multitude of ways so it seems inescapable, these thoughtful books deserve extra attention. Beyond the credit some of us editors may want for our skills as list curators, it also means something that university press books have been peer reviewed and approved by a faculty board at a university. They are key resources as facts blur in the swiftness of this current moment.

Right now, the U. S. President and his Administration have made threats and promises on a number of fronts, possibly to draw out voters who support their more extreme positions ahead of the mid-term elections. When the New York Times uncovered a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services that would limit how the government recognizes those individuals who identify as transgender, as just one recent example, the backlash was swift. The University of California Press was able to publish a blog post from Tey Meadow, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century, which the Press published in August 2018. Of course, many university presses have published key texts in the area of transgender studies, such as the new Histories of the Transgender Child by Julian Gill-Peterson from the University of Minnesota Press, the forthcoming Trans People in Higher Education edited by Genny Beemyn from SUNY Press, and Duke University Press’s Transgender Studies Quarterly journal..

Searching the word “migration” will now lead to hits focusing on people rather than animals, especially those women, men, and children desperately trying to reach the Unites States for a chance at asylum. This is an issue where the significant—and significantly—false information poses true dangers to the travelers in question. (As often ill-informed debates have played out, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that 1,500 children, ages 13 – 17, were being held in “temporary shelters” in West Texas, as of October 2018, for example.) The facts of today are essential for us all to know, but ongoing migration into the US, from Mexico and elsewhere, has a long and complicated history that provides necessary context. Books published by a number of university presses, particularly those like the University of Arizona Press and the University of Texas Press from border states, illuminate key questions on these issues. Indeed, in 2019, UT Press will publish Accountability Across Borders: Migrant Rights in North America, edited by Xóchitl Bada and Shannon Gleeson.

Even with wave after wave of extreme natural disasters hitting the US, most recently Hurricane Florence in the Carolinas, those following the news may still believe that the science of global warming is up for debate amongst scientists. Certain university presses have long published work making the science very clear. MIT Press has published widely on this issue, from in-depth research aimed at specialists to more general interest titles, such as the recent Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale, by Matt Hearn and Am Johal. Princeton University Press comes at the issue from its various disciplinary strengths as well, from policy to science, including approachable titles such as Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North, by geographer Mark C. Serreze (2018). Trinity University Press, combining humanities and science in their approach, published Coming of Age at the End of Nature: A Generation Faces Living on a Changed Planet, edited by Susan A. Cohen and Julie Dunlap. Many presses confront these challenges in their own regions explicitly, such as a book published earlier this year by Louisiana State University Press, Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South: Two Centuries of Catastrophe, Risk, and Resilience, edited by Cindy Ermus.

In fact, university presses often serve their regions with a range of books, from regional ecology studies to local nature guides to biographies of political figures to local fiction, relevant to you and your neighbors, for pressing issues of the day or as a local resource. In addition to books in a number of scholarly fields, I have developed a Boston activist history list at UMass Press, with the latest entry being People Before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making by Karilyn Crockett, chronicling the intersectional protests against highway construction that brought together environmentalists, neighborhood groups, and more.

The news will keep moving at a breakneck pace, that seems clear. But as we as readers approach the news, or the polls, or protests, we need to be informed with knowledge that has been curated, vetted, and peer reviewed. Fortunately, our evolving, adapting, and forward-looking university presses provide the very tools that can make for better news consumers, voters, and activists.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2018

Sergio De La Pava
Pantheon ($29.95)

by Chris Via

Sergio De La Pava’s first book, A Naked Singularity, cast a long shadow that continues to loom over him like Gödel, Escher, Bach over Douglas R. Hofstadter. Even the synopsis on the back cover of Personae, De La Pava’s second novel, is more preoccupied with escaping its towering predecessor than in its own précis, and it seems inevitable that the debut novel itself makes a self-deprecating cameo in this latest production. But for those who crossed over the event horizon and perhaps were befuddled with the slim offering during the interregnum, Lost Empress proves that the author is no one-hit-wonder.

The fateful butterfly wings of an automobile accident and a woman’s bilked inheritance set into motion the intertwining of a motley cast of characters. We open with the magnetic Nina Gill and the conflict with her brother over ownership of the Dallas Cowboys. In the midst of NFL lockouts, Nina—the author’s reimagining of Ayn Rand’s Dagny Taggart—takes over the Indoor Football League’s Paterson Pork and proposes a pons asinorum that will make (and perhaps end) history. Meanwhile a fatal car wreck brings together the lives of an outcast, a priest, an EMT, a CO, and a 911 operator. And in yet another plot stratum, we follow the virtuosic Nuno DeAngeles, an imprisoned autodidact who performs his own grand jury defense in an unlikely turn of events. One of the novel’s greatest narrative strengths is the intersecting of these disparate lives, the sharp contrast of which brings the ideas of fate and justice into bas-relief.

De La Pava revels in playfulness and punctiliousness—for starters, the book is divided into prologue, logue, and epilogue—while maintaining a perspicacity reminiscent of David Foster Wallace. There is an overwrought narration of the trivial akin to books like Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, but adorned with comedic gilding that ranges from Three Stooges slapstick (think: the banter in Personae’s Waiting for Godot-like brain-in-a-vat play) to National Lampoon gags (think: A Naked Singularity’s Señor Smoke burritos incident) to sardonic social commentary. Add in the interpolated ruminations on coincidence, seasons, silence, islands, music, time, space, sports, and religion; a heavy sprinkling of literary allusions (Keats, Dostoyevsky, Musil, et al.); a keen sense of parallax (“There’s no down or up for the sun”); deft aphorisms (“Memory may be more powerful than pure imagination but both are muffled rumor when compared to our experience of the urgent present”); and you have all the trappings of what makes reading De La Pava a treat.

Like the corpulent Scarpetti, who, ironically, becomes an office celebrity for transcribing 911 calls, De La Pava is an “expert in human truth and impervious to cliché or shallow thought.” Lost Empress is the product of a restless mind that has gorged on the best of recorded thought but is too sensitive to the human condition and the ambiguity of language to succumb to chaotic postmodern regurgitation. The novel is a tightly-crafted, cerebral synthesis that bandies anti-anthropocentrism and human-all-too-human sympathy, while, as The Theorist declaims, “Time is literally running out.”

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2018

Book 3 of the Eroica Trilogy
Eugene Garber
Transformations Press ($9.99)

by Martin Nakell

In The House of Nordquist, Eugene K. Garber writes not about the war or the truce or the potential for harmony between reason and vision, logos and dream, order and chaos, good and evil, primitive passions and civilized societies—he writes from the consciousness of that field. Therein, all the difference. Therefrom, this extraordinary novel, a marker from time of our time.

There is no simple story here. Rather than a novel of storytelling, this is a fiction of consciousness not easy to construct, organize, or keep track of. There is an exploration of the human experience from the primitive mind to our own, our destructive and our creative powers, our restlessness. The main characters are all in search of redemption in a 21st-Century world in which we have lost our connection to the spiritual / consciousness / dream / art. They all seek to reconnect in different ways. Then there is a Kafkaesque bureaucratic governmental agency, “National Division A,” whose agent-detectives interrogate some of the characters.

To ground this Fiction-of-Consciousness in the material, lest it “slip into the fantastical,” there is an actual “House of Nordquist,” a “huge house with much glass, the north wall sharp-edged like the cutwater of a ship.” Eric Nordquist’s “insane father,” Gunner Nordquist, once sailed the ship-house off to the Arctic in search of IT. “Maybe they sailed all the way north until they got to the edge and looked over, and there was the IT. The old man couldn’t stand the voltage and cracked up, but Eric brought IT back.”

Eric, who hates the inadequacy of words, sets out to compose a symphony “to change the world,” because “only music can speak the truth. And only his music. . . . a searing music, an absolute fire out of which would rise the Phoenix of a new creation.” Half-mad, Eric draws several characters—his mother Dierdre; Holocaust survivor, Helene; Eric’s college buddy (from Justin and James College for Men) Paul Albright, and Paul’s wife Alice—into his form of the quest, creating his symphony.

To ground it yet a bit more, there is a crime—someone has set fire to the House of Nordquist. Someone is known to have escaped the fire, and National Division A goes in search of that person to try to find the arsonist. But is the crime the setting fire to the House of Nordquist, or is it the destruction of the human spirit? And who is the criminal?

The book opens with a dialogue between Alice and Peter Albright about Eric Nordquist and the fire. Alice asks, “Where did Eric come from? I don’t mean by birth from Deirdre and his crazy father. I mean after being born, or maybe before being born.” Eric’s powers, his vision-quest made manifest in his symphony is so compelling that Paul “had to speak for Eric. He had to say whatever Eric put in his mind.”

Eric must draw his Phoenix-symphony out of the body of some living person, and he will do it with a Gothic machine, “With the right equipment you could suck music from a body and change the world.” Eric’s mother, Dierdre, provides the body for Eric’s project—she procures Helene, an emaciated Holocaust survivor, the decayed body of history. Helene’s suffering is compounded by Eric’s use and abuse of her. Finally, during the fire, Helene “was in the house drinking flames like wine and singing songs of death with a nail in her throat.” In an orgiastic, madly triumphant feast of her destruction Helene drinks the “flames like wine” as she sings “songs of death.” Would it change the world? No. Paul and Alice in dialogue:

Because to change, things have to be broken up.
Or burnt up.
That’ll work.
But the symphony didn’t change the world. It just changed your life.
What about your life?
Sure. If it changed your life, it changed my life.

Thomas Meachem, another college classmate, is as much of a seeker as are Eric and Paul. While Eric re-names Paul “No-Name” (“What did it feel like getting into the role of No-Name?” / “Like being a tabula rasa.”), Meachem unnames himself, sheds all identities, all sense of self, in order to rename himself. At college, Meachem “was . . . the one of clearest purpose.” He used his clarity to become rich, a “star capitalist.” But Professor Tyree “secretly . . . loathed clarity. What he loved was the shadowy aura that hovers around the edges of clarity. It was there, he believed, that the verities were to be found.”

Realizing that the clarity of his wealth (achieved through the system of Econometrics, a first cousin to Eugenics, was just a “scam that pretends you can assign numbers to the behavior of billions of people,” Meachem pays heed to “the arrival of a voice that said you must renounce your identity,” and joins the pursuits of his old classmates and professors: “I wanted to be broken into pieces that I could put back together any way I chose.”

To disentangle himself from the clarity of identity, driven purpose, and money, from the America that “was to have given birth to the new order four centuries ago,” but has only “drowned in blood.” Meachem, traveling to the Amazon, abandons his possessions, his identity, even the clothes he wears, subjecting himself to hunger, humiliations, and degradations, all to look over the edge of his own void. He explains to a detective in one of the interrogations:

I broke down. I babbled in unknown tongues, howled like an animal, crawled along the bank like a furtive saurian. I crammed reeds and mud into my mouth. Success at last. I was broken.
You suffered terribly.
I visited it all upon myself.
How did you manage to come back?
I never came back. That was the whole point.

Those are the two worlds Garber sets against each other: those who, like Gunnar and Eric Nordquist, pursue art in lives redeemed by that art, and those who prize hyper-civilized, money-driven, self-destructive greed—signified by the detectives in their objectivity, their numbers, their econometrics.

Professor of Religion Karl Aptheker plays a different part in these quests. In Meachem’s letters/reports to the detective bureau, he writes: “I said that nothing we know is the center. . . . our Professor of Religion, Aptheker, would say that there is a center, only we cannot experience it.” Aptheker sees the quandary, yet is capable of just living within it, not running to find frantic ways out. Professor Aptheker “believes that no human can change the world utterly.” Where Eric is the anti-Logos, Aptheker believes that “in the end it will be the Word made flesh that transforms the world.”

A book of this complexity is no ordinary tale to be told in any ordinary way. Absent of plot, it unravels not through exposition or logic or linear time, scene or action, but through dialogue, interrogation, and letters. And then, with its target in mind of this contradictory braided miasma of forces, it undercuts its own reality. It is a book whose aspirations go far beyond mere realism:

It’s an old story, sailing off to get some great prize.
Like what?
Helen of Troy, the Golden Fleece, the New World.

But “Nothing in this story fits in.” The characters come to play parts they cannot help becoming aware of:

Where are we in the story?
It’s not a story. It’s a geometry. It’s what happens when you wrap the earth in lines. You go to the bottom of the sea, like my father. But if you want a story, tell it.

And so, it is not a story like Helen of Troy, et alia. “I may have embellished it, but I was inside of it. How does one get inside a story he has never heard before?”

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2018

Christine Schutt
Grove Press ($23)

by Erin Lewenauer

Author of three novels and two short story collections, Christine Schutt, with the exacting grace of a water-skier, takes us prickly places we don’t want to go in her latest story collection. What is this place saying? she asks insistently through numerous characters and their highly individual circumstances. Schutt’s universe is a thin, brittle one, where even the young are old.

In the opening novella, “Pure Hollywood,” Schutt writes, “Since they had moved to the desert Mother thought most about what happened before with people they didn’t remember or hadn’t known.” We are dropped into worlds like this often, voids, a moment choked by another moment of loss. The details of characters’ predicaments are explosions within the strict confines of time before they float away, becoming more feeling than fact:

Let’s say it was May in the first decade of the hardly promising twenty-first century, and a white stucco wall, corsaged in bougainvillea and lit up by the moon, enticed them downhill a long way past gated properties to a wider road, then down that road and across it on the other side to the lookout onto the sparkle that was the city and what lay before them at the liftoff of another beginning, which feeling they would experience again, until decades shrank to pieces of colored stone, mosaics unexpected and unfitted yet shellacked together and made to glow alike in recollection so that all she had known of love and the end of love could be summoned and summed up in a ceiling pinked in sulfurous light.

Schutt’s remaining ten stories vary greatly in length, but they share an atmosphere, always carrying the sensation of the West, where fine, gritty sand is sprinkled everywhere, never fairy dust: “the just-right night of Los Angeles” Their plots often pebble like water over skin and dissipate. And the pace is a sprint, always toward the horizon. The story “Family Man,” for example, delves in and out of conversation with itself: “He hears his name, but has no desire to know how he might be described in the future: a glass of water, a flavorless man, at best, at best, on a white tablecloth a goblet of melted ice with the slightest curl of lemon in it. Through the blinds a blade of sunlight cuts the glass in half and shows up dust.”

While Schutt sucks the romance right out of any situation, and even in her flash fiction holds us somewhere longer than is comfortable, she makes us wonder if there is exactly where we should be. Unnerved while taking pleasure in her language, lost among her characters in the never-ending desert, we wince from pain and sometimes from beauty also.

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2018

Hadara Bar-Nadav
Saturnalia Books ($16)

by Denise Low

Hadara Bar-Nadav’s The New Nudity is a book of riddles, one of the oldest literary forms. The poems examine objects like “Wineglass,” “Spoon,” and “Piano.” Most titles in the book have this one-word, concrete noun format, with only a few variations. The chosen topics may seem, at first, quotidian, but they valorize and illuminate the process of language. Titles of the poems give away the answers to the riddles, so the word play is about the inventiveness of definitions, those approximations of size and shape, as in “Thumb”:

Who means what it is to be human
and is scarred by childhood.

Thick and neckless. Your head shaped
like a gravestone.

A smile opens across the knuckle and disappears
every time you lift a tumbler of scotch.

Who holds a pen and lies.

The distinctive human digit must work in tandem; isolated, a thumb is bizarre, even grotesque. The nail is the shape of a “gravestone,” and so inutile. Wrinkles in the thumb’s skin, from a foreshortened point of view, resembles a smile. The true and literal view of a “thumb” gets lost in layers of description. The thumb of the poet herself distorts as she grips the pen, so altering with “lies” the idea of a thumb.

Metaphors accumulate throughout the volume in a new syntax, so they become singular, as when the speaker in “Bridge” finds “Wire spokes / through speech” and notes “I don’t want / to play the harp.” The distorted scale, reducing bridge’s cables to the size of a harp, creates a startling comparison. And not using the article “the” in the title makes this more indefinite—and dynamic. None of the titles has an article, which adds to their suspension in a mythic-like time.

Like Daniel in the Old Testament, Bar-Nadav is an interpreter of the realm of dream and imagination. The poem “Gypsy” demonstrates this, with a submerged narrative about a birch tree with gypsy moth eggs. The poet gives the tree gender—“Sever her arms one / by one. Cut the moths // from the white clot / of heaven.” This could be a Hansel and Gretel forest scene. The poem folds inside-out several times; the images recur in sequences similar to the jumbled narrations of dreams. In the poem, however, a closure occurs, even if incomplete, with the connections among white images: “You found her pearl-pale, / lying on the sidewalk // her head opened, / opening, // like the unborn / gypsy moths, torched // in their white beds.” The emphasis on the verb “open” and its shift from past participle to present participle moves the poem into present time, while it continues to exist in the past.

The New Nudity has surprises on every page. It interrogates many strategies of writers, and so it reads like a master lesson in poetics. The poems are about questions more than answers. Metaphors surprise but are not contorted as they expound upon physical reality and expand it into myth. Bar-Nadav teases out basic elements of physical entities— “Balcony” or “Jar”—until she reinvents alternate realities.

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2018

Adrian C. Louis
Backwaters Press ($16)

by Warren Woessner

The title of this poetry collection is an elaboration of its epigraph by D. H. Lawrence: “The world of men is dreaming. / It has gone mad in its sleep, / and a snake is strangling it / but it can’t wake up.” Adrian C. Louis’s “Electric Snakes” are manifested as fourteen prose poems with numbered sections that illustrate the main themes of the book. More “conventional” poems are spacers between the “Snakes.”

This collection is also geographically circumscribed. Most of the present-day action takes place between Marshall, Minnesota, where Louis was an English professor at Minnesota State University, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Much of this region is Trump country, and not a few of the poems in Electric Snakes lament his election and fear for the future. “Electric Snakes #12” starts out as a celebration of a good night’s sleep, but then veers into inauguration day:

I live alone so I slept with the television on & awoke
to an odious shit-goblin being sworn into our highest office.
Friends, it’s morning but the sun is setting. The sun is setting
& incomprehensible evil is rising.

Louis is in his sixties and is fearlessly adopting the persona of a grouchy old man. He is in the years of life between retirement and infirmity, and there are a lot of questions, regret, and sorrows in these poems, but they aren’t self-pitying. The poet’s body may be falling into disrepair but he still can pull a laugh out of situations that would otherwise just be a whiny reflection on mortality. Take “Electric Snakes #14”:

An ancient man crawls out of bed & enters the world
the wrong way & twists his trick knee. His goddamned
knee hurts like a son of a bitch, so he is full-on
cantankerous . . . his faith dissolved. Today he will not do the
pony like Bony Maronie even if he could remember how.

Louis, a self-described “half-breed Indian” who grew up in Nevada, in the “blood-drying wind,” tells us that the “ghosts in the Great Basin are insistently calling me home.” This move is unlikely, however, as Louis has learned to love hating Minnesota:

I think I am still alive, but alive in
Minnesota is a slow death. This is the frozen land of the dull
& the dead. Dull & dead earth, dull & dead humanity, dull
& dead weather. I type out “Minnesota sucks the scrotum
of Satan” and post it.

Still, Native-American themes and story-telling are threads that run through many of these poems. Some of the stories only take a few lines, as in a section of the sequence “Skinology”:

I have known
Some badass Skins.
Clichéd bad-to-the-bone
Indians who were maybe
not bad but just broke,
& broken for sure.

Some of the most moving poems contain the poet’s longings for a lost lover, one he would literally die to join. In “Got Those Lonesome Blues In Small-town Minnesota,” Louis moves from thoughts about the sounds of trains at midnight to speak to her:

Darling, I was dreaming of you
when trains pulled me awake
& our wet lips parted ways.
The last time I kissed you
was ten years ago. I shivered
while you slept in your coffin.

Even as he describes himself as a ghost, a hermit, or a zombie, Louis is brought to life by the pleasures of the flesh that he can still sensually access, such as college girls sunning in the park:

Firm bottoms & bellies & heads filled with helium. The good ole USA. The euphoric scent of Coppertone simmering on the skin of young women. I inhale the intoxicant as I slowly drive by.

Although Electric Snakes is suffused with mortality and the ghosts that surround him, Louis is not quite ready to stop telling us his stories. As he puts it in “Electric Snakes #2”: “So when I say poets should write poems & otherwise shut the fuck up, I pretend I am not talking to myself.”

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2018

Luljeta Lleshanaku
Translated by Ani Gjika
New Directions ($16.95)

by John Bradley

“I was a child when my first teacher / mispronounced my last name twice. That pricked me / like a needle. / A small needle in the earlobe. And suddenly, / my vision cleared— / I saw poetry, / the perfect disguise,” writes Luljeta Lleshanaku at the closing of her poem “Acupuncture.” Poetry as “disguise” no doubt offers a survival mechanism for anyone growing up in Albania during the tyrannical rule of Enver Hoxha, as did the author. But note the other gift that needle prick bestows: clarity. It’s this trait that makes Negative Space, Lleshanaku’s third collection of poetry in English published by New Directions, noteworthy. Negative Space draws from two unpublished (in English) collections: Almost Yesterday and Homo Antarcticus, offering the reader forty-seven poems.

Clarity can take many forms. One of them, at least in the poetry of Lleshanaku, results in aphoristic lines, evidence of hard-earned wisdom. Here are a few examples: “Nothing exists until its moment of absence.” “People speak of what they have, not what they are.” “You can’t conquer evil. Evil ends on its own.” Another form of clarity in these poems are the plethora of similes, always unique and memorable. Even taken out of context, they illuminate, like this one from “Tobacco” describing cigarette butts “as though they were spent shells / from a civil war devoid of glory.” Here’s one more of her astounding similes from “Live Music,” describing two pub-goers: “They’re here precisely for the emptiness / the vast emptiness in a divey pub / like the white, fluffy inside of artisan bread / and its smooth crust on the outside.” The similes clarify and at the same time provide depth.

This might give the impression of abstract poems. Actually, these poems are almost always grounded in a particular event or object—a used book filled with written comments, a history class, neighbors building a house, or even something as mundane as stairs. In her poem titled “The Stairs,” we can see a pattern Lleshanaku often employs in this book. The poem opens with a direct observation: “My father was obsessed with stairs.” Then it shifts perspective: “the railroad track with its yellow-and-black lines / isn’t the rattlesnake that makes your skin crawl.” Then the poem moves to another form of stairs—escalators—and makes a metaphorical leap: “Poetry, too, is a way of moving up.” That movement from the ordinary to the profound, that assured intuitive leap, is handled without effort, without pretension, recalling the work of poets such as the Nobel-winning Polish author Wislawa Szymborska.

The translations here, by Ani Gjika, create that rarest of illusions—that these poems were originally composed in English. Such is the ease of the lines, as can be seen in this excerpt from “A Perfect Day”: “Then what? What happens next? I don’t even know / and God damn it, the days are so long in May.”

There’s only one problem with Negative Space: it lacks an introduction offering some biographical information on the author, which could help in building her a readership here in the U.S. But this is a minor flaw in a book that’s like “a low cloud of gunpowder / in a temporary ceasefire zone.”

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2018