Sue Klebold
Crown Publishing ($28)

by Jason Zencka

The tension that animates Sue Klebold’s A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, could be conveyed with the simplicity of an elevator pitch: What if the mother of one of the most infamous school shooters in American history were a great mom? What if she were the kind of attentive, well-adjusted parent who knew the names of all the kids on her sons’ soccer teams, who didn’t let her children watch too much TV or eat sugary cereals, who geeked out on classic samurai movies with her sons and then “put them to bed with stories and prayers and hugs”? It’s as if Beowulf finally came face to face with Grendel’s mother, only to find her tearfully watching home movies and rummaging through a box of her son’s art projects.

If A Mother’s Reckoning disabuses a few readers of the notion that Dylan Klebold’s parents were abusive, incompetent, or negligent, it will be in part because it never feels as if this is Klebold’s primary aim. Rather, her book is a careful, sometimes obsessive investigation into the suicidal depression that Dylan hid from almost everyone around him, including his loving parents, until he and his friend, Eric Harris, shot to death twelve students, a teacher, and themselves at Columbine High School. How did Dylan’s mother not see it coming? The question takes her seventeen years and the whole of her book to answer, as she chases the son she thought she knew through her memory, his journals, and years of her own research into suicide and depression. It is a testament to Klebold’s thoroughness that her focus on what she calls Dylan’s “brain illness” feels more like clinical precision than a copout. As an FBI psychologist says late in the book, “Eric went to the school to kill people and didn’t care if he died, while Dylan wanted to die and didn’t care if others died as well.”

The journalist Dave Cullen traced how Harris’s cool psychopathic tendencies and Dylan’s smoldering depression became a tornado of violence in his persuasive 2009 book Columbine. Readers of Cullen’s book will find few revelations here. And yet, the bravery, compassion, and clear-headedness of A Mother’s Reckoning make it required reading. Klebold kicks another few dents in the media-created mythology of Columbine, with its trench coats and goth conspiracies—glib, sensationalist treatment that, many have argued, contributes to more mass shootings. More importantly, Klebold makes the reader want to grab their nearest son, daughter, or sibling, and say, “I love you so much . . . you are such a wonderful person, and [we] are so proud of you.” In fact, Klebold embraced Dylan in their home and said these words less than two weeks before her son became a killer.

Those who want to write off Klebold as self-deluding are free to—it’s probably the path of least resistance, and one she herself has occasionally fallen into in the years since the massacre. But Klebold, who is donating all author profits to mental health research, has worked hard to put such self-flagellation behind her. A Mother’s Reckoning reaches a harder truth: Sue Klebold loved her son totally, sincerely, and well. It was not enough.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Geoffrey Hill
Edited by Kenneth Haynes
Oxford University Press ($39.95)

by Adam Tavel

Having spent much of 2014 savoring Geoffrey Hill’s colossal Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012, I’ve come to accept that any review of it will falter as piecemeal commentary in the shadow of its achievement. At nearly a thousand pages, this stoic hardcover is as imposing as its contents, since it collects twenty-one books the poet composed over six decades. And yet, even a brief consideration of Broken Hierarchies seems worthwhile—particularly for American readers—since the cumulative brilliance and range of Hill’s oeuvre make him unquestionably England’s greatest living poet.

Hill takes all of Western thought—its moral dialogue, its metaphysical yearning, its ceaseless search for metaphor—as his subject, and casts it against the backdrop of an amnesiac world too often corrupted by indifference and too often aflutter with vogues to heed wisdom. One need only read his powerhouse sequence “Funeral Music” or his pastoral elegy “In Memory of Jane Fraser” to feel the force of his talents. Americans must look to Norman Dubie or David Wojahn to find a stateside poet who can wield such expansive diction and historical allusiveness without squandering pathos.

At first blush, Hill’s tautly metered verses about Our Lady of Chartres, or Cromwell, or the Pre-Raphaelites may seem starkly traditional in a literary age that champions irony and hybrid forms. In his essay “Englands of the Mind,” reprinted a decade ago in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001, Seamus Heaney wrote that Hill celebrated “his own indomitable Englishry, casting his mind on other days, singing a clan beaten into the clay and ashes.” But Hill is also the sly, prose-poem modernist who zooms through Mercian Hymns, the agitated citizen who fumes in A Treatise on Power, and the demure, earnest word-lover who attacks advertising’s corrosive influence on literature in his interview with The Paris Review.

This deeper examination of Broken Hierarchies reveals worldliness and visionary imagination. As his book’s title suggests, Geoffrey Hill’s best poems catechize hallowed themes and verities to see, as he once wrote, “how each fragment kindles as we turn it, / At the end, into the light of appraisal.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Edited by Gavin Parkinson
Liverpool University Press

by Laura Winton

Gavin Parkinson is a man on a mission, and not just a mission to Mars. His mission is to establish academic scholarship on Surrealism’s link to science fiction and to comics, a line that many fans of science fiction and/or surrealism have known about for years. Even the most casual observer of Surrealist art will note its fantastic nature of the art, the blurring of lines between machine and man; Surrealist films too are definitely science fiction, if retrospectively clumsy and hilarious in the effort (which may have been intentional). If anything, the connection between Surrealism and science fiction seems almost too obvious.

Nonetheless, Parkinson does an excellent job in the book’s introduction setting up the debate. He cites art critic Clement Greenberg, that arbiter and simultaneous villain of modernist and abstract art, as making the case in the 1950s that Surrealism couldn’t really be considered “high art” because it was too tied to popular media, therefore putting it in the category of “kitsch” instead. So anxious were academics to recover the good name of Surrealism and its place in the pantheon of high art that they rejected Surrealism’s link to popular forms such as science fiction. And apparently it was never spoken of again in academic circles, with the exception of a few oblique references here and there.

After laying the groundwork for his argument, Parkinson then gives others the opportunity to weigh in. The collection includes a mix of scholars from the U.K., the U.S., and Canada, including Joanna Pawlik, Julia Pine, and Jonathan Eburne, among others; each offers a chapter on, say, Magritte’s drawings and paintings, Salvador Dalí’s artwork and influence, or the Chicago Surrealists, who have always been interested in comics and pop culture as well as works of “high art” and literature.

Parkinson himself writes the first chapter, which explores Jules Verne and his influence on not only subsequent science fiction, but on Surrealist authors as well. Parkinson discusses how often Surrealist writers pay homage to Verne, pointing out that growing up in the late 19th century, the Surrealists would have encountered Verne’s books as children and been influenced by them at an early age. Again, it’s somewhat baffling to think there is any controversy over Verne’s contribution to the history of SF, but apparently there are “ongoing debates between SF scholars about this genre’s identity [due to] questions about whether SF is a specifically twentieth-century phenomenon.” Outside of academia, most people accept that there were a number of 19th century writers, including Verne, H.G. Wells, and Mary Shelley, whose writing prefigured, influenced, or was considered science fiction.

Importantly, these critical anxieties were rarely felt by the Surrealists themselves. Julia Pine’s chapter on Salvador Dalí, entitled “A Fantastic Voyage: Mapping Salvador Dalí’s Science Fiction World of Tomorrow” begins with a passage from Dalí’s book, Dalí on Dalí:

Dalí the Futurist is the most percussive and the most outstanding antiromantic, synthetic image ever applied to the demiurgic strabismus, Op Pop, and Pompier Art. (194)

Dalí, a relentless self-promoter, was obviously more concerned with his place in the popular imagination of his time than with whether or not Clement Greenberg considered his work to be “high art.” He is further quoted as saying that “art and science will have merged by 2001” and clearly, he sought to be a part of that movement. Pine goes on to discuss Dalí’s interest in all things “scientific” (although sometimes his version of science is a bit specious), including his space age wardrobe; she describes Dalí wearing a “gold leather space suit” that he wore while “posing inside his latest brainchild, an ‘ovocipede,’ a transparent plastic sphere that rolls merrily along while its operator sits comfortably (says Dalí) encapsulated.” The accompanying photo on the next page, courtesy of Time magazine, 1960, is, as they say, worth the price of admission.

In fact, all of the photo plates in this book are stunning, despite the fact—or maybe even because of it—that they are in black and white. Black and white photographs and drawings are often used in academic books because they are less expensive to reproduce, but in Surrealism, Science Fiction, and Comics they also give the book a pleasurable retro feeling, one that evokes looking at old comic books or science fiction movies from the 1950s and ’60s. There is a great mix here of classic Surrealist paintings, rarely seen drawings, comic art, and science fiction movie stills and drawings.

The key element that makes this book worthwhile is not the tired high art vs. kitsch argument, but the fact that it makes Surrealism relevant beyond the interwar years. For many people, Surrealism is seen as having existed for only a short time in Europe, petering out after World War II began—a belief which is decidedly untrue. André Breton was an ambassador for a living Surrealism until the day he died in 1966; this book brings Surrealism even further past Breton’s Surrealist Manifestos of the 1920s, and includes a number of “second generation” Surrealists as well as fellow travelers. The sharp attention to the contributions of the Chicago Surrealists, headed up by Franklin and Penelope Rosemount, also shows Surrealism as an active practice today. These, again, are narratives that practitioners already know but academics tend to overlook, making the effort here an important addition to art and literary history.

As Surrealism, Science Fiction, and Comics is an academic book, some of the language can occasionally be opaque, and there are moments when the argument being made seems much ado about nothing. But this book is generally a good and interesting read that anyone with an interest in Surrealism vis-à-vis the history of science fiction and comics will find useful; it has a wealth of references, with interesting footnotes and an extensive bibliography and index. Parkinson has done an admirable job adding details and signposts to the endless journey of Surrealism.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Alejandra Pizarnik
Translated by Yvette Siegert
New Directions ($18.95)

by George Kalamaras

Alejandra Pizarnik was, according to Argentinean poet Enrique Molina, “the daughter of insomnia.” Too long reduced in English translation to a footnote or to being represented by a handful of poems in a rare anthology of Latin American women poets, Pizarnik forged a poetry that peeled the skin of darkness back to reveal the exploration of death, the wonders of childhood, and the heavy chains of an imagination that—like other female poets of her generation—inhabited the liminal space between the body and the universe. Extracting the Stone of Madness, a long-awaited selection of her work, explores this space in detail, with beautifully wrought poems that evoke (and don’t simply describe) the in-between. She tells us in her poem, “Paths of the Mirror”: “The pleasure of losing yourself in the image foreseen. I rose from my body in search of who I am. A pilgrim of my self, I have gone to the one who sleeps in the winds of her country.”

Pizarnik’s literal country is Argentina, where she was born in 1936, dying there by her own hand in 1972. But her true country is the limitless winds of the imagination. Her poems are dream-weaves of a soul in search of answers, a breath in search of a candle to extinguish in order to allow the darkness of the cave of the psyche to season it with the moist places of fierce animal tenderness. The paradox of her life is that her poems pivot between despair and celebration—even the celebration of despair. Her world is a world of self-consciousness and self-reflection, though rarely for the details of daily life, few of which her poems reveal. What is it like to desire not only to study the myths but to live them, in the dark murky places where the psyche bends back into itself consuming Adriane’s thread, back-tracking it to a way in rather than a way out? These are the moments Pizarnik allows us to touch, even as her poems scald and repel, as if moving our hands away from a burning book, our own psyche left smoldering on a beach of bleached bone and primordial ash. In one of her final, uncollected poems, “For Anna Becciú,” Pizarnik recounts, “I just came to see the garden where someone was dying on account of something that never happened or of someone who never came.” The often long lines of her poems read like hurricanes and land unresolved, as if she stepped into the body for a brief thirty-six years, unsure if she was fully in the body or partially out.

Is Pizarnik a Surrealist? Yes and no. Surrealism for her is more a word for something innate and not the designation of a process or a technique. No word can describe how she inhabits the liminal space of the in-between, where she is constituted of language and simultaneously not:

I, the sad waiting for a word
to name the thing I look for
and what am I looking for?
not the name of the deity
not the name of the names
but the precise and precious names
of my hidden desires

something in me punishes me
from all my lives ago . . .

Her seemingly Surreal turns remain disembodied, like a ghost in search of a ghost, one foot in the grave and the other in the human psyche—a heightened moment in search of the ordinary, and vice versa. Imagine a dream in which you dream yourself dreaming—those are the murky layers of consciousness she explores. In Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America, she explains her connection to Surrealism this way:

I believe that signs, words, hint at things, they suggest things. This complex way of feeling language leads me to believe that language cannot express reality; all we can do is speak about the obvious. That’s where my desire comes from to make poems that are terribly precise, despite my innate Surrealism, and I want to work with elements from the inner shadows. That is the main feature of my poetry.

Inner shadows are not only her subject matter but her various points of origin. Even her earliest poems collected here from 1965’s Works and Night demonstrate these seed shadows, somewhere between Surrealism and not. In “Your Voice,” the ambiguity of a seeming dangling modifier troubles the border between self and other: “Ambushed in my writing / you are singing in my poem.” “Meaning of Her Absence” continues this interpenetration of landscapes, again complicating the relationship between self and other, and again drawing this ambiguity from dark wells, with the assistance of knife-edge line-breaks that cut meaning forward and backward at once:

if I dare
look on and speak
it’s because of her
shadow linked so gently
to my name
far away
in the rain
in my memory
for her burning
face in my poem . . .

For Pizarnik, there is little hope of emerging whole, since the burning that cleanses with an inner alchemy also scalds, leaving permanent scars of despair: “The name I was called by is already lost.” Still, she tells us in the beginning of “Of Things Unseen,” a poem from a later phase of her work, we have language—which itself is a lot—and a deep primordial desire that will maintain the fires forging our words: “Before words can run out, something in the heart must die.” What complicates Pizarnik’s vision, saving it from annihilation, is that after her entire world is stripped away, some inner core remains—obscure, disembodied, perhaps abstract—a core where the possibility of psychological resolution resides. As she continues “Of Things Unseen”:

The light of language covers me like music, like a picture ripped to shreds by the dogs of grief. And winter reaches for me like a woman who has fallen in love
with a wall.

Just when I’d hoped to give up hoping, your fall takes place within me. Now I am
only but this within.

One leaves this poem as one leaves many of Pizarnik’s powerful treks through the psyche—splintered yet whole, whole yet fragmented. If one falls “in love with a wall” has one become wedded to a great obstacle of nothingness, or to a resilience capable of supporting an entire house? To be only “this within,” is one reduced to a hope in hope of giving oneself up? Is the fall that “takes place within” a psychological sinking, or an arrival at ultimate compassion—by becoming that part of the other that stumbles and falls?

In fact, one often leaves a Pizarnik poem with more questions than answers, which is not confusion in her case but a richness that allows for multiple points of orientation. New Directions and translator Yvette Siegert should be applauded for finally making available a substantial offering of Alejandra Pizarnik’s work; I only wish the book included an introduction for readers coming to her complexities for the first time. Still, the publication of Extracting the Stone of Madness should be celebrated, with the hope that it points the way to making available more of the voices of Latin American women poets, too often relegated to the margins.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

INTERVIEWS

The Ethos of Irony: An Interview with Lee Konstantinou
Lee Konstantinou’s new book approaches postwar literature, politics, culture, and counterculture through the lens of the ironic worldview, pioneered by hipsters, punks, believers, and the cool alike.
Interviewed by Dylan Hicks

The Nightboat Interviews
In eight interviews featuring authors published by Nightboat Books, Andy Fitch offers a comprehensive oral history of the diverse output of this decade old press.

Paula Cisewski    •    Juliet Patterson
George Albon    •   Michael Heller
Douglas A. Martin   •   Martha Ronk
Lytton Smith   •   Jonathan Weinert

Interviewing the Interviewer: A Conversation with Andy Fitch
To conclude our special section of Nightboat Interviews, we turn the spotlight on interviewer Andy Fitch to find out what drives him toward oral history projects. Interviewed by Caleb Beckwith

My Year Zero: An Interview with Rachel Gold
Enter the world of Rachel Gold's latest novel, which tackles the subjects of mental health, dating, making mistakes, being a young artist, and writing your own story. Interviewed by Steph Burt

COMICS REVIEWS:

Paper Girls, Volume 1
Brian K. Vaughn & Cliff Chiang
Strange goings on in a Cleveland suburb capture the attention of four paper delivery girls in this riveting graphic novel. Reviewed by Amelia Basol

ART REVIEWS

Matthias Buchinger: "The Greatest German Living"
Ricky Jay
Esteemed collector and magician Ricky Jay chronicles his obsession with the Little Man of Nuremberg, illustrated profusely with ornamental and wildly detailed micrographic works. Reviewed by Jeff Alford

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012
Geoffrey Hill
With the recent passing of Hill, whom many consider Britain’s finest poet, we bring this review of his selected poems online to celebrate his work. Reviewed by Adam Tavel

Chapbook Reviews

Black Movie
Danez Smith
Smith’s Black Movie is a cinematic tour-de-force that lets poetry vie with film for which medium can most effectively articulate the experience of Black America. Reviewed by Mary Austin Speaker

POETRY REVIEWS

Firewood and Ashes: New and Selected Poems by Ben Howard
Geis by Caitríona O'Reilly
Two collections of poems take on Ireland—one by Iowan Ben Howard, obsessed with the Green Isle, and the other by Irish poet O’Reilly, whose work is influenced by American poets. Reviewed by M. G. Stephens

Ventriloquy
Athena Kildegaard
Kildegaard’s latest volume of poems expand out from the garden to saints, divination, and ultimately to the universe. Reviewed by Heidi Czerwiec

Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Ocean Vuong
With an expert blend of the tender and the destructive, Vuong shows himself to be a master of the lyric moment. Reviewed by J.G. McClure

Histories of the Future Perfect
Ellen Kombiyil
Kombiyil uses boundaries as launch pads to careen from one galactic experience to the other, occasionally returning to the ground. Reviewed by Samantak Bhadra

Orphans
Joan Cusack Handler
This heartfelt collection of poems is an extended elegy to Joan Cusack Handler’s parents, who were Catholic immigrants from Ireland. Reviewed by James Naiden

Justice
Tomaž Šalamun
Šalamun’s posthumous collection is drawn from unpublished works and other collections, showing his seminal humor and fearlessness. Reviewed by John Bradley

Literature for Nonhumans
Gabriel Gudding
Gudding offers a “zoopoetics” that explores an empire defined by agri-industry and the slaughterhouse. Reviewed by Garin Cycholl

Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 – 1972
Alejandra Pizarnik
This collection of poems by a powerful Argentinian voice peels back the skin of darkness to reveal an exploration of death, the wonders of childhood, and the heavy chains of imagination. Reviewed by George Kalamaras

FICTION REVIEWS

My Escapee
Corinna Vallianatos
The women who populate the stories in this prize-winning collection are bound together by a common desire to escape. Reviewed by Shane Joaquin Jimenez

Kuntalini
Tamara Faith Berger
Number 7 in the Unlimited New Lover series, Kuntalini follows erotic adventures in yoga class. Reviewed by Corwin Ericson

Eleven Hours
Pamela Erens
In her latest novel, Erens unpacks the fearful anticipations of becoming a mother and the painful process of losing one. Reviewed by Lori Feathers

My Name is Lucy Barton
Elizabeth Strout
Strout touches on themes of family and memory, poverty and superiority, loneliness and identity, providing a down-to-earth reflection on real life grace, searching, and the irreversibility of life. Reviewed by Emily Myers

We Could Be Beautiful
Swan Huntley
Huntley spins a spellbinding novel that explores wealth, trust, and the tumultuous nature of familial relationships. Reviewed by Rebecca Clark

Cities I’ve Never Lived In
Sara Majka
Majka’s debut novel follows the narrator, a women re-evaluating her life after a divorce, in a dream-like prose that blurs the line between memory and fact. Reviewed by Montana Mosby

YA FICTION REVIEWS

Lady Midnight
Cassandra Clare
In the first Shadowhunters novel, Clare engages with an enthralling plot, witty humor, romance, mystery, and plot twists that will have the reader gasping out loud. Reviewed by Jessica Port

NONFICTION REVIEWS

Germany: A Science Fiction
Laurence A. Rickels
Rickels traces the resurgence of German Romanticism in postwar Californian SF writing, as evidenced by Heinlein, Pynchon, and Dick. Reviewed by Andrew Marzoni

Real Artists Have Day Jobs (And Other Awesome Things They Don’t Teach You in School)
Sara Benincasa
Comedian Benincasa’s new book offers 52 chapters with life advice as told through deeply personal narratives. Reviewed by Christian Corpora

You Are A Complete Disappointment: A Triumphant Memoir of Failed Expectations
Mike Edison
Edison's humorous memoir unfolds into a heart-wrenching narrative of the author’s journey to make peace with his childhood, forgive his father, and find worth within himself. Reviewed by Bridget Simpson

We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s
Richard Beck
Beck writes about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and its outlandish tales of child abuse, many of which were linked to accounts of bizarre devil-worshipping rituals. Reviewed by Spencer Dew

Six Capitals, or Can Accountants Save the Planet?
Jane Gleeson-White
Gleeson-White’s new book reports on cutting edge ideas in accounting with a keen and strongly critical eye. Reviewed by Robert M Keefe

Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War
Raghu Karnad
Karnad’s astonishing history casts the Indians who served the British Empire in Iraq during World War II in a prestigious role. Reviewed by Mukund Belliappa

Every Song Ever
Ben Ratliff
Ratliff’s book is a series of graceful music-appreciation essays designed for listeners evolving into a species inundated with thousands of kinds of music across culture, region, and history. Reviewed by Dylan Hicks

Satellites in the High Country: Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man
Jason Mark
Journalist and back country explorer Jason Mark argues that not only is the wild relevant, we need it now more than ever. Reviewed by Eliza Murphy

Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax
Michael N. McGregor
Inspiring and thought-provoking, this biography follows the unconventional life of an experimental poet who pursued life, faith, and art with authenticity. Reviewed by Linda Lappin

A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy
Sue Klebold
Klebold’s book is a sometimes obsessive investigation into the suicidal depression that her son Dylan hid from almost everyone—until he and his friend shot to death twelve students, a teacher, and themselves at Columbine High School. Reviewed by Jason Zencka

Surrealism, Science Fiction, and Comics
Edited by Gavin Parkinson
Gavin Parkinson is on a mission is to establish academic scholarship on Surrealism’s link to science fiction and to comics. Reviewed by Laura Winton

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016