Noy Holland
Counterpoint Press ($28)

by Kate Berson

Describing what it feels like to read Noy Holland’s new and selected stories, I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like, is nearly impossible. The language tilts and loops. The tangible diffuses, dissolves, reconstitutes itself into something other. Any message a reader might seek evades. But we can be thankful for that, because in this difficulty there drums the pleasure of reader and writer in conversation—in mutual recognition of their shared endeavor.

Writers and readers, creatures whose favored habitat is the printed page, are indeed ever trying to match word to feeling. We are taught—as young and not-so-young writers—to use our five senses as our tools for observation and description. But in Holland’s stories, we are granted no definite, nameable sense from even these basic impulses; physical feeling refuses to be pinned down by expression any more than feeling felt by mind or heart. “It was as if you were watching music”; “A place that was like a painting of a place”; “Might it be not the sea we hear, but some lurching yellow dream we wake to keep from dreaming?”.

Holland not only crosses our sensory wires, she also blurs the boundaries between individual people, delicately blending one character with another or with multiple others. In this way, she questions the absoluteness of our (humans’) separate identities. It is frightening, and it is lovely—frightening because there might be nothing we cling to more than our uniqueness, our ability to single ourselves out; lovely because this compulsion to join, even fuse, with someone else can be a sort of caring or love—and, as in “Orbit,” the novella that portals us into the collection, a means to heal: “I lay with her and in the nights thereafter and after a time to lie there, curved into the wound in her, I think to grow in under her, bone by bone, my toothy spine her long wound’s tongue and groove to seal her.”

Holland takes this notion in various directions, among them displacement, replacement, and interchangeability—as when the narrator tells her addressee in the collection’s title story, “Every boy I ever loved peeled his face off and gave it to you. They’re all you.” We also witness the literal, but heightened, attachments of motherhood; the mother of “What Begins with Bird” insists, for example, “I would have carried him in me for years,” and after her son is born, she notes as she breastfeeds him: “He is rooting, and then uprooting me -- that’s what it feels like.” And we see how the urge to shoulder another person’s burdens, as illustrated in "Chupete," can intensify into a darker appropriation of another’s tragedy, as per the narrator’s confession in “Tally”: “It had not been my grief but I had claimed it.”

In “Matrimonial,” a sleepless couple melds by way of their projected shadows: “I stood behind you. Together we made a shadow of one body, four arms, thrown against the cliff from the moon.” A more elaborate melding is accomplished later between a pair of Sioux girls in “Milk River,” though this time it is through voice, as well as their shared experience and rituals, that the girls become sweetly and hauntingly singular: “It was a trick: you couldn’t tell between them . . . They might be one voice, or four.” They can even “dream the same dream,” they swear. They have become wardens of the land and mothers to their fathers, supplanting their mothers who also “had been girls together,” who “died days away from one another.”

This profound synthesis becomes one pulsing artery in the book’s complex vascular system. I focus on this one of so many—inheritance; quiet violence; interruption and disruption; the relentless temptation of the hypothetical; disaster and the occasionally, oddly beautiful ruins thereof—because I find it particularly reflective of the nature of fiction. Isn’t this why a child begs his parent for a tale at bedtime? Why a commuter buries her foggy, early-morning head in a novel? Why writers choose their maddening craft over a steady nine-to-five? It is a sort of affirmation, then, to behold Holland’s characters as they themselves enact this most sought-after feat of fiction, the traveling together—writer, reader, characters—from sight to sound to smell to touch to dream, from mind to mind to mind to mind, all in the name of that exquisitely impossible undertaking: to know what it feels like.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2017 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2017

Haruki Murakami
Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen
Alfred A. Knopf ($25.95)

by Allan Vorda

Sometimes you come upon a writer who helps you discern some unknown world; for many readers, Haruki Murakami is such a writer. His latest creation, a collection of bizarre short stories titled Men Without Women, primarily focuses on male-female relationships, with most stories dealing with varying degrees of physical and psychological infidelity. The first two stories continue Murakami’s fondness for 1960s pop music, notably the Beatles. As he used their song “Norwegian Wood” as a novel title, Murakami here utilizes “Drive My Car” and “Yesterday” as story titles.

“Drive My Car” certainly is an apt starting point for the rest of the book. It involves a forty-seven-year-old actor named Kafuku who needs someone to drive him to work. The driver is a homely, big-breasted, chain-smoking twenty-four-year-old woman with ears “like satellite dishes” named Misaki. Initially, very little is spoken between these two insular characters, but gradually they begin to reveal themselves to each other. Kafuku tells Misaki about the affairs of his deceased wife, and how he developed a “friendship” with the fourth and last of his wife’s lovers, though he confesses that he “was acting” the whole time during their so-called friendship. However, it is the ex-lover who tells Kafuku the answer to his question about the “blind spot” Kafuku had with his wife: “If we hope to truly see another person, we have to start by looking within ourselves.”

The reader is left wondering about, and possibly hoping for, a connection between the driver and the passenger, since they both seem disconnected from reality. As in Murakami’s acclaimed 2014 novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, there is no final resolution. Perhaps the Beatles song offers some promise: “I got no car and it’s breaking my heart, / but I found a driver and that’s a start.”

Many of the stories explore the vagaries of connection. “Yesterday” is about a young man named Kitaru who asks his best friend to date his girlfriend, a test of both love and friendship. “An Independent Organ” focuses on a fifty-one-year-old plastic surgeon who has countless affairs until he finally falls in love—except the women he loves is in love with someone else, so he slowly starves himself to death. “Scheherazade,” a weird variation on A Thousand and One Nights, features a housekeeper who tells sexually inflected stories after making love to the homeowner, and “Samsa in Love,” a take-off on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, is simply too strange to describe.

“Kino” might be the best of the seven stories here; it features a jazz bar owner who has recently discovered his wife was having an affair. (Murakami, it should be noted, owned a jazz bar called Peter Cat before becoming a full-time writer.) The story opens with Kino (which translates in Japanese to “yesterday”) talking to a visitor named Kamita (translates to “god’s field”). Strange characters enter—a mysterious visitor, a femme fatale, a gray cat, and a bluish snake, about which Kino learns: “If you want to kill that snake, you need to go to its hideout when it’s not there, locate the beating heart, and cut it in two.” As the surreal noir hurtles toward the ending, the reader is left trying to figure out the connection between all of the characters, and what it all means.

The last tale is the title story, which begins with a phone call at 1:00 AM when a man calls to say his wife has committed suicide; the caller hangs up without identifying himself, leaving the narrator to wonder who the woman is. He believes she is a woman, M, he broke up with years ago; it so happens M is the third woman he has dated that has killed herself, and as he reminisces about her, fact and fantasy blur. “Truthfully, I like to think of M as a girl I met when she was fourteen. That didn’t actually happen, but here, at least, I’d like to imagine it did.” At the end of his imagistic wanderings, the narrator declares how everything has vanished for him: “All that remains is an old broken piece of eraser, and the far-off sound of the sailors’ dirge. And the unicorn beside the fountain, his lonely horn aimed at the sky.” As with the other stories in Men Without Women, much is left for the reader to decipher.

And perhaps that’s the point. Murakami makes readers wonder thanks to his unique ability to include “movement in and out of the protagonist’s inner mind” (as Matthew Carl Strecher wrote in his 2014 book The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami); he has infused these seven hypnotically bizarre stories of broken and twisted relationships into something both magical and Kafkaesque. I wonder if the late Junichiro Tanizaki, one of Japan’s greatest novelists, ever thought another Japanese writer could write anything stranger than as The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi. Read Men Without Women and decide.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2017 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2017

Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner
University of Arizona Press ($14.95)

by John Bradley

Two concrete poems entitled “Basket” open and close this engaging book. The arrangement of the words of each poem form the curved outline of a basket, which connects the reader to the book’s title. “Iep Jāltok,” we learn from the Marshallese English Dictionary, means “A basket whose opening is facing the speaker.” It also refers to a female Marshallese and to their matrilineal society.

Some may remember images of the Marshall Islanders from the era of nuclear “testing,” the euphemism employed by the U.S. for the explosions of nuclear bombs in the Pacific from 1946 to 1962. Jetn̄il-Kijiner evokes this period in “History Project,” a poem that narrates her attempt at age fifteen to confront the past:

I flip through snapshots
of american marines and nurses branded
white with bloated grins sucking
beers and tossing beach balls along
our shores
and my islander ancestors, cross-legged
before a general listening
to his fairy tale
about how it’s
for the good of mankind

Her use of lowercase for “American” indicates both a fifteen-year-old’s writing style and also the anger of those whose home was made into a nuclear bomb testing site.

“History Project” includes statistics on the death of the Marshallese from cancer due to radioactivity from the bombs. Ancient history, some may say. Surely we all know the consequences of nuclear testing in the Pacific and how those who were its victims feel about it. And yet when “three balding white judges” evaluate her history project, they somehow believe her project embraces the “fairy tale” told by the Americans. One judge says: “Yea . . . / but it wasn’t really / for the good of mankind, though / was it?” She abruptly concludes her poem: “and I lost.”

Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s losses include the death of her niece Bianca from cancer, as she relates in “Fishbone Hair.” The poem moves, in eight parts, from the discovery of two “ziplocks” of Bianca’s “rootless hair / that hair without a home” to a mythic conclusion in which Bianca’s “fishbone hair” becomes a net, echoing a Chamorro legend. In this legend, women used their hair to weave a net and preserve their islands from a “monster fish.” Over and over in the book, Jetn̄il-Kijiner weaves a net of language to heal and protect. Yes, there is an occasional cliché—“red as tomatoes”—but they are rare, and the language pulses with emotive depth.

Loss once again threatens the Marshall Islands with a terrifying future which Jetn̄il-Kijiner bravely faces: global warming. This means rising seas and the flooding of the Marshall Islands. She promises her daughter, in “Dear Matafele Peinam,” that “no one’s drowning, baby // no one’s moving / no one’s losing / their homeland.” We see this promise tested in “There’s a Journalist Here,” which describes the damage done to an island home by the rising ocean. Still, the author does not surrender. In “Two Degrees,” she tells us she knows that “if humans warm the world / more than 2 degrees” it will flood her home. She’s told at a conference on climate change how two degrees is “just a benchmark for negotiations.” Once again, we see how quickly the world forgets the Pacific Islanders, even those knowledgeable about climate change. The closing of “Two Degrees” suggests how to move the discussion beyond the comfortable abstraction of numbers:

remember
that beyond
the discussions
numbers
and statistics
there are faces
all the way out here
there is
a toddler
stomping squeaky
yellow light up shoes
across the edge of a reef

not yet
under water

Iep Jāltok reveals a poet who—in her first book—has already found her voice, who draws her poetic power from her islands, her culture, and her people’s history. Sometimes utilizing folklore or mythology and other times stream-of-consciousness, her poems change shape and strategy. However, they consistently demonstrate a clear focus. Whether sharing the folk beliefs of the islanders, or witnessing the terrible cost of cancer from nuclear testing, or recalling her own experiences as a mother, her poems educate and advocate on behalf of the Marshallese. At the same time, they speak for everyone, as climate chaos is not limited to islands in the Pacific. We are fortunate to have a poet confront a global issue with both craft and courage: “Maybe I’m / writing the tide towards / an equilibrium / willing the world / to find its balance.”

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2017 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2017

The Best Minds of My Generation:
A Literary History of the Beats

Allen Ginsberg
Edited by Bill Morgan
With a foreword by Anne Waldman
Grove Press ($27)

First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg

Edited by Michael Schumacher
University of Minnesota Press ($19.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Allen Ginsberg’s impact upon the literary as well as cultural climate of the United States during the tumultuous latter half of the twentieth century cannot be overstated. No other American poet has ever achieved the status of countercultural hero that Ginsberg enjoyed, fulfilling Walt Whitman’s declaration in his Introduction to Leaves of Grass to be “master after [his] own kind, making . . . the poems of freedom, and the exposé of personality—singing in high tones democracy and the New World of it through These States.” Ginsberg was a proudly practicing Buddhist homosexual Jewish poet who forthrightly spoke his mind to anyone who cared to listen. Although famous for frank, at times explicit, chronicling of his sex life and drug use, such instances within his writing are in actuality the byproduct of his lifelong discipline to a poetic practice in which observation and detailed notation remain paramount. Far more than chasing hyperbole-fueled scandal or doggedly following the path of raging revolutionary, he was ever the doting Jewish grandmother, always committed first and foremost to being a poet.

In 1956 Ginsberg’s book Howl and Other Poems shuttled him into the national spotlight and he never looked back; he didn’t need to, since he never left any part of his life behind, and he always brought his friends along for the ride. For several years leading up to the publication of Howl, he had been championing the work of his novelist friends Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, and he continued thereafter for the rest of his life to make sure they would not be forgotten. Almost overnight what had previously been an unorganized, underground milieu of renegade writers, artists, and sometime drug users who hung out at coffee houses and jazz joints from New York City to San Francisco became categorized as the Beat Generation, a label that has never been shaken off. Not that the marketing-minded Ginsberg ever bothered attempting to dispense with having himself and his pals so labeled—he took advantage of having the Beat Generation as a recognizable brand name to push for publication of all their works.

Ginsberg is well deserving of a multi-volume Collected Works. Aside from his poetry and the gargantuan amount of correspondence and other material which has been published, plenty more remains scattered in fugitive publications and sitting in archival sites awaiting dissemination. While such a massive Collected Works is unlikely to appear anytime soon, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, an amalgamation comprising lectures on Beat writing delivered by Ginsberg throughout his teaching career at Naropa and Brooklyn College, along with First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg, accomplish a bit of the job of further rounding out what is currently available of Ginsberg’s oeuvre. Each book offers unfiltered access to Ginsberg’s always enthusiastic support for his closest friends, namely Kerouac and Burroughs along with poet Gregory Corso, and insight into those matters which Ginsberg believed had the most powerful impact upon all their work, from the vital African American cultural influence of jazz to ecstatic late night conversations high on stimulants as much as each other’s company.

All the interviews in First Thought are previously uncollected. The collection is genuinely worthwhile in its own right; rather than merely reiterating similar information there’s both a cohesiveness here and an easy accessibility that the bulkier Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996 (2002) lacks. There are also true rarities, such as Michael Reck’s 1968 “A Conversation between Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg.” This recounts Ginsberg’s visit to the reticent master poet shrouded within his self-imposed silence, which Ginsberg infamously managed to pull him out of long enough to receive Pound’s self-condemnation of his spouting “that stupid, suburban prejudice of ant-Semitism.” There is also an amusing joint-interview by Stephen M.H. Braitman between Ginsberg and his father Louis, an accomplished poet given to quaint rhyming verse. The father-son exchange is full of jollity. There is Louis taking delight in his dated, off-color, sexist one-liners (“Poets are born, not paid. But a lady poet can be made.”), as the two poets verbally spar off and talk over one another, leaving a desperate Allen repeatedly pleading with his father, “I want to answer his question.”

The “lectures” presented in The Best Minds of My Generation have been chiseled by editor and official Ginsberg Estate archivist Bill Morgan from nearly 2,000 pages of transcriptions he made from the original tape recordings of Ginsberg’s classroom sessions. It is a phenomenal undertaking even to attempt such a feat, let alone pull off the production of a highly readable text, but Morgan has succeeded. And while there is understandably some repetition of certain factual circumstances, along with a great deal of information that has long since been covered in much detail by others, there is still an undeniably charming aspect to having Ginsberg’s perspective as he presented it in real life. Morgan wisely includes the full text of most of the excerpts and in some cases entire poems that Ginsberg reads and comments upon; this is particularly helpful for any readers unacquainted with the full range of the voluminous prose by Burroughs and/or Kerouac.

Morgan also provides some scholarly apparatus, including footnotes which offer up a pair of clarifications regarding factual errors made by Ginsberg when he accepted Gregory Corso’s poetic assertions in the poem “How Happy I Used to Be” to be historically accurate. Ginsberg extrapolates upon Corso’s line “Alexander Hamilton lying in the snow” that “Hamilton was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, so Alexander Hamilton lying in the snow. Either Gregory read it or he figured out that it was a winter snowy scene.” Yet Morgan’s footnote helpfully clarifies that “the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr took place on July 11, 1804, not winter at all.” Even more amusing is the footnote on Ginsberg’s riffing upon the poem’s closing lines, “Children, have you not heard of my meeting / with Israel Hans, Israel Hans—”:

Israel Hans apparently was some figure of the American Revolution. Oddly enough, Corso was quite learned in old, funny history.
. . . He wrote [the poem] in Amsterdam in 1958 when we were all living together in a furnished room meeting Dutch poets. I guess Israel Hans had originally been Dutch, I think that was the connection, he was some sort of Dutch, Jewish American revolutionary. That’s how Gregory knew about it.

Morgan’s footnote wryly observes “The editor has been unable to find any reference to Israel Hans in historical documents.” Ginsberg’s blind loyalty to his dear friend is quite clear, and when it comes down to it, fully understandable.

Ginsberg clings to memories as the basis for much of his work, and his reminiscences undergird everything he relays in both these interviews and lectures. Key events of his life are told and retold throughout both books. One of these is the infamous story of a vision he had while reading William Blake’s poetry in the summer of 1948. In his lecture on the novel Go! by John Clellon Holmes, Ginsberg describes how Holmes usurps “like terrible hokum” his Blakean vision for quasi-fictional use. Here is Holmes, as Ginsberg relates, “describing my experience through his interpretation of what I had described to him,” with subpar results: “A vision! A vision! The words kept stinging into his consciousness like quickening waves of fever . . . It was love! he cried to himself. A molecular ectoplasm hurtling through everything like a wild, bright light!” Unamused, Ginsberg has no qualms pointing out the flaws in the passage: “my first reaction when I read it was one of cringing and embarrassment, that it had come out so corny or seemed so drugged and hallucinatory, pitifully creepy, in fact.” It’s interesting to compare it with Ginsberg’s own description as given in a Q&A session in 1976:

. . . as far as light—I had a sensation of that everyday light as becoming some kind of eternal light. So it was like an eternal light superimposed on everyday light, but everyday light wasn’t any different than everyday light! It was just, “the eye altering alters all.” My eyes, having altered, everyday light seemed like sunlight in eternity. So there was a sensation of awe, spaciousness, and ancientness as in some eternity, but actually people get that everyday.

With the recent deaths earlier this year of Joanne Kyger and David Meltzer, the circle of living Beat-affiliated poets continues to tighten. Although often relegated to the fringe of the spotlight, both Meltzer and Kyger (along with several others) are major figures in their own right whose work is substantial and influence far-reaching. Kyger is the ultimate Dharma poet if ever there has been one (her work represents an alert, daily practice of utter awareness) just as Meltzer is the real deal when it comes to being a Jazz poet (he was down in the cellars with the musicians from the get-go). If there is a glaring hole in Ginsberg’s lectures and interviews it is the discussion of such figures. Although Kerouac (including Neal Cassady by association), Burroughs, and Corso may be “the best minds” Ginsberg felt he had known, his self-absorption within his relationships to these closest pals falls far short of being any sort of a truly thorough “literary history of the Beats.” As entertaining and richly rewarding as Ginsberg’s thoughts are, avid readers will be best served by these works as but accompaniment to far deeper reading into American poetics of the era.

Click here to purchase The Best Minds of My Generation at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase First Thought at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2017 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2017

INTERVIEWS

The Stories Choose You: an interview with Rosa Montero
Critically acclaimed and award-winning Spanish novelist Rosa Montero discussed her newest novel, La Carne, in her art-adorned Madrid apartment.
Interviewed by Jorge Armenteros

Of Mirth and Pathos: An Interview with V. G. Lee
Painter, author, and comedian V. G. Lee discusses her new novel in which “everyone is queer somehow” disposing of the perfect love story for something less gendered and more meaningful.
interviewed by Rebecca Weaver

FEATURES

A Savage, Celibate Gaze: Cris Mazza’s Foray into Independent Film
In her new hybrid “fictive documentary” Anorgasmia, Cris Mazza explores her lifelong alienation from her own sexuality. Essay by Michael Newirth

FROM THE BACKLIST

Alexander’s Bridge
Willa Cather
Perhaps the best short novels rely more on character than plot—having a theatrical quality that condenses or transcends time. Cather’s Alexander’s Bridge fits this pattern snug as a glove. Reviewed by Dennis Barone

COMICS REVIEWS

Trump: The Complete Collection by Harvey Kurtzman, et. al.
The Realist Cartoons edited by Paul Krassner and Ethan Persoff
These reprints of comics associated with two important twentieth-century American satirists show how they used humor to shine a sometimes harsh light on reality. 
Reviewed by Steve Matuszak

The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir
Thi Bui
Focused on her family's emigration from Vietnam in the ’70s, Bui’s graphic memoir explores feelings of alienation with inclusivity and empathy. Reviewed by Jeff Alford

POETRY REVIEWS

In Which I Play the Runaway
Rochelle Hurt
Hurt explores the infinity encapsulated in labels by composing studies of colors and towns with sad names, until they resemble still lives of places blowing in the wind. Reviewed by Rachel Slotnick

Aperture
Anna Leahy
Leahy points her poetic lens at a variety of women subjects, each of whom is unique, but also contributes to the group’s chorus of wisdom, sorrow, and beauty. Reviewed Eileen Murphy

A Woman of Property
Robyn Schiff
Schiff’s narrative poems paint a picture of historical figures in their prime, connecting their past struggles to her current ones. Reviewed by Shayna Nenni

Basic Vocabulary
Amy Uyematsu
In this new collection, Amy Uyematsu explores external and internal wars, finding solace in the cosmic wonder of mathematics. Reviewed by Julia Stein

American Purgatory
Rebecca Gayle Howell
In this collection of poems, Howell drops the reader into a dystopian world torn apart by industry and environmental cataclysm. Reviewed by Kent Weigle

Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter
Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner
Jetn̄il-Kijiner draws her poetic power from her home in the Marshall Islands, her culture, and her people’s history. Reviewed by by John Bradley

NONFICTION REVIEWS

All the Lives I Want:
Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen To Be Famous Strangers
Alana Massey
In her debut collection of essays, Massey focuses on troubled, flawed, forgotten, and at times outwardly ridiculed women. Reviewed by Lizzie Klaesges

The Birth of the Imagination: William Carlos Williams on Form
Bruce Holsapple
Poet Bruce Holsapple enters an ongoing conversation concerning Williams’s thinking about form in general, prosody in particular, and imagination’s cosmological implications in relation to them. Reviewed by Michael Boughn

Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art
Virginia Heffernan
New York Times Magazine regular Virginia Heffernan weighs the gains and losses of our information age in all its digital-versus-analog splendor. Reviewed by Michael Workman

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
Yiyun Li
In this collection of autobiographical essays, Yiyun Li writes about how the literature that formed her became her lifeline as she endured crushing feelings of isolation and suicidal depression. Reviewed by Donna Miele

Revisiting Allen Ginsberg:
The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats & First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg
Two recent publications offer unfiltered access to Ginsberg’s enthusiastic support for his friends and insight into the influences that drove him.  Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan

FICTION REVIEWS

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson
This Census Taker by China Miéville
Two visions of dystopic futures from SF greats mix grimness with whimsy. Reviewed by Paul Buhle

4 3 2 1
Paul Auster
Is this 866-page novel a departure from or career-culminating apotheosis of the offhand existentialism Auster’s been practicing for decades? Reviewed by Steven Felicelli

Dear Cyborgs
Eugene Lim
A wild and wildly intelligent work, Dear Cyborgs skillfully employs elements of essay, noir, fantasy, and pop in order to question the limitations of identity in the Internet age. Reviewed by Robert Martin

I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like: New and Selected Stories
Noy Holland
In Holland’s recent new and selected, her language tilts and loops, diffuses and dissolves, and then reconstitutes itself into something other. Any message a reader might seek evades. Reviewed by Kate Berson

Men Without Women
Haruki Murakami
In his recent collection of bizarre short stories, Murakami focuses on hetero-relationships marked by varying degrees of physical and psychological infidelity. Reviewed by Allan Vorda

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2017 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2017

Deep State (archival pigment print, 20" x 24", 2017)

Sean Smuda is an artist, curator, photographer, and writer. He works in a variety of mediums including collage, video, and performance. Recent projects have taken place in Antarctica, Iraq, Wall Street and the MN State Capitol. In 2011 he was appointed Cultural Liaison to Tours, France by the Minneapolis/Tours Sister City Association. His work is in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center. You can see more of his work at www.seansmuda.com.