There ought to be more books like Kevin Sampsell’s I Made An Accident, a thoroughly engaging blend of poetry and visual art. Sampsell’s collages feature unsettling juxtapositions (babies covered in snakes, for example) and everyday people, places, and things layered atop landscapes, galaxies, sheet music, and more. Women on telephones emerge from mountaintops. Small children sneak up on terrorized ingenues from old movies. Sampsell also deploys great ransom note poems and images of cats that will instill fear or laughter, depending on your predispositions.
The poem “John Stezaker Talks About Collage” serves as a kind of philosophical manifesto for the book: a lament over the “lack of materiality” in a “digital world” that has “too many images.” The act of collage, which can sometimes entail making decisions as simple as “turning a picture upside down,” becomes a way of simultaneously revealing and obscuring. Finding the perfect combination of recontextualized images, paradoxically, “is the moment when I’m somehow not present.”
In “Photos of the Ocean,” the poet confesses to attempting to “live / vicariously / through your / internet presence.” “Countdown” is an alternately hilarious and poignant lament for music delivery systems such as vinyl records, jukeboxes, and CDs. The poem begins with the apocalyptic pronouncement that “music ends next week” but ends on a note of resignation:
sometimes people will try to remember what a song was but it will feel impossible to shape the air like something that could make you cry
As the book goes on, a loose narrative featuring a dialogue with a friend or loved one in California begins to form. Comparisons are drawn between the writer’s life and how he envisions California: “I imagine every bathroom in California / as being sunny and warm.” Just as collage allows one to reorder the universe, poetry uses language to forge or reconstitute personal connections that may have been lost or rendered remote.
Sampsell’s writing is understated enough that the emotional impact of a poem often comes as a surprise. “Can’t Remember How Old I Am” is a touching poem featuring funny, intimate observations about a hairdresser alongside the writer’s internal monologue while being worked on:
She saved my life, I thought. She saved my hair’s life, I thought.
What am I pretending to be?
Even more beautiful, “Crush” examines affection and desire in which “love is never shaped like I expect”:
It is a queer tree Waiting to be cut down by someone I thought was a stranger Are you boy-shaped? No We were never boy-shaped You said you loved my belly. I’ll never forget that.
In the final section of I Made An Accident, the colors in the collages burst forth from the page, ending the experience with a crescendo of women and men from another time dancing “like Nicolas Cage / if he knew how to dance.” The big finish also features heartbreaking poems like “Broke & White” and “The World”:
It should be easy to love someone. To be in the world and to see the good parts. I feel alive when someone talks to me About their small things. An open window that stays open because It wants to.
Sampsell’s poems and collages quiver with the inescapable melancholy of earthly bliss and suffering. Readers may see themselves reflected in I Made An Accident and will want to return to its kaleidoscopic complexity again and again.
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Saeed Jones’s latest book of poetry, Alive at the End of the World, is an outpouring of anguish, grief, and anger. It’s also an outward-looking commentary about racism and the performative pressures placed on the Black artist in America to meet white expectations and assumptions.
Jones’s debut came in 2011 with his chapbook When the Only Light Is Fire (Sibling Rivalry Press). It was followed in 2014 with his full-length collection Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press), a beautifully crafted account of his boyhood in Texas and his life growing up as a young queer Black man. The rich lyricism of his work, with its mix of earthy imagery, explosive violence, and sensuous eroticism, portrayed a world of family, country life, pervasive racism, and trenchant inner conflict.
Jones is part of a generation of queer poets of color who have revitalized and reshaped American poetry. In recent years, this group has been nurtured by the efforts of progressive MFA writing programs and writers-of-color-focused organizations. One of these organizations is Cave Canem, established in 1996 by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady, which seeks to counter the underrepresentation and isolation of African American poets. In like manner, Lambda Literary created its Emerging Writers program for LGBTQ+ authors; these talented poets were also embraced by the small-press publishing world, which made a concerted effort to promote more diversity. Jones joins the likes of Danez Smith, Donika Kelly, Justin Phillip Reed, Taylor Johnson, and Jericho Brown—I could go on—all queer Black poets of distinction.
Alive at the End of the World is a departure from Prelude to Bruise. It has the tone of a jeremiad, a long lament and outcry of informed complaint that is sharp, direct, and chilling. It harbors angry indictment and accusation. It is the work of a maturing poet, too, and perhaps a transitional work: Jones has moved from the subject of his boyhood to the volatile racist politics of the here and now, as well as his worries for the future.
These poems speak of a constantly unjust and fearful world. Jones weaves together scalding social commentary with everyday personal experiences, uncovering the tense undercurrent of racial conflict in every facet of Black life and the psychological wounds it inflicts.
The title poem, really a series of poems of the same title, offers a fitting overview of this formidable project. The first poem begins:
The end of the world was mistaken for just another midday massacre in America. Brain matter and broken glass, blurred boot prints in pools of blood. We dialed the newly dead but they wouldn’t answer.
Inequities and violence are casually understated, but their brutality is clear beneath the dismissive tone of the final dialogue:
With time the white boys with guns will become wounds we won’t quite remember enduring. “How did you get that scar on your shoulder?” “Oh, a boy I barely knew was sad once.”
And it’s not just the most tragic violences that define these end times. In “Sorry as in Pathetic,” Jones describes a white woman on a street walking “right through” him to get to “her next spike-heeled hour.” He waits for the woman to turn and apologize, but soon realizes that her violation of his personal space will not be acknowledged; she doesn’t even “see” him as being there. He closes the poem with the description of another tense encounter, and the sad fallout that adds weight to the title:
once I was lost on a late-night street and when I asked
the woman walking just ahead of me for help, she screamed “Oh, god!” and clutched her purse the way the night holds me.
I told her I was sorry, then felt sorry for saying sorry. I think of that woman often; I doubt she ever thinks of me.
Jones’s language displays a wonderful musicality and a gift for metaphor. In “Date Night,” he contemplates his mother crying out in her sleep for her brother, his uncle, whom she wishes still lived near her, as though only he could give her comfort through his solid masculinity and paternal strength. The poet is hurt by his mother’s yearning—though he is perpetually available to her, he cannot be who she wants—and this suppressed inadequacy apparently gets voiced aloud while Jones sleeps with a lover. Here is how Jones transforms this pain into poetry:
When a Venus flytrap flowers, the two white blossoms sit atop a very tall
stalk. Green teeth way down at the bottom. It’s trying to avoid triggering its own traps. It’s trying to keep
the bees it needs for pollination away from its own traps. I’m most dangerous when I’m hungry. I’m most hungry
when I’m hurting. Seems like I’m always hurting. Nothing but teeth. Nothing but the same words calling out to me
in my sleep. Grief asking its ghosts not to leave. Please. It’s not up to me when I get to stop crying. Or hurting.
Or holding memories in my mouth, gentle as bees I promised not to eat, but oh, the hurt is so sweet.
In a way, this poem serves as an ars poetica as well as a trenchant personal narrative. Jones has tried to resist the temptation to eat of the fruit of grim knowledge—not of something as simple as good and evil but of racist hatred, of maternal rejection, of all the many slings and arrows that Black men in America face daily. But as a poet, as an artist, he is compelled to eat of this stinging truth—and equally compelled to make from it the sweet honey of verse.
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There is much written on the life and work of poet Rae Armantrout, including her own memoir True (Atelos, 1998). It was through this book that I thirsted to ask about her Evangelical background, and how a such a meticulous poetics of what Gordon Lish would call “quiddity” could emerge from the fascinating world of fundamentalist Christianity. Regardless of how it comes about, though, there is surely an inquisitive nowness in her timeless poems, a willingness to engage with Guy Debord’s spectacle or to completely ignore it, and a thrilling ability to transport William Carlos Williams’s iconic red wheelbarrow into an uninhibited, semantic, seismic, motionless playground.
Segments of Armantrout’s latest book Finalists (Wesleyan University Press, $35) seem reminiscent of the Harper’s Magazine column “Findings,” a digest about recent scientific research; when placed side to side, its items have a peculiar strobing effect. Throughout Finalists, etymologies inflate and implode, contradict and contort, resisting motion as if they were two magnets connecting. Making new meaning of familiar references is part of this dance of contrast; pop culture grounds Armantrout’s work in the contemporary world, while physics, genetics, and botany enshrine it with her exquisite L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.
Armantrout’s other recent notable books include Wobble (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Versed (Wesleyan University Press, 2009), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010; and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award.
This interview was conducted at the end of 2022, with Armantrout’s punctual feedback, over email.
David Moscovich: You came of age among the West Coast “language poets” of the 1970s. What advice would you give young women writers today?
Rae Armantrout: I hesitate to give advice to young people who will be living in a much harsher world than I have. That said, the old advice to “Stop, look, and listen” travels well in poetry as well as life. Hone your curiosity. Read widely.
DM: How does family influence your work?
RA: For the last five and a half years, I have been participating in the care of my twin granddaughters. There isn’t much that’s more interesting than the emergence of mind, personality, and language. They are adorable, but, especially since they’re twins, they also provide a front row seat on what you might call war and peace. There’s a lot of fighting, scheming, negotiating, making up, etc. (It’s possible I think this is fascinating because it’s the newest thing in my life.) In any case, their sayings and doings have gotten into my poems lately, just as my parents got into my earlier poems.
DM: Can you speak to your upbringing—how did Vallejo, San Diego, and Evangelical Christianity help form your current approaches to poetry? I think you’ve addressed at least part of this in an essay about your mother, but I wonder if you have anything to add now.
RA: You’re right, I have written about this before—in a memoir called True, published on Lyn Hejinian’s Atelos Press,and in interviews. I grew up in one of those housing developments built after World War II in which there were, say, five models of home repeated down the block. But, no surprise, it wasn’t exactly “Father Knows Best” or “Leave it to Beaver.” My father was in the Navy, so he was away for long periods. My mother managed a candy store. My maternal grandmother took care of me, but she was a rather taciturn, distant presence.
Fortunately, I discovered reading early. My best friends were books. When my father wasn’t on deployment, things were worse. He was a drunk. I tried my best to avoid him. I got into some minor delinquency as a teenager but still managed to make it to adulthood relatively unscathed.
My mother and grandmother were fundamentalist Christians, which meant I grew up reading the Bible and going to church. I started to have doubts by the time I was 11 or so. We had an encyclopedia, as families often did before the internet, and I remember reading about evolution. I showed my mother the pages and she said, “Don’t look at that!” I think I got interested in science as a way to break out of the evangelical cage.
DM: Do you have any work that you have kept private which you are still working on or which you plan to de-privatize?
RA: Although I wrote about my early years in True, at the start of the pandemic, I decided I would write a complete autobiography. Ha! So far I’m only up to the age of twenty-six. I have a long way to go. When I wrote about my childhood and teenage years this time, I decided to write the truer, unexpurgated version. Stanford bought this first installment when they bought my papers in 2021. I don’t intend to publish the thing. To see it, you need permission. I did it this way to protect my family and friends.
DM: Can you recall the very first time you wrote something down and thought of it as poetry (not for publication)?
RA: When I was in first or second grade my teacher had us make up poems. She must have read us some haiku. I wrote, “The little fisheys swim / around and around / and away.” I remember this poem was put into a mimeograph book of class work, but I certainly had no idea of publication.
DM: At which point in writing poems for Finalists did you know you had a cohesive book?
RA: The book is in two parts: “Threat Landscape” and “Finalists.” “Threat Landscape” was written first. I see the two parts as two different manuscripts so, to that extent, I don’t have one cohesive book—I have two that I chose to pair. Most of “Threat Landscape” was written before the pandemic (with the exception of “Fashion”) and most of “Finalists” was written during it. So they are bookends, I guess. (Though I don’t mean to imply that the pandemic is over.) The two parts have some common themes, of course: the climate crisis, and raising children in a world we’re ruining. In “Threat Landscape,” I try breaking the manuscript into sub-sections divided by one or two-line phrases. Mini poems. I’ve never done anything like that before. In “Finalists,” I found myself writing longer poems, some prose poems, and I leaned into that as much as I could during the early pandemic solitude.
DM: It seems the first few poems are broken into sections of one, two, three. How did this form come about? Why threes? And perhaps related: In a poem entitled “System Processing,” you write:
To get an idea is to place one thing
beside another, see how they look,
whether they’re a good fit— though I don’t want them
to fuse.
I know I will want to move them again.
To what extent might this poem describe a part of your writing process?
RA: I do tend to break poems and sometimes even books into sections. I started to use internal divisions early on as a way to write longer poems. I found I could stretch poems out by juxtaposing different observations done at separate times. This seemed like a natural way to go about it. After all, the brain bundles perceptions into packets— separate “nows”—each several seconds long. Now is not continuous. But there are other reasons too. I always find myself interested in how two or more distinct things/perceptions/tones might fit together. What do they have in common? How can bits drawn from different sources or scenes inform one another? This juxtaposition is a way of making implicit metaphors. But such metaphors will always be knobby. The parts will resist each other. And I think these resistances are at least as interesting as the harmonies. My poems look at what happens when very different things meet.
And, yes, the lines you quote from the end of “System Processing” do describe this process. They imply that an “idea” is always a way of seeing what happens when A meets B. I didn’t start out to write a poetics statement. The poem starts with a quote from something I read on systems theory and consciousness. The rest of the poem is a kind of thought experiment using concrete, down to earth examples to explore and question the heady initial concepts. Somewhere along the way, though, I do start to reflect back on my own writing process.
DM: I was raised with values that fall somewhere between atheist Marxism and secular Judaism, so I have a curiosity about all types of Fundamentalism. Read with an Evangelical lens, I wonder how the logic in “Recent Thinking” might assemble/disassemble a belief in the Christian higher being: What is the difference between simulationism (if that’s even a word) and creationism? They seem potentially related in your eyes:
Some say the fact that the world is computable is evidence we’re living in a simulation.
And the fact that the simulations we create are improving rapidly is further evidence of this.
It is reasonable to think that any simulation might have been created by one more advanced than itself,
a potentially infinite regress in which the word “simulation” becomes meaningless.
Experience suggests that simulations are games with both player and non-player characters.
No character has explicitly stated that we should destroy the biosphere to test the limits of the game.
I’m interested in the question of when and how deep-seated beliefs, such as evangelism or atheism, might morph or flex over one’s lifetime, in your view.
RA: I think you’re absolutely right. “Simulationism” and creationism have the same structure and the same shortcomings. Both suggest that some humanoid intelligence created us and is watching us. They propose different versions of the Big Other. Both theists and people who believe in simulation theory, for instance, argue that the fact that math works in the world shows that “reality” was intelligently designed by a mind or minds somewhat like ours. That’s actually an interesting argument. I’m not saying that simulationists or (all) theists are stupid. Far from it. But both ideas fall into an infinite regress, which is not where you want to be. If everything must have a creator, then who created God? Or, if the fact that we make simulations implies that we are a simulation created by a more advanced civilization—then who created them? Where does it stop? And where does our responsibility begin? In simulation theory we really have no agency. Similarly, it could be argued (though it rarely is) that if God is truly omniscient, we have no agency. I think we should act as if the world is real and as if we can affect what happens. I also think both theories underestimate the dynamism and creativity of “nature.”
As for how my “deep-seated” beliefs have changed over time, I don’t think the evangelical Christianity I was raised with was really deep-seated. I mean, I shed it quickly in my early teenage years and never looked back. I was too curious to stay there. I did a paper on comparative religion in seventh grade and that was the end of that.
I do think reading the Bible at a young age prepared me to understand metaphor and parable. Since it was the King James version, it even prepared me for reading Shakespeare. To be clear, I know sophisticated, intelligent Christians—but they aren’t fundamentalists. It’s the Jimmy Swaggart form of religion I’m allergic to. I’m an agnostic, really. I mean, it’s not impossible that we are living in a simulation! But it’s a very depressing thought, and the argument for it is essentially circular. The poem is an exploration of the way plausible reasoning can go wrong.
DM: What this brings up, in a way, is censorship, which according to a recent PEN America report on banned books is increasing in the U.S.—1,648 titles were affected between July 2021 to June 2022. Do you know of an anti-censorship argument that might speak effectively to religious-minded folks who hold faith-based objections to books—something that might actually move opinions?
RA: This seems to be the age of censorship. Who would have expected that? People on the left have tried to ban Huckleberry Finn from school libraries because the N word, used by characters in the book, is racist and potentially triggering. But the strongest censorship movement now is on the right, which apparently wants to keep young people from knowing that gay or trans people exist—even though some of these kids are inevitably already gay or trans. They’re also against teaching the true history of racism in this country. I am against censorship—though I do think curriculum should be age appropriate. Do I know of a good argument against it? Well, ignorance is seldom good. It’s certainly not what school is about. Kids will find out about all this stuff sooner rather than later on the internet anyway. Why not contextualize it.? You could use Huckleberry Finn in high school, for instance, to teach about racism and slavery, about character and humor, and about the dream of freedom as experienced by Huck and Jim. As for the right wing, I doubt those people are amenable to argument. They want to institute a theocracy. They are on a political crusade and they won’t let a little thing like an argument stand in their way. It’s very dangerous.
DM: I wanted to ask about the poem “Cathexis”:
When we say the world is haunted we mean untranslated as yet.
A “cathexis” is a catch basin in English.
A result of draining “here” off into “there.”
Starbucks’ billion plastic straws are green.
I know the leaves are whispering.
Tell me what my mother meant!
Are the final lines of the poem autobiography?
RA: Cathexis is a term usually used in psychology; it refers to a concentration of mental or libidinal energy on a particular person, object, or idea. An obsession, in other words. So it isn’t really “a catch-basin/ in English”—not literally. I like making up faux definitions. This one isn’t so wacky though. Cathexis really does drain “‘here’ off into ‘there’” if we take “here” to mean the self and “there” to mean the fascinating object. As for the poem’s last lines, they are not primarily autobiographical; I see the demand as being spoken to the leaves, to nature. The whispering of the leaves perhaps reminds the speaker of the whispers of her parents when she was a child.
Nature and the incomprehensible speech of parents are connected here. Adult speech amounts to a kind of “primal scene” for the child, to use a Freudian term. Freud said that walking in on one’s parents having sex is traumatic because the child can’t understand what’s going on and sees it as violent. I’m hypothesizing that the traumatic lack of comprehension extends way beyond that particular sight. So the whole poem exists in a somewhat playful argument with Freudian psychology. (Mother is one, the first, fascinating object of cathexis?) Did I feel this way as a kid? Maybe. I don’t remember.
DM: You mentioned that you are writing a complete autobiography, but that you do not intend to publish it. Can you explain more about your motivation behind this? How does it feel in comparison with writing poetry, for publication, for example?
RA: It’s entirely different from writing poetry. I’m writing it in a fairly linear way in order to try to remember—and reconsider—the events of my life. It’s difficult both because I’m not used to writing like this and because my memory is pretty hazy. I started it as a project to work on during the pandemic and, I must say, I’ve ground to a halt since things have loosened up. I want to get back to it, though.
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Check back as we add more features and reviews in the next months!
Interviews
Stop, Look, and Listen: An Interview with Rae Armantrout Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rae Armantrout talks about breaking “out of the evangelical cage” as well as the process of writing Finalists and topics from censorship to grandparenting. Interviewed by David Moscovich
Archival Woman: An Interview with Sarah Heady In her new book Comfort, Sarah Heady offers a refreshing new history of American women and the world surrounding them; the result illuminates not only the past, but our own tremulous moment. Interviewed by Greg Bem
A Wild Vitality: An Interview with Jerome Sala Poet Jerome Sala discusses satirizing the corporate content machine, his Chicago art and performance influences, looking for culture in the branding of everyday objects, and his new collection How Much. Interviewed by Jim Feast
Features
Three New Publishers' Self-Retrospectives Anthologies like these have critical value because they portray what publishers think they have achieved — and thus how they wish to be remembered. Reviewed by Richard Kostelanetz
George Mackay Brown: An Appreciation A virtuoso with words, the prolific Scottish poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist George Mackay Brown remains too little known in literary circles. Essay by Mike Dillon
Two New Translations of Max Jacob’s Poetry These new translations of two of Max Jacob’s major collections should be recognized as welcome and essential. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan
Poetry Reviews
Alive at the End of the World Saeed Jones Alive at the End of the World is the work of a maturing poet, and perhaps a transitional work: the already-accomplished Saeed Jones has moved from the subject of his boyhood to the volatile racist politics of the here and now, as well as his worries for the future. Reviewed by Walter Holland
psalmbook Laura Walker In her new book, Laura Walker manages to preserve a sense of prayer while also reshaping the psalm into something new—a significant literary achievement. Reviewed by John Bradley
How to Communicate John Lee Clark John Lee Clark hasn’t just put his life into verse and prose poems; he’s felt and manipulated and explored and expanded what poetry in English can do. Reviewed by Stephanie Burt
Water Has Many Colors Kiriti Sengupta Illustrated by Rochishnu Sanyal From epics to succinct one-liners, Kiriti Sengupta suits his poetic form to the subject, just as the titular folk idiom reminds us that water takes shape from the container in which it is held. Reviewedby Malashri Lal
Nonfiction Reviews
Watershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress Ranae Lenor Hanson Ranae Lenor Hanson offers a personal map against which readers might chart their own ways through the uneasy waters of the climate crisis. Reviewed by Elizabeth Bailey
Tuesdays in Jail: What I Learned Teaching Journaling to Inmates Tina Welling These reflections on teaching by novelist Tina Welling, which include non-judgmental sketches of her incarcerated students, make for a beautifully written memoir. Reviewed by George Longenecker
I Need to Tell You Cathryn Vogeley In a memoir that details moving from the solitude of shame to the loving acceptance of family, Cathryn Vogeley also offers an enlightening examination of secret adoptions. Reviewed by Sandra Eliason
Fiction Reviews
The Last Days of Terranova Manuel Rivas Translated by Jacob Rogers The Last Days of Terranova is like a bookstore: One is pleasantly overwhelmed by the many rich stories that sit near one another. Reviewedby John Kazanjian
Because I Loved You Donnaldson Brown Because I Loved You presents an adult assessment of the limits of love alongside a potent acknowledgment of the power of shared history. Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader
Participation Anna Moschovakis As she does in her poetry, Anna Moschovakis effectively employs and interrogates language in her latest novel, Participation. Reviewed by Joseph Houlihan
Multi-Genre Reviews
I Made An Accident Kevin Sampsell Just as collage allows one to reorder the universe, poetry uses language to forge or reconstitute personal connections that may have been lost or rendered remote. Reviewed by Christopher Luna
Young Adult Fiction Reviews
Blaine for the Win Robbie Couch As depictions of queer characters become increasingly nuanced in YA fiction, Blaine for the Win will garner readers’ votes. Reviewed by Nick Havey
Online tickets have concluded, but you can still get a ticket at the door!
Rain Taxi turned 25 in 2020, but we couldn’t celebrate at the time because, you know. Join us now as we celebrate our silver anniversary in style at one of the coolest venues in Minneapolis! You’ll be treated to an extraordinary showcase of short musical performances and literary readings by great local artists—plus the return of the Raintini, our signature cocktail, and other awesome food and drink at the Granada Theater!
We can’t wait to party with you! Located in the heart of the Uptown neighborhood in Minneapolis, the newly renovated Granada Theater is Uptown in a nutshell—arts friendly, forward looking, welcoming to all—we are proud to have them as our sponsoring venue! And we are equally proud to have this event supported by Dispatch and it’s outstanding coverage of arts and culture in the Twin Cities. Come lift a glass with, and to, these terrific kindred spirits of Rain Taxi!
The following is an alphabetical list of the six musical acts—set times will be announced the week of the event!
Colin Bracewell
Colin Bracewell, a 22-year-old indie pop artist from Minneapolis, is paving his own, fresh path within the Midwest music scene. Originally hailing from Windsor, Ontario, Canada, Colin blends inspiration from the likes of Justin Vernon and John Mayer, though his music holds a raw and unabashed post-Frank Ocean R&B quality. His instrumentation sets Bracewell apart from other singer-songwriters of the same genre, often adding gentle synths, a killer trumpet solo, or a moody saxophone riff to bring a jazzier feel that offsets lyrics of heartbreak (or amplifies them, depending on the listener). Colin is a full-time student at the University of Minnesota majoring in Vocal Performance and Marketing. His most recent release, "Making Me Crazy" has been in rotation on The Current (Minnesota Public Radio) and Radio K (University of Minnesota Radio) since September of 2022.
Dosh
A master multi-instrumentalist, Dosh has been making independent music since 2002. His use of loops to create dazzling musical interplay while evoking deep emotion have made him a renowned solo performer, though he has also collaborated with numerous other musicians, including Andrew Bird, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Gaelynn Lea, and Gayngs. His most recent solo album is Tomorrow, 1972, which reflects upon the anguish of the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the artist’s own childhood to create a layered meditation on our times.
Adam and AvaLevy
Ava Levy and her father Adam have played music together for most of Ava’s life, first in the family group Bunny Clogs but now as a duo sharing originals and covers. Adam Levy is a singer-songwriter guitarist, producer, activist, and educator. He’s led The Honeydogs for almost thirty years, been a founding member of Turn Turn Turn (who just released their second record) and a number of varied musical projects, and recently began teaching high school social studies. Ava Levy was one of the songwriters and guitarist for Femme Punk group Sapphire. She’s finishing up college in Gender Studies at the University of Minnesota and just released her first solo single, “Not Ur Clown.”
Allie McIntosh
Seventeen-year-old Allie McIntosh has been playing music since the age of four. A bonafide wunderkind, she excelled at violin, viola, and piano by the time she entered middle school, but her musical curiosities extended far beyond the notes on the page. At only nine, her original song “Pachyderm Plea” was featured in a video by the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. From then on, rigorous classical study was paired with explorations on guitar, ukulele, and in Logic Pro. McIntosh’s most recent single, “Want you to stay,” likewise shows an artist with instincts and abilities well beyond her years. Recorded in part in her bedroom and in part at Minneapolis’s Hideaway Studios with super-producer Joe Mabbott (Snoop Dog, Atmosphere, Doomtree), the single is a strong indication of her creative talent. Described by Jon Bream in the Star Tribune as having “skills beyond her years…equal parts Adele and Camila Cabello,” Allie was selected as the youngest ever participant for NYU’s 2020 Summer Songwriters Workshop, has recently graduated from high school, and is just getting started.
Munson-Hicks Party Supplies
Munson-Hicks Party Supplies is a collaboration between John Munson, who does most of the singing and plays bass, and Dylan Hicks, who does most of the writing and plays piano. They make groovily bookish music inspired by far-flung alliances between interpretative singers and less spotlit writers. Munson is best known as a founding member of Trip Shakespeare, Semisonic, and the New Standards. Hicks, who’s also a novelist, is the leader of Dylan Hicks & Small Screens and part of other collaborative groups.
Why Not
Henry Breen, Isaac Dell, and Joshua MacGregor met playing in a middle-school music class; before any band member could drive, they had released their first album and booked their first tour. Now based in Minneapolis, the trio have pivoted from their math rock and punk beginnings, incorporating a wide variety of musical influences; the result is an amalgamation of punching drums, intricate guitars, and digital distortion, all built around an incredibly memorable suite of songs. Completed at Hippo Campus’ recording studio, their debut album WHY NOT is a virtuosic, genre-fluid statement from a young band just beginning to harness the heights of their craft.
Writers
The following is an alphabetical list of writers who will be reading—set times will be announced the week of the event!
Michael Bazzett
Michael Bazzett is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Echo Chamber (Milkweed Editions, 2021). His work has appeared in Granta, Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Nation, and The Paris Review. His verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh, (Milkweed, 2018) was named one of 2018’s best books of poetry by the New York Times, and his translation of the selected poems of Humberto Ak'abal, If Today Were Tomorrow, is forthcoming from Milkweed.
Tish Jones
Founder & Executive Director of TruArtSpeaks, Tish Jones is a poet, narrative strategist, cultural producer, and educator from Saint Paul, MN, with a deep and resounding love for Black people, arts & culture, youth development, and civic engagement. As a performance artist her work has been shared in venues throughout the United States. Her writing can be found in We Are Meant to Rise (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), A Moment of Silence (Tru Ruts and The Playwrights Center, 2020), the Minnesota Humanities Center’s anthology entitled, Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2015) and more.
Currently serving as a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and an Arts Matters Artist2Artist Fellow, Jones is grateful to have been supported through grants, fellowships, andawards from The Intercultural Leadership Institute, Springboard for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board and more. The generous support that she has received over the years has allowed her to excavate the kind of stories that chart new worlds—she is eternally grateful.
Michael Kleber-Diggs
Michael Kleber-Diggs is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. Michael’s essay, “There Was a Tremendous Softness,” appears in A Darker Wilderness:Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions, 2023). His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies.
Mary Lucia
Mary Lucia is a writer/actor/voiceover artist, and has been a celebrated voice in MN radio for 28 years. Known for her unique interview style, she has chatted with everyone from Studs Terkel to Trent Reznor. A graduate of New York University Tisch Drama with a BFA, she is currently a regular columnist for Dispatch MSP@Popular Creeps and is in the process of writing her memoir. Though she prefers animals over people, she's open to occasional exceptions.
Benjamin Percy
Benjamin Percy is the author of seven novels (includingThe Sky Vault, which releases this September with William Morrow), three story collections, and a book of essays. He writes Wolverine, X-Force, and Ghost Rider for Marvel Comics. His honors include a Whiting Award, an NEA fellowship, a Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, the iHeart Radio Award for Best Scripted Podcast, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics.
Sun Yung Shin
신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea and was raised in the Chicago area. She is a poet, writer, and cultural worker. She is the editor of What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories on Food and Family and of A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, author of the poetry collections The Wet Hex; Unbearable Splendor (winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for poetry); Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black (winner of the 2007 Asian American Literary Award for poetry), co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and author of a bilingual illustrated book for children, Cooper’s Lesson. She lives in Minneapolis where she co-directs the community organization Poetry Asylum with poet Su Hwang.
Free and open to the public! Books will be available for purchase. Please note this is an in-person event only; virtual attendance is not available. East Side Freedom Library requires masks to be worn in their building.
Two boundary-pushing Minnesota orgs, Rain Taxi and Mizna, are proud to team up to present an evening with renowned Palestinian writer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh, who will discuss his new bookWe Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I. At this special event, the author will be in conversation with Joseph Farag, professor of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota who specializes in Palestinian Literature and Culture. We hope to see you there!
About the Book
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I is in part the story of Palestine’s ongoing fight against multiple foreign powers, but it also presents a poignant unraveling of a complex father-son relationship. Set against the backdrop of continuing political unrest, Raja Shehadeh describes his failure as a young man to recognize his father’s courage as an activist fighting for Palestinian sovereignty and his father’s inability to appreciate Raja’s own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. Then in 1985, Aziz Shehadeh is murdered, and Raja undergoes a profound and irrevocable change.
About the Author
Raja Shehadeh, winner of the prestigious Orwell Prize for his book Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, is widely regarded as Palestine’s leading writer. He is also a lawyer and the founder of the pioneering Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq. In addition to this new work and Palestinian Walks, Shehadeh is the author of many acclaimed books, including Strangers in the House, Occupation Diaries, Where the Line Is Drawn, and Going Home, which won the Moore Prize in 2020. He has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Granta, among many other periodicals. Shehadeh lives in Ramallah in Palestine.
About the Moderator
Joseph R. Farag is Assistant Professor of Modern Arab Studies at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities where his teaching and scholarship focus on the intersection of politics and modern Arab literary production. His first book, titled Politics and Palestinian Literature in Exile (2017), addresses Palestinian short fiction in the wake of the Nakba of 1948; his current book project explores narratives of imprisonment and confinement in novels and memoirs from across the Arab world. Farag's scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Arabic Literature and Middle East Literatures.
Thanks to all who visited bookstores in the week leading up to Independent Bookstore Day and on the day itself!
Another successful Independent Bookstore Day is in the books! Thousands flocked their favorite indie bookstores with the Twin Cities Bookstore Passport in hand to celebrate.
Congratulations to Grand Prize winner Melissa Z.; to Literary Prize Pack winners Morgan M., Kyle H., Angie B., Jacob V.W., and Kelsey Y.; and to #ItsMeMargaret Prize Pack winners Ami P., Chloe B., Keeli G., Anna H., and Deb S.!
The Passport wouldn't be possible without our incredible sponsors. Thank you for supporting our cities' great independent bookstores and this fun program, and for all you contribute to the world of books! Many thanks to Finishing Line Press, The Givens Foundation for African-American Literature, Graywolf Press, Professional Editors Network, The Book House in Dinkytown, Candlewick Press, The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library, Haymarket Books, Lerner Publishing Group, The Loft Literary Center, Milkweed Editions, Mizna, and the University of Minnesota Press.
Rain Taxi's Twin Cities Literary Calendar is once again publishing its Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day! Passports will be available at the participating bookstores listed below starting Monday, April 24, 2023 andcontinuing to IBD itself on Saturday, April 29, 2023.
Packed with bookstore coupons and illustrations by local artist Kevin Cannon, the Passport is FREE to pick up at any participating store. Once you obtain a Passport, get it stamped at ALL the stores you visit that week for future discounts and a chance to win prizes. Don’t forget that each stamp activates that store's coupon; read on for more details below. We’ll see you in the bookstores!
How it Works
Pick up a passport and activate the coupons
Start your bookstore journey at any of the participating stores listed below, and then get a stamp at each bookstore you visit through April 29, 2023. Each stamp activates that store’s coupon; just bring your Passport back after May 1 to buy books and save!
Get any 12 stamps, and you activate ALL store coupons
Collect stamps from any 12 bookstores and ask the twelfth one to stamp a special page that will activate all 23 coupons in the Passport — you’ll have bookstore savings for months to come!
Get all 23 stamps, and be entered to win the Grand Prize
Collect stamps from ALL the bookstores and ask the final one you visit to stamp the special square in the back of the Passport; you’ll then be eligible to win one of fiveliterary prize packs, or the Grand Prize! If you have obtained all 23 stamps, simply email a picture of the "Bookstore Hero Stamps" page to calendar [at] raintaxi [dot] com by end of day on Monday, May 1, or tear out and mail on Monday to Rain Taxi, PO Box 3840, Mpls MN 55403 with your email address or phone number included. Winners will be notified by email on Friday, May 5.
Thanks and best wishes on your travels with the Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport!
2023 Participating Stores
Click on these links to learn more about the open hours, special activities, and limited or exclusive items available at each participating store!
Passport holders who collect ALL the stamps over the course of the week leading up to Independent Bookstore Day will be entered in a drawing to win a Literary Prize Pack full of these great gifts!
The Bookhouse in DinkytownCandlewick PressFinishing Line PressFriends of the St. Paul Public LibraryThe Givens FoundationGraywolf PressHaymarket BooksLerner PublishingMilkweed EditionsMiznaUniversity of Minnesota PressRain Taxi
Grand Prize
Our Grand Prize winner will receive a new book from each of the independent bookstores involved in this year's Passport—and a handwritten note from each one explaining why they chose it! Each store is offering a book that they feel is representative of both their store and their community of readers, so collectively this is a one-of-a-kind prize that reflects the bounty that independent bookstores in the Twin Cities provide.
#ItsMeMargaret Prize Packs
Five winners will receive prize packs full of goodies for the new film Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, the adaptation of Judy Blume's beloved middle grade novel!
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.
INTERVIEWS
Christine Sneed: Please Be Advised | by Justin Courter Zack Kopp: A Guide to Happiness, Aliens, False Spiritualism, Brain Drugs, and Punk | by Hillary Leftwich
ESSAYS
Grand Prix: A Memory of Russell Banks | by Madison Smartt Bell James Weldon Johnson: The Poet-Bureaucrat | by Richard Kostelanetz
FEATURES
If and Only If | by Scott F. Parker The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan
Headless World or The Problem of Time | Ascher/Straus | by Alvin Lu Ex-Members | Tobias Carroll | by Jesi Buell The Beloved of the Dawn | Franz Fühmann | by Greg Bem Revenge of the Scapegoat | Caren Beilin | by Zoe Berkovitz It Falls Gently All Around | Ramona Reeves | by Nick Hilbourn Brother Alive | Zain Khalid | by Brian Watson At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf | Tara Ison | by Eleanor J. Bader No Excuses | Stephen L. Harris | by George Longenecker
NONFICTION / ART REVIEWS
The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution, 1968–69 | by Chris Funkhouser Under My Bed and Other Essays | Jody Keisner | by Sandra Hager Eliason We’re Not OK: Black Faculty Experiences and Higher Education Strategies | Antija M. Allen and Justin T. Stewart, eds. | by George Longenecker Groundglass | Kathryn Savage | by Evan Youngs The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature | Josh Lambert | by Richard Kostelanetz The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, and Lovers Talkin’ Early Bob Dylan | Anthony Scaduto | by Scott F. Parker A Horse At Night: On Writing | Amina Cain | by Garin Cycholl Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal | John Yau | by W. C. Bamberger
POETRY REVIEWS
[To] The Last [Be] Human | Jorie Graham | by Walter Holland How To Communicate | John Lee Clark | by Stephanie Burt O | Zeina Hashem Beck | by Tara Ballard Summer | Johannes Göransson | by K. Blasco Solér The Collected Poems | Marguerite Young | by Zachary Tanner The Sky Watched: Poems of Ojibwe Lives | Linda LeGarde Grover | by Warren Woessner Translation of the Lilies Back Into Lists | Laynie Brown | by John Bradley No Farther Than the End of the Street | Benjamin Niespodziany | by Justin Lacour Damage | Mark Scroggins | by Joe Safdie
COMICS REVIEWS
Regarding the Matter of Oswald’s Body | Christopher Cantwell and Luca Casalanguida | by Chris Barsanti
MayDay Parade 3 Acrylic on panel, 18” wide x 14” tall
Even before the pandemic, our culture was beset with isolation and conflict. In reaction, I have chosen to use my art to reach out to my community by depicting people coming together through music, art, festivals and social justice actions.
This painting represents the MayDay Parade, a community celebration which was organized annually for 45 years in South Minneapolis by the In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre. Each April (before the pandemic), the community was invited to create hand-built puppets and masks for the parade— some over 15 feet tall. On the first Sunday of May, more than 50,000 diverse participants and spectators filed the streets in this celebration of local culture.
We let each other be or not, a little tea slops over the rim
of your cup or mine and the other takes it personally.
We forget to kiss then kiss, we marry for love, agreeing to the sky also
These lines from Billie Chernicoff’s poem “As It Is in Heaven,” which is contained in her luminous new book Minor Secrets, start to give an answer: a total acceptance of otherness, the capacity to write in the first-person plural without any sort of appropriation, “Each of us the whole world, / naked and afraid” (“Next Morning in a Holy City”). Rather than provoking anxiety, however, this fear sometimes manifests as a charming awkwardness and incapacity: “I rove, arriving / at neither moon nor sonnet / nor any answer whatsoever” (“Letters from a Holy City”).
Chernicoff’s use of the almost archaic word “rove” suggests that she doesn’t ignore the playfulness of love either; it sometimes seems as if she’s engaging her readers in a game of language—“Bring me your ruse, a rose, / your news, / a more charismatic water”—which, if we don’t play along, can doom us to separation or isolation. But she welcomes us into the dance, giving us confidence we can participate: “I pray you too catch a wave.”
These are unabashedly lyric poems; indeed, they constitute new discoveries in that mode. The work of Charles Olson would seem to have little to do with lyric, yet Chernicoff, in a final section of the book called “Luminous Failures” that explores and distills some of her working principles, cites Olson as one of her poetic vectors: “I would place my work in the context of Olson’s compositional field, where I place myself out in the Open and breathe whatever comes into being.” Yet even in these reflections on her work, a playfulness is ever present: “I would like to confess poetry, though nothing I can confess or propose would be as true as a poem itself. And for sure a poem is a better liar.” On occasion, these poetics echo the effect of Chernicoff’s poems: “A good poem does not make you feel virtuous, it makes you feel terribly human—tender, doubtful, sometimes fearful and sometimes brave, sorrowful or mirthful, maybe prayerful, in love, full of longing, or just being—lost in the wild, an ecstatic nobody.”
Among their many virtues, Chernicoff’s poems never let us forget the joys and fascinations of living in the physical world:
Let me start again. I want you the way the sea wants herself, returns to herself the way rivers find their way through marshes the way one rows through marshes and tires, and drifts, and dreams of the lover while hours go by between her thighs and books write themselves
That’s just one section from a longer poem called “Letters from a Holy City,” and it takes my breath away. What’s finally to say about this book, these poems? Perhaps these lines from “Next Morning”: “They lingered here as long as they could. / Now the whole world sways a little.”
Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore:
