Edited by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown
AK Press ($18)

by Jane Franklin and Folake Shoga

Walida Imarisha and adrienne maree brown’s AK Press anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements feels like a distillation of the times—an anthology of dystopias and apocalypses, protest, resistance and revolution. Inspired by the work of the brilliant and innovative Black science fiction writer Octavia Butler, this book seeks to center writers and worlds of color in its visionary fictions.

Octavia’s Brood assembles twenty stories, four short essays and a handful of illustrations, bound in a striking cover. Imarisha and brown bring together both well-known and upcoming writers, including a foreword by advisor and collaborator Sherry Renee Thomas (editor of the pathbreaking Dark Matter: 100 Years of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora), essays by Tananarive Due and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a story from Minneapolis poet and activist Bao Phi, and many others.

Mainstream science fiction has often written out people of color, ordinary people, and the work of liberation struggle, creating futures that are a faster, shiner version of an unequal present. Theorist Mark Fisher uses the concept of “science fiction capital” to convey how predictions of the future work to consolidate power, to exclude, and to coerce—science fiction capital is the power to set the future’s agenda. “We believe it is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future,” say Imarisha and brown. Octavia’s Brood strives to put science fiction capital in the hands of the people.

Jane Franklin: These stories are all very immediate—some in the first person, one a television script (the quietly hilarious “Sanford and Sun” in which everyone’s favorite interstellar jazz composer visits a sitcom), and with much emphasis on bodily experience. Some expository passages are a bit longer and rougher than would be ideal, but I found myself intrigued enough by the worlds being built to continue. I was especially excited about these stories as continuations of Octavia Butler’s work—she is such an important figure, but her work is undertheorized and its importance to contemporary SF is often overlooked.

Folake Shoga: I remember one of the first things we discussed is how the stories in the anthology relate to Butler herself. Butler is accurate and scary about power relations to do with race and gender in a way that’s not really mitigated by optimism (unlike for example, Margaret Atwood at the end of The Handmaids Tale), or by sentimentality, or by a conviction that moral right will guide you through a rational universe. Instead she looks at the human condition in a way which, for a change, recognizes the unnumbered lives of the majority, freighted with loss, waste, and pain, ending with no meaning and no progress and no lessons learned. To have achieved what Octavia Butler did, with the difficulties she faced—systemic racism, mental health issues, crippling shyness, and inability to conform to gendered and to genre expectations—and to have been an absolutely original writer and thinker, is truly inspirational. I think a community of sympathetic minds has formed around her writing, found her and each other, and do see her as a role model. It's not about the pessimism. It's about permission to be in your own imaginative space. Letting your imagination go where it naturally would, not where dominant Western literary culture would usually send it. This is the very real way those writers see themselves as “Octavia's Brood,” engendered by her.

JF: And yet both Butler and Octavia’s Brood have this funny kind of optimism—stories like Bao Phi’s “Revolution Shuffle” and Autumn Brown’s “In Spite of Darkness” are set against backgrounds of racism and genocide, but the focus is on the characters’ relationships to each other and to liberation struggle. Lately I’ve been thinking about how this contrasts with dystopian and apocalyptic work by writers like John Brunner and Margaret Atwood which is very despairing and emphasizes total social collapse. I find myself wondering if this is because writers of color and writers who are engaged in liberation struggle see that the apocalypse is already here, already happening to marginalized people, and so they’re able to recognize how people survive and transform under these conditions of extreme stress.

FS: I can't say that I find Butler's work optimistic; in fact I find it grueling to read because the horrible things that happen are so personally wounding to the characters and also so very likely given the established context. Exquisitely expressive and filled with poetic logic, yes—these things are characteristic of Butler and make the stories bearable. But she is bleak. I did find the stories in Octavia’s Brood much more generally hopeful even though many of them take place in blighted apocalyptic landscapes. That's apocalyptic, not post-apocalyptic: any reader of color with the least bit of political consciousness will recognize some of the more over the top details are referring to real things in the contemporary world (okay, maybe not Black people being kidnapped to supply skin grafts to White skin cancer patients). The Black child penalized for cheating after scoring highly on a test, the prisoners fined to pay for their own upkeep: instances of oppression that are not purely fictional. Speaking in April 2015 to the Portland Mercury, Imarisha said, "When we talk about horror stories, living as black folks is a horror story. Michael Brown is a horror story . . . It's a horror story that happens almost every day in the United States, in the black community. So for us, we don't have to imagine horror. We live it every day."

The editors state the purpose of the anthology is “social change and societal transformation” and adrienne maree brown also writes that creatives “can either reflect the society we are part of or transform it.” This has been a guideline to develop the set of practices and workshop methodology from which the anthology grew. It has worked to provide a different common ground in which the stories could root themselves, countering the deafening conventions of Western literary culture in which minorities are hardly even legitimate protagonists. It has given the writers space to breathe and imagine fresh worlds, running on a different logic. The effect has to be cumulative: as more voices are nurtured, they join a larger chorus. The hope has to be that these writers develop and find peers, publishers, and audience, adding to a growing literary culture whose roots lie in the 19th Century, greatly enhanced later by the notion of Afrofuturism. With the growing security of that culture comes the confidence to inhabit the imagination fully, undistracted by disempowering influences.

JF: The book is more than a collection of stories—it’s a matrix for growing a social community, and it’s a place where social justice activists can see themselves and their experiences reflected. As such, it is difficult for me to choose favorite stories from Octavia’s Brood. I like adrienne maree brown’s Detroit fable “the river” for its lyricism, strong sense of place, and ambiguity. An excerpt from Terry Bisson’s 1980s novella of an alternate, radical Civil War, Fire On The Mountain, links these contemporary SF stories to earlier work. Kalamu Ya Salaam’s “Manhunters” made me long for an entire novel and seemed extremely Butler-like in structure.

Alixa Garcia’s “In Spite of Darkness” has really stayed with me, partly because of its illustrations and in spite of its occasional awkwardness. In it, the survivors of a series of genocidal attacks try to preserve the last of their young, hoping against hope for the return of the Sol-gatherers who bring light to their remote and dark planet. On first reading, it seemed slightly heavy-handed, but I found myself thinking again and again of the story’s firelit and dying world and the struggle which blossoms there, and of what it might be to live through the genocide of a people.

FS: The stories reflecting Black diasporic cultural trends resonated with me the most, because I find that little spark of recognition heartwarming. (I find it heartwarming when I get it from Butler too.) The Swahili names in “Manhunters”: Family, Faith, Art, Spirit (Ujamaa, Imani, Kuumba, Nia) recall for me not just an ideal African past of ancient trade routes and cattle droves across the high savannah, but also consciousness-raising groups and Saturday schools and painstaking work around recovery and self- image by dedicated lay people.

I really liked “The River.” It's constructed with craft and precision, using non-hierarchical language to reference a long tradition of vernacular speech. The writing honors the orality of Black diasporic culture in an extraordinarily literary way, producing a clash of sensibilities and a great deal of tension. Formality and abandon are in play, with reticence set against one devastating statement. The abiding emotion is caution but another thing I like about this story is the rage it also expresses, which, like the rage in Walidah Imarisha's “Black Angel,” is entirely appropriate.

JF: “In Spite of Darkness” is characteristic of how this book works, almost requiring a new kind of reading. If you go into this book expecting conventionally plotted stories written in a consistent, conventional science fiction voice that will reward a quick, plot-driven read, you won't find what's best in it. If you go to the book with the desire to engage with the worlds they depict, you’ll find them very rewarding.

FS: The anthology has a second function as a marvelous introduction to contemporary activism around issues of violence, disability, literacy, and participation. I challenge anyone to go through the bios listed in the book and not be overwhelmed by the sheer hard work, creativity, and ethical seriousness of these writers. As a non-USAian, I find it important to overtly and explicitly include Mumia Abu Jamal in that assessment.

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

Jean-Phillippe Blondel
Translated by Alison Anderson
New Vessel Press ($14.95)

by Justin Goodman

The difference between suspense and surprise, to paraphrase Alfred Hitchcock, is the difference between the audience seeing the bomb before it detonates and no one seeing it. But unlike a multi-temporal medium such as film, where a bomb can march on a timeline parallel to a dinner party, literature's comparative limitations lead to surprise superseding suspense. Jean-Philippe Blondel's The 6:41 To Paris makes such a case, anyway. Translated in staccato format by Alison Anderson, this so-called “psychological thriller” grinds like a bullet train on 19th-century tracks, but despite the historical dynamism that propels the novel, it remains inescapably static and small in its design.

This is perhaps inevitable since the novel consists of the alternating asides of two exes unexpectedly forced to sit beside each other in a train compartment; they need to work their way through presque vu, then recognition, then embarrassment. When they first met at lyceé, twenty-seven years ago, Cécile was “just plain. Nothing striking. A bug,” and Philippe “was someone who at the age of twenty had never had any reason to complain.” After four months and a forebodingly oft-mentioned event in London (apparently twice warranting a melodramatic “Oh. My. God”) they broke-up, leading to a She's All That role reversal. She's now a handsome and successful entrepreneur, while he's an overweight salesman underselling his house after a divorce. While the tortoise syntax can be blamed on Anderson’s obsession with tight sentences, it’s more likely an attempt to mirror Blondel’s concern with how we construct the past.

Unfortunately, the attempt doesn’t quite come off. Unlike Henry James’s famously claustrophobic contemplation of Isabel Archer’s failed marriage in The Portrait of a Lady, Blondel demands an intimacy in tight spaces that doesn’t functionally exist. As one character meditates on a moment, so does the other on the exact same moment—but for two people closer to the last station of their life than the first, is this climactic, unfolding way of seeing the past reasonable? Forget that the supposedly surprising London event is not simply anti-climactic, but aggressively dull. This is a far cry from fiction that offers real psychology through piecemeal moments, from Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad to Junot Diaz's Drown; an even farther cry from the first writer to escape from the gloom of Isabel Archer’s morgue-like memory, Virginia Woolf, who wrote in her now famous essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” that “we must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments. We must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth, the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition.”

The spaciousness and variety that matches the “chaotic condition” of truth is brilliantly displayed in Woolf, Egan, and Diaz, whereas in Blondel's The 6:41 to Paris, the world is as constrained and awkwardly focused as being forced to sit next to your ex on a train, grateful for the rare interruption of that independent moment—though when it comes, it looks out the window and sees its reflection instead of the world blurring by. It doesn’t, in the end, try to capture the world. Again, this is perfectly reflected in Anderson's tersely ungrammatical translation—too perfectly. At best, for both translator and author, it’s a pyrrhic victory.

What really makes Blondel’s book less interesting than those by the aforementioned writers, other than preferences of style, is the way the joints interlock. In using the flak of consciousness from outsiders to develop the arcs and byways of their characters’ thoughts, great authors of fragment depict those thoughts expanding like water slowly creeping across a rag. What is surprising is not necessarily what happened but why, and who's involved in the telling. The 6:41 to Paris is an interesting experiment in the ostensibly casual substance of isolation, but the result is best described by Cécile when the train doors closed: “the beginning of an egocentric and self-indulgent interlude.”

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

Edited by Diane Goettel and Anneli Matheson
Black Lawrence Press ($16.95)

by Rahel Jaskow

An ancient Greek philosopher recommended that a host giving a dinner party should avoid reading his poetry to his guests. If he were still around to read the anthology Feast: Poetry & Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner, he might reconsider. Brimming with delicious recipes and poetry to match, Feast is magnificently nourishing. Like a meal (or a menu), the anthology is laid out in proper order: Starters, Sides and Sauces; Cocktails; Mains; and Dessert. Each of the poets—all of them contemporary, and many of them award-winning—contributed a recipe and a poem; two of the recipes are poems themselves. And just as the recipes come from, or are inspired by, various countries or regions of the world, the poems give us a glimpse into the various regions of the world of the human spirit.

Some of the poems, like “Here’s to My Mother Making Herring Under a Fur Coat” by Yelizaveta P. Renfro pair food with memory—though at times the memory evoked is one of scarcity rather than the abundance the book celebrates. This is true of both Renfro’s poem and “Eat Stone and Go On” by Joe Wilkins, which is paired with his recipe for soda bread:

Isn’t it a shame, my grandmother said,
silver fork in her shivering fist,

How we have to go on eating?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Even if it was only
soda bread and fried steaks, I see now

it was something. I shoveled
another forkful of buttered potato

into my mouth, bits of the stone
we call salt between my teeth.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya instructs us in a Zen-like calm and acceptance in “Eggs Satori”:

If curds break into pieces, you are working too hard.
You have been dragged off-center.
Stop. Get over yourself.
Let the eggs cook alone for a moment.
Honor how little they require from you.

Hers is a dish to be enjoyed mindfully: “Eat your egg in small voluptuous bites. Do not speak.” Contrast this with Matthew Gavin Frank’s recipe, Tajarin with Savoy Cabbage, Mushroom, Hazelnut and Sage butter, which ends with the liberating instruction: “Eat noisily.”
Other poems pair the preparation of sustenance with love in its endless forms. In Kevin Pilkington’s “Eating a Herd of Reindeer,” the poet watches his wife engaged in a labor of love: baking holiday cookies that “she will place in tins / and send to family and friends.” As he observes her at her work, he reflects upon the blessings of his life as reflected in the cookies she is preparing, “a world / that is as warm as a favorite old sweater / with holes in its elbows.”

The final page of Feast invites readers to host a party of their own with a recipe or two from the anthology, and share the event with “fellow readers and eaters” on its Facebook page. One can envision a sequel to Feast with recipes and poems contributed by devoted readers of the anthology—and that might be another delicious gathering.

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

by Catherine Wong

Alfie Bown is a new Assistant Professor of Literature at HSMC in Hong Kong, where I have been a professor for five years. His recent book Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism (Zero Books, $11.95) seems to have caused a bit of a stir. Just as the title promises, Enjoying It offers readers an experience of pleasure. Viewing enjoyment in the context of modern capitalism, Bown makes the profound question of pleasure accessible and the trend of video game apps intellectually stimulating. The book argues its topic in a light-hearted, witty way without being unnecessarily pedantic, though it doesn’t shy away from applying various critical theories, Slavoj Žižek’s especially, to the exploration and classification of enjoyment.

Reading Bown’s intriguing case studies on productive, unproductive, and irrational enjoyment, I found myself at times unsettled, albeit always absorbed in introspection on my own experience of happiness. For me, the question remains—what actually is enjoyment, and how are we to enjoy cultural production without feeling that our subjectivity is threatened and commodified? What follows is the discussion we had about this and the book’s other resonant themes.

Catherine Wong: A simple question to get things started. In your book you use six cases to study types of enjoyment, ranging from listening to “Gangnam Style” and playing Candy Crush to reading critical theorists and philosophers like Deleuze. Do you enjoy all these things? Why did you choose those as examples in the book?

Alfie Bown: Absolutely, I enjoy all of those things, probably too much in fact. I play Candy Crush, read Deleuze, and have played so much Football Manager that I even dream that game is my reality. It was important to me to study things that I did really enjoy myself. I see quite a lot of criticism of other people’s enjoyment, both in the university and in “left-wing” journalism, and I think there is a problem here: there is a tendency to place value-judgements on the enjoyment of others, whether consciously or unconsciously, and that was something I wanted to avoid in this book. Instead, I wanted to analyze how various kinds of enjoyment operate on us as subjects, how these different kinds of enjoyment affect us in different ways. I guess it’s fair to say that I was the main subject of analysis and that these things are all primarily my own enjoyments, though I did try to think about the general ways in which these things are enjoyed and the effects they have on the “enjoying population.” I also carried out some interviews to see how others enjoyed these things. Ultimately though, this was an analysis of how I found myself constructed as a subject by various forms of enjoyment that I encounter in my own experience of contemporary society. The thing I am most pleased about is that people seem to be applying the models set out in the book to their own enjoyments, which is more than I could have asked for.

CW: In the book, you compare enjoyment in the Victorian era with enjoyment today, which is perhaps rather unusual because we often tend to emphasize the differences, rather than the similarities, between ourselves and the Victorians. Could you say a bit more about why you make this comparison?

AB: In some ways modern entertainment is so radically different from Victorian entertainment, but I am more interested in the similarities. During her history degree, my wife studied a fascinating course on Victorian leisure time. Before that I had known about the 1832 Reform Act, which had attempted to control the potentially revolutionary working classes; at that time England was as close as it would ever come to revolution, as E.P. Thompson has discussed in his famous book The Making of the English Working Class. The Reform Act was designed to stop this happening. What I hadn’t known was that after this, those in power had taken great pains to regulate and control the leisure and recreation of the people in a project called “rational recreation.” The idea was that by controlling people’s leisure, revolution could be prevented. I heard about this all from my wife and it occurred to me that we are in a bizarre second wave of this today: we are a capitalist workforce who are controlled and regulated, made into ideal workers, through the things we enjoy, things which prevent us from asking for change.

CW: To focus on one of the case studies, let me ask you about Candy Crush—the one game you put in the title. You write that Candy Crush somehow makes you work harder and become a more perfect capitalist subject, but if this mobile entertainment promulgates the unproductive, do you think we should all stop playing the game?

AB: Right, great question. I can follow on from my last answer here. Actually, its kind of the opposite: I am not saying that mobile phone games promulgate the unproductive but that, in a certain way, these distracting games serve the perfect capitalist agenda. A distracting game of Candy Crush, Angry Birds, Temple Run, or Smashy Road might seem like the opposite of productive work and a total waste of time, but I argue that it stimulates a guilt-function that ultimately turns you into the perfect capitalist worker. From the point of view of capitalism, these games are bloody useful (rather than useless, which is how they appear) because they unconsciously make us feel guilty for wasting time and then we go back to work with a renewed passion for capitalist productivity.

In another way I think what you say is totally right. These games are usually played in and around the workplace and I think they are designed to stop people from reflecting on their working conditions and perhaps even to stop people from discussing their dissatisfactions with their colleagues. Instead of thinking about work and what is wrong with it, our frustrations are channeled into distractions such as these. So should we stop playing them? Maybe. Or maybe we should just try to be attentive to what they are doing to us when we do play them, so that we know what we are getting into and what effects they have!

CW: One of your arguments seems to be a bit of an attack on the university. You claim that the university and things like popular culture studies have tended to approach the question of enjoyment in the wrong way. Why is this so? Where is the university going wrong?

AB: That is right. I am very much in the university, and I am a product of it. However, I wanted to work against the way that the university uses popular culture to prove its own points. Popular culture is quite common these days as a subject in the university. Video games, pop music, and sports are all in the titles of new university modules. But the university often just uses examples of pop culture to prove something that it already knew to be correct. For example, a quick look at Lady Gaga proves yet again that Foucault’s theory of sexuality was right. This isn’t interesting, and it reiterates the idea that the university is very clever and can explain everything, especially the everyday things that “the masses” enjoy. I’m completely opposed to this and I wanted to search in the everyday for things that the university does not know how to understand and explain. In particular I wanted to find kinds of enjoyment that don’t make sense in terms of the knowledge we already have, hoping that these would force us to develop new ways of theorizing enjoyment and new knowledge about it, rather than just applying theories and ideas we already have to everything. I do believe that in our enjoyment of things like “Gangnam Style,” Candy Crush, and Game of Thrones, there are unsettling moments that force us to reconsider what we know.

CW: In the conclusion of the book you briefly talk about “illegal” enjoyment. Do you think the kinds of enjoyment that are prohibited in a capitalist society could sometimes be radical anti-capitalist things and that we should transgress and enjoy them? What about enjoyment that might be pleasurable to one individual but might be dangerous or even fatal to others, like some crimes?

AB: This is a great question to finish on and I must say that I don’t have a confident answer here. It was a problem I ran into towards the end of the book, as you say. On the one hand, it seems reasonable to want to break out of some of the regulations placed on enjoyment and to try to disrupt the way that we are organized by and through our enjoyment. I think this is necessary and I think that my main point is that we need to realize how powerful enjoyment is. By analyzing enjoyments, even those which seem totally mindless and uninteresting, we can reveal the fact that enjoyment constructs us and affects us powerfully: it turns us into the people we are. Realizing this, I hope, can unsettle it and stop our enjoyment from working so much in the service of capitalism. On the other hand, I am not saying that we should just enjoy whatever we want. That could lead to the following of all sorts of impulses and passions which, as you say, could be destructive. In fact, isn’t it the case that capitalism wants us to follow every impulse to enjoy that we have?

Grappling with these problems can perhaps help us see the difficult positions we are placed in. I certainly don’t think there is such a thing as radical enjoyment per se, and one of the things I wanted to attack was the idea that it makes you a good radical if you enjoy reading Deleuze and listening to Burial but a poor one if you read Lacan and listen to Taylor Swift. These again are value-judgements that are placed on enjoyment by people who proclaim that one enjoyment is preferable to another. What I think is perhaps genuinely anti-capitalist is seeing what enjoyment can do and how it often affects us unconsciously in the service of capitalism. I’m not saying we should change what we enjoy, but rather, that we should realize how what we enjoy changes us.

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

Edited by Joel Allegretti
New York Quarterly Books ($21.95)

by M. Lock Swingen

Rabbit Ears: TV Poems represents the first poetry anthology about TV, ever. All 129 poems in the anthology, written by an impressive diversity of poetic voices, address the medium of television from every angle. There are, for example, poems about a first encounter with a television set: a father dragging home a furniture-sized mahogany console and installing it in the living room. (Do you remember your first TV?) Another poem recalls watching the reports of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. And if you recall a TV show from your childhood, there is likely a poem written about it in this collection.

The poets here, in other words, address how TV has affected them, their relationships, and even the society we live in. Ellen Bass recounts the formative experience of watching the Miss America Pageant as a little girl. In “How I Became Miss America,” she writes:

There she is, Burt Parks is singing
and I am weeping as her gleaming teeth shine
through the wide open window of her mouth.
When I grow up, I could be her.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
and tonight my tears are hers
as they fall like sequins down those lovely cheekbones.

Rabbit Ears, named after the iconic TV antennae, deploys a multitude of poetic forms ranging from free verse, prose poems, sestinas and sonnets, haiku and senryu, and even poems structured like interviews and screenplays. With its diversity of content and poetic form, Rabbit Ears feels more rich and eclectic than any other poetry anthology on the market.

Admittedly, this claim is bold. After all, there are countless anthologies of poetry that address a vast array of subject matter and material. A quick survey in the Poet’s Corner of my local bookshop, for example, reveals a shelf full of anthologies whose themes range from love poems, war poems, the best poems of the English language, the best poems of a given year, French Symbolists, Asian American poets, seven Texan women, joke poems . . . the list goes on. In short, poetry anthologies are legion. So why is Rabbit Ears the first poetry anthology about TV, ever?

Perhaps it’s because poetry suffers from a burden of nobility. Make no mistake about it, poetry does address the higher pursuits of humanity: our desires, our foibles, the meaning of life, the inevitability of death. Does the utter quotidian banality of watching television, then, stand in direct opposition to poetry’s apparent higher calling? Certainly, there are poems in Rabbit Ears that address the morbidity of television watching—the little deaths we succumb to while tuning in, day in and day out, over our entire lives. Tantra-zawadi, for example, in her poem “Radiator Grooves,” recalls:

Watching Daddy drive up
In his sky blue Belvedere
Lifting a shiny, color television set high in the air
Wonders of Tinkerbell, Mr. Greenjeans, and Captain Kangaroo
The box
Oftentimes entertaining
Mainly gave me the blues.

Of course, demonizing television has always been part of the strange logic of the medium. Since television’s inception, actually, people seemed not to trust it. As Toby Miller recounts in his 2010 book Television Studies: The Basics: “The Director-General of the BBC at the time the new medium was becoming popular . . . refused to have a set in his own home, and instructed TV executives to ensure viewers did not watch it much.” Nothing brings out primal fear like new technology. And yet there is simply no denying that the lion’s share of 20th-century American culture has been expressed and transmitted through the medium of TV.

Indeed, we have imbibed television like a fish takes in water for breath. In his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster Wallace explains the pervasive effect television has had on American culture at large: “The US generation born after 1950 is the first for whom television was something to be lived with instead of just looked at,” Wallace writes. “For younger writers, TV’s as much a part of reality as Toyotas and gridlock. We literally cannot imagine life without it.” In other words, television is what binds us together, what we have in common. Dana Gioia’s blurb on the back of Rabbit Ears explains the significance of television in our epoch: “What Nature was to the Romantics, the TV screen has become to contemporary Americans—the everyday sensory world that shapes the imagination.” Rabbit Ears represents, then, one of the oldest mediums of art and communication (poetry) engaging with one of the newest.

One of the misconceptions people have about new communication technologies is that they render past communication technologies extinct. Radio killed theater. Television killed radio. The Internet is killing television. E-books are killing the printed page. It’s a classic narrative, but is it really accurate to say TV snuffed out past communication mediums and technologies? In his aforementioned study, Miller argues rather that “TV blended all of them, becoming a warehouse of contemporary culture that converged what had gone before.” Moreover, despite what could be called the television singularity, past communication technologies rarely died out; instead, they shrank to fit particular niches, or even outlived their original functions as their utility evolved. (No one saw the pager and payphone, for example, becoming integral tools in the illegal drug market.) Some think poetry has followed this trajectory—that it has receded permanently into fringe culture, read only by pasty academics, smug dandies, or hipsters looking for an edge. Rabbit Ears suggests the contrary, however—that poetry has reemerged onto the public square, uncompromised by newer communication paradigms.

If television is a warehouse of culture, what happens when we repackage that culture in sonnets? Or when we reinterpret Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the twelfth-century French poetic form of the sestina? Jason Schneiderman’s “The Buffy Sestina” does just that:

Buffy is upstairs sharpening her large collection of stakes
when her mother comes upstairs and says, “Would it be bad,
just this once, not to go out staking vampires again tonight?”
After all—she had just defeated an apocalyptic force! Time
for a break? Buffy never has time for a break. Angle gone,
her stakes sharp, she kisses her mom and hops out the window

Every stanza in a sestina rounds off with the same six end-words, rearranged according to an intricate pattern; as the poem progresses, the end-words build up like surf and clatter against each other in a rich game of wordplay and hyper-nuanced meaning. Critically, the end-words also build a platform for a central theme and a circular narrative to which each stanza consistently returns. In Schneiderman’s sestina, the end-words—“tonight,” “time,” and “window” for example—and those words’ cyclical repetitions seem to echo how the standard TV show also relies on repetition of storyline, plot, and characters from episode to episode. In fact, one could say that the structure of an episodically-formatted TV show platform has its very roots in such poetic form. When a sestina repackages a TV show, then, we see how what is said and how one says it become almost indistinguishable. In “The Buffy Sestina,” the medium becomes the message, and the reader comes away from the poem with a richer understanding of both the sestina as a form and how TV draws more from older artistic mediums than we realize.

And yet, while still lingering in the Poet’s Corner of my local bookstore, I cannot shake the feeling that the vocation of poetry is somehow not up to the formidable task of addressing our culture of television, and as a result the nobility of poetry has been drawn into some kind of uneasy détente with the poems in Rabbit Ears. Compare Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night,” for example, with Aaron Anstett’s poem in the collection, “Self-Portrait as Jackass on Dash Cam.” But then we might recall that in one of his letters, Rilke writes: “Don’t write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary . . . Rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you.” Here Rilke unshackles poetry from its gilded throne and claims that poetry can address the more quotidian circumstances of living. In Rabbit Ears poetry engages with these ordinary circumstances, the daily grit, where a considerable portion of our lives is devoted to the watching of television. In his poem “Television,” Bill Zavatsky writes:

There must be something
I want from this television
that leads me to watch it
for hours on end, hovering
at the rim of its well
where the swirl of colored images
almost slakes my thirst
by expanding into a body
of water stirred by an angel
so immense its coast-to-coast
transmission could stop time.
And so it does.

In this sense, Rabbit Ears strikes at the heart of something deeper in our culture than just the current predicament of poetry; the poems here grapple with the unglamorous underbelly of day-to-day living that we all experience, but the poems also are representative of how contemporary culture deals with memory and forgetting. After all, we are a peculiar species of animal that constructs cultural artifacts so as to counteract the natural flow toward forgetfulness and oblivion. Today, however, it seems that we refuse to forget anything—our cultural past is almost uncannily accessible. The culture we experience is not dictated by syndication, relevancy, or even fame. Instead, what we have the luxury of choosing to experience depends upon the desire to dredge it up from collective memory, where it has been outsourced in vast digital warehouses. Recalling his 1950s childhood in America, novelist William Gibson writes in an essay that “the dead were less of a constant presence, then. Because there was once no Rewind button . . . Because there were old men in the mountain valleys of my Virginia childhood who remembered a time before recorded music.” Today, we are left instead with what seems to be an ever-present Now. Our cultural past crowds the margins of collective memory and merely waits to be rummaged through according to even the most desultory whim. We seem not to be able to forget even if we wanted to.

Does the inability to forget explain, for example, Internet memes that replicate themselves ad infinitum? Does our ever-present Now spell out the existence of TV shows like “30 Rock,” which are effectively TV shows about TV shows? If we can access the cultural past so easily, in other words, does that explain the current impulse to produce so much culture about our own culture, poetry about TV? Perhaps Rabbit Ears represents, finally, poetry’s engagement with this ever-present Now. In the anthology’s pitch-perfect Addendum, “There’s Nothing on TV,” Roy Lucianna writes:

I sit vacantly,
In front of the screen.
It’s been hours
And I’ve seen many things
Of interest.
Much music heard,
Words spoken,
Scintillating.
Continuous.

Knowledge, even.
Entertainment,
Reinforcement
For neuroses.
TV lacks nothing.

There’s nothing on TV.

Maybe I should turn it on now,
Just to be sure.

Lucianna describes the rapture of Miller’s television singularity, where all art forms merge. Our culture, literally unforgettable, describes a kind of end point for Lucianna: “TV lacks nothing.” Yet at the same time Lucianna questions this singularity: “There’s nothing on TV.” If TV possesses everything—“Much music heard, / Words spoken . . . Knowledge, even”—what is it about TV that nevertheless leaves us wanting, unsure? Another way of putting the question is: why am I still stooped over this footstool in the Poet’s Corner reading poems about TV, when I could be watching TV?

When the flow of forgetting was relatively unimpeded, a long time ago, we remembered in tiny little capsules of meter, rhyme, and memorable turns of phrase. In other words, we etched language into melody in order not to forget. Before we began storing ourselves in radio, television, and the Internet, we stored ourselves in song.

Despite everything, Rabbit Ears shows us that we still do.

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

Caleb Curtiss
Black Lawrence Press ($8.95)

by Robert Manaster

"Even now, I know I could use this moment, / / this dying thing to remember her with, / but I don't want to." Thus, triggered by a dead bird, Caleb Curtiss in A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us resists (yet retains) the memory of his sister's death from a rural car accident. Throughout the chapbook, tension surfaces between presence/memory and absence/forgetting. "Self-Portrait without My Dead Sister," for instance, ironically remembers his sister's absence; in several poems, a left parenthesis without a matching right interrupts a strain of thought, which seems soon forgotten with each successive strain becoming a strand of memory both uncontained and unending:

(a presence that will burn

(long after it's passed

The poems weave details and reflective moments well. The language is plain and effective in resisting the urge to elevate (and overdo) a grief that seems akin to

. . . the chassis
of an overturned car

steadying itself beside a corn field,
a stop sign.

Powerful insights are rooted throughout, often bolstered by Curtiss’s technical skill, which can be seen in the effective enjambment between these stanzas:

I have even learned
to grieve formulaically,
while the function of your absence
has grown less and less

integral to my algorithm: you
aren't even you anymore.

While the book coheres through Curtiss's sister's death and his struggle to contain (or not contain) memory and grief, in some poems, the death's unmentioned. The ghost of the other poems, though, seeps into these "breaks." Only a few parts seem to border on being overdone, as here:

This time you're asleep

and there's nothing I can do to wake you up.

This time you blow by the stop sign and everything's fine.

This time you blow by the stop sign and everything's fine.

This time you blow by the stop sign and everything's fine.

This time you say how tired you are.

Curtiss repeats not once but twice, as if to convince himself things are ok. Absorbed, he seems to forget the reader. The last line, though, redeems this part—his sister, or her spirit, being woken up by the conviction of his wish.

There are poems in varied stanzas, including couplets and double-spaced stanzas, and even an experimental poem with footnotes. One poem employs a definite spatial quality, which proves all the more powerful for its uniqueness in this volume:

Still
the house
Still
the room

. . .

In the mind
Still
Be still
be still

Curtiss (and perhaps the reader) needs the silence between these words. This poem takes chances in filling a poetic void between memory and forgetting, "where there could have been / more than a body fallen, / a body fallen from."

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

The Correspondence between Ann Charters and Charles Olson about History and Herman Melville
Ann Charters and Charles Olson
Tavern Books ($17)

by Patrick James Dunagan

In 1992, Penguin Books published The Portable Beat Reader, edited by Ann Charters. Through the rest of the decade and beyond, the book has served as a gateway for countless readers to writings by numerous members of the Beat Generation. That Charters served as editor of the volume is no surprise; ever since her 1973 biography of Jack Kerouac she has been writing and editing books on the Beats. Before making her mark as Beat scholar, however, Charters published her slim yet meaty Olson/Melville: A Study in Affinity with the small press Oyez in 1968. Unlike her books on the Beats, which provide a beginning point of entry for nearly any reader, Olson/Melville is a rarer breed of book best appreciated by readers already dedicated to exploring the work and life of poet Charles Olson (1910-1970), rector during the final years of the now legendary creative arts-focused Black Mountain College and author of The Maximus Poems.

Olson’s 1950 essay “Projective Verse” is the most widely read and recognized of his works; it’s commonly taken to represent the defining statement for those post-World War II poets writing in the outside-the-academy vein as presented in Donald Allen’s anthology New American Poetry: 1945-1960. Yet Olson’s 1947 study of Herman Melville, Call Me Ishmael, is arguably a far more vital and groundbreaking piece of writing. Olson wrote his M.A. thesis at Wesleyan on Melville and began tracking down Melville’s dispersed library, locating volumes in secondhand bookstores and attics throughout New England and New York. He continued his studies towards a doctorate on Melville at Harvard only to abandon them in the process of writing his dissertation. Olson’s primary area of focus was upon the influence that Melville’s reading of Shakespeare played in shaping Moby-Dick. Olson understood that Melville’s discoveries while reading Shakespeare had drastically altered Moby-Dick, and he felt his own writing stymied by the formal expectations at Harvard. He wanted to convey the disruptive connections he’d discovered and knew accomplishing that meant leaving the university. Within the following few years, Olson turned the material gathered for his dissertation into a book which moves freely between the author’s creative will and analytical endeavor.

With Olson/Melville: A Study in Affinity, Charters looks at Call Me Ishmael and how Olson’s work stands in relation to Melville. Compared to more academic studies on Olson there’s a touching quality, an inviting aura of sorts, surrounding this book; used copies regularly pop up for sale around the San Francisco Bay area, offering a reassuring reminder that not all studies of poetry must tidily fit into the rubrics of academic writing. It’s a compact book as well, possessing a personal feel which mellows out the more scholarly passages. This effect is due in large part to the inclusion of photographs Charters took of Olson in and around the environs of his hometown, the one-time fishing mecca of Gloucester, MA, which serves as the inspirational locus for The Maximus Poems. In fact, the photograph of Olson on the beach used on the cover of the University of California Press edition of The Maximus Poems is from this same set—a cropped version decorates the covers of Olson/Melville. On the front are the rocks along the water’s edge while on the back Olson is seen gazing upwards off camera, his beefy fingers holding the ever-present filterless cigarette to his lips.

Over forty years later, Evidence of What Is Said revisits the period of time surrounding the writing of Olson/Melville. Although billed as presenting letters “about History and Herman Melville,” the book contains a good deal more than just that. There’s an introduction by Charters, a nifty memoir that reviews matters arising in the correspondence just before, during, and after the writing and publication of Olson/Melville, including details in regard to her visit with the poet in Gloucester. This is followed by the correspondence itself. Any reader familiar with Olson’s letters will find them much as expected: bombastic and energetic, often fragmentary, never dull. Disputing a claim Charters makes regarding a similarity of argumentative purpose between Olson’s handling of the Freudian trope of killing the father in the “Moses” section of Call Me Ishmael and cannibalism in the opening “First Fact” concerning the travesty of the sailing ship Essex, Olson drives home a clear message: “creatively, one does not repeat.” He would have completed his book as a dissertation if he intended using such rhetorical structure to prove his argument. Charters also includes her brief personal essay “Melville in the Berkshires,” written during the same period as the letters with Olson and undertaken with the “creative freedom and imagination” she found within his work.

In addition, an expanded number of the original photographs, many of which appear to have been previously cropped, are included. It turns out that Olson scholar George Butterick, who edited the complete edition of The Maximus Poems after Olson’s death, was staying with Olson at the time, helping to order the poet’s papers and gathering material for a never realized biography of the poet. In these additional photos he is seen walking with Olson on the streets of Gloucester. The description given by Charters before the trio heads out for a walk is a classic Olson scene:

That afternoon, Charles, George, and I never budged from the kitchen table while our talk went on and on. We consumed endless cups of coffee and, as the hours passed, quite a few shots of Cutty Sark. Late in the afternoon the weather turned chilly. Olson put on an old brown corduroy jacket and George disappeared briefly into his room next door to put on a shirt before we went outside for a walk. Olson had agreed to let me take photographs of him in his Gloucester neighborhood, and I was eager to take advantage of the light during the late afternoon sunshine. . . .
. . . Olson had met the choreographer [Merce Cunningham] at Black Mountain College in 1955, and he gracefully demonstrated the way that Cunningham had taught him to walk with his weight distributed evenly on his two feet.

On the opposing page a snapshot taken by Butterick following behind Olson and Charters shows the pair strolling along a waterfront walkway, the poet’s 6’8” frame towering over the rather petite Charters in a light dress and sandals as Olson firmly plants his feet flatly down one in front of the other, legs slightly crossed, with his arms jetting down and out from his sides. The image is of a monsterish ballerina moving light as air. Added to the essays and letters, such photos make Evidence of What Is Said a book to be cherished by readers interested in all things Olson.

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

Eric Shonkwiler
Alternating Current ($11.99)

by David Nilsen

Eric Shonkwiler’s debut collection Moon Up, Past Full takes up the harsh beauty of the midwest and the gentle misery of its rural working class in a series of stories exploring family, drug and alcohol abuse, violence, and the mere struggle to survive. Occasionally these stories slip into the clichés of the burgeoning rural noir genre, but what distinguishes the collection as a whole is Shonkwiler’s strong narrative sense, his patience in developing the internal tension of his characters, and the roughhewn grace of his prose.

In these fourteen stories, including two pieces of flash fiction and one novella, Shonkwiler begins with simple set-ups for his characters, then tugs at the strings that hold their worlds together until each man or woman is ready to break apart or fight to survive. Often they do both. The slow fuse burning through each story slowly ratchets up the anxiety and tension at the core; Shonkwiler is much less concerned with the outbursts of violence that often define fiction of this type than he is with the fragile strength at the heart of his weatherworn protagonists.

In “Last Snow” a mother takes her young daughter to a state park on a mountain to witness what might be the first and last snow the child ever sees. The story is set a few years into a future when global warming has taken this beauty away from us, and the mother doesn’t want her girl to miss it. The quiet poignancy of the story comes from its whispered specificity; there is no politicizing, and this imagined future is not overrun with zombies or global famine or war. The simple loss of the seasons is enough.

Shonkwiler does give us that darker future, however, in “GO21,” the longest story in the book. An asteroid has hit the earth, and all forms of broadcasting, including cell phones, have been knocked out; the ensuing tale of a small group of adults trying to get to and defend a remote cabin starts out quietly and builds to a terrific crescendo. The story’s genius lies in its subversive ending, which of course can’t be revealed here—suffice it to say this is not the story you think it is.

“Rene” tells the story of a young woman trying to find help for her mother, who has had a bad nosebleed for days. The hospital is useless in helping her; the rumored witch that lives by a river many miles away might not be. Their truck has given up the ghost, so they set out on horseback. Along the way Rene comes to grips with the burdens her mother has laid on her since childhood.

There is a recurring theme in these stories of adult children facing up to the human failures and relational wounds of their parents. Shonkwiler’s characters are often fractured from their families, struggling with loyalty to their parents and siblings while defending their own identities and ethics. This coping with the frequent failure of the endeavor of family is a central and defining characteristic of his writing.

Moon Up, Past Full is a promising debut from Ohio native Shonkwiler. It’s refreshing to read stories like these that aren’t set in the West or the Ozarks or some other well-worn territory of rural noir, but in the heartland states of Ohio and its neighbors. We have stories around here you wouldn’t believe, so Shonkwiler isn’t likely to run out of muses any time soon.

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