Check back as we add more features and reviews in the next months!

Interviews

Documenting the Suburban Gothic: An Interview with Ryan Rivas
by Chrissy Kolaya
Author Ryan Rivas talks about his new book, Nextdoor in Colonialtown, the accidental “truth bombs” of his neighbors’ posts on Nextdoor, and what it means to illustrate the “slippery time” of our historical moment. 

History and Story: Madison Smartt Bell and Jane Delury in Conversation
Authors Madison Smartt Bell and Jane Delury discuss using language in historical fiction to transport characters through space, time, and identity—and the occasions language has done the same to them.

Poetry Reviews

The Lascaux Notebooks
Jean-Luc Champerret
Edited and translated by Philip Terry
The Lascaux Notebooks presents a window into the inner life of our Ice Age ancestors, transforming mysterious cave markings into poetic testimonials. Reviewed by John Bradley

Relativism
Mary Ford Neal
For Mary Ford Neal, the self is composed of absence: distances within us, between us, and outside of us. In Relativism, it is also a space we walk through and become, not a possession. Reviewed by Nick Hilbourn

Wind, Trees
John Freeman
Wind, Trees has John Freeman’s characteristic quietness: an understated, restrained quality which lends itself particularly well to post-pandemic writing. Reviewed by Joanna Acevedo

All the Blood Involved in Love
Maya Marshall
Reading All the Blood Involved in Love is like looking through a kaleidoscope at a cross section of violence: the violence of motherhood, the violence of race, the violence of illness, and of course, the violence of love. Reviewed by Rachel Slotnick

Young Americans
Jackqueline Frost
Young Americans, Jackqueline Frost’s book-length project, is intense, intricate, lyrical, and lengthy, tracking the progress of a mind from young adult to not-so-young adult. Reviewed by Nadira Clare Wallace

Tangled Hologram
James Cushing
In his latest volume of poetry, James Cushing sees distress all around, but he offers his readers an alternative—not nihilism, but its sunnier cousin, anti-nihilism. Reviewed by Lee Rossi

Minor Secrets
Billie Chernicoff
Among their many virtues, Billie Chernicoff’s poems never let us forget the joys and fascinations of living in the physical world. Reviewed by Joe Safdie

Fiction Reviews

Boulder 
Eva Baltasar
Translated by Julia Sanches
Boulders have a way of making landscapes both formidable and absurd—and Eva Baltasar delves into this uneasy balance in Boulder, her idiosyncratic portrait of displacement. Reviewed by Abby Walthausen 

Telluria
Vladimir Sorokin 
Translated by Max Lawton 
Telluria asks: What rough consciousness is emerging along our frontlines and glowing screens? How do we rescale our existence along these spaces in more human terms? Reviewed by Garin Cycholl

Cat Brushing
Jane Campbell
The stories in Jane Campbell's debut book Cat Brushing feed empathy, ask uneasy questions, and jilt the denial of mortality. Reviewed by J. Van

The Missing Lover
Summer Brenner
Collages by Lewis Warsh
In endearing and fast-paced prose, Summer Brenner's The Missing Lover refuses to let the concept of love settle into a single qualitative experience. Reviewed by Evan Burkin    

Hollow
Matthew Cole Levine
Hollow, the new horror novel by Matthew Cole Levine, lives in the tenuous space between the safety of the hearth and the darkest parts of the Wisconsin woods, where the wind screams like a howl. Reviewed by Joseph Houlihan

Nonfiction Reviews

Transfixed by Prehistory: An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time
Maria Stavrinaki
Translated by Jane Marie Todd
This tome by art historian Maria Stavrinaki shows how the existence of prehistory drastically changes the science, the art, and even the concept of time in the modern world. Reviewed by W. C. Bamberger

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life
Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman
Joining the burgeoning genre of collective philosophical biography, Metaphysical Animals puts its subjects at the center of a story about friendship while detailing contemporary philosophy’s renewed interest in metaphysics and morals. Reviewed by Scott Parker

Graphic Novel Reviews

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths
Shigeru Mizuki
Translated by Jocelyne Allen
Long before Maus made comics serious business in the U.S., Shigeru Mizuki’s work, including Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, demonstrated the power and potential of the medium. Reviewed by Nicholas Burman

Roger Williamson is a visual artist, residing and creating in Minneapolis Minnesota. Born in Loughborough, England, in 1947 and growing up in Coventry he was inspired from an early age by the French Symbolist painters of late nineteenth century France. These artistic influences, in conjunction with his own esoteric upbringing and practical experiences of magick, mythology and dream control, form the matrix, a collective oeuvre upon which his paintings and writings are an extension.

Roger Williamson’s works belong to a “theater” of life. Building upon classical myths and ancient themes the paintings invite the viewers into spheres of consciousness- characterized by ethereal portraits and kaleidoscopic color palettes. Williamson’s practice seeks to re-enliven a kind of mystery, revitalizing the senses and questioning reality.

Using diverse creative media, whether painting or writing books, Williamson endeavors to develop techniques that materialize the sensuous dreaming experience into the language of the waking world. Aspiring to reintroduce mystery and ambiguity back into the adventure of human existence through the creative process, encouraging artistic audiences towards "living effulgent and invigorating lives, revitalized from the secretions of our subconscious."

Roger Williamson is the creator of Tarot of the Morning Star deck and the author of The Sun at Night. He is also the founder of Magus Books and Herbs. Visit him and learn more at https://rogerwilliamsonart.com/

Rain Taxi’s annual Benefit Auction is taking place from December 11 through December 18!

Why simply buy your holiday book gifts when you could win them?

Up for grabs are a wide variety of books, chapbooks, and broadsides — many signed, some very rare! — and some other fun surprises. We’re selling out-of-print poetry, cool first editions, signed books, children’s treasures, vintage literary gems, Rain Taxi exclusives, and some terrific 2022 items, all at low starting bids.

When you bid on any item from our Benefit Auction, you are supporting our nonprofit organization and its programs, but you also obtain a wonderful literary treasure to delight yourself or someone you love. (We don’t do much online selling the rest of the year, so especially if you’re not local to the Twin Cities, now’s your chance to snag an item from the Rain Taxi vault!)

The auction begins Sunday, December 11, at 8 pm Central and concludes the evening of Sunday, December 18, at 8 pm Central.

On Sunday night, this page will go live and you can begin bidding:

Thank you for taking a look and for supporting Rain Taxi!  

Ish Klein
Canarium Books ($17)

by Robert Fernandez            

“The world is full of miracles; toys / are our blueprints for better living,” writes Ish Klein in her latest book, The New Sun Time, a riveting account of how life expresses itself in the world. Here, we see the world from the perspective of life and life from the perspective of one outside, but not quite separate from, the world:

Eh, allowing love
for it is outside
very like the nose
A lovely huge nose.

The New Sun Time ends with the masterful “Every Animal Is Your Mother,” which adapts the Tibetan Buddhist exercise of imagining every living thing implicated in every other living thing (such that a worm, say, could be your mother via the endless cycles of death and rebirth):

Cutthroat Trout eats small fish,
fish, eggs, algae, insects,
frogs and small rodents which
got delivered, I guess.
They’re et by bald eagles,
lake trout, otters, osprey—

      I will go toward commotion

The value of such an exercise is foregrounded in an era in which planetary life threatens to disrupt humanity’s homely domain. The New Sun Time reminds us that life can be threatening and indifferent, code-like and machinic, but it is also libidinal, funny, punning, spontaneous, shocking, innocent: “Iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb alive.”

The place of life—“a precious necklace [ringing] heart and breast”—can’t be penetrated, yet it draws the poet in: “I must only move towards life.” To be harassed by both the world and the invisible—the poet’s natural state—provokes cleansing utterances:

and he was like offended
and I was like you want me to do the German version
    of lick your asshole though you insult me

and he was like you are a prostitute in German
and I was like your mother is a prostitute
and he said destroy me in German    
and I said I’d like to see him try                                                                 

Klein’s poems are indebted to the New York School’s speed and immediacy (she was a student of Kenneth Koch's), modernist theater, film, Buster Keaton, Sherlock Holmes, games, Old English poems and riddles, and so on. Her idiosyncratic sensibility and formidable facility can lead to opacities, but the poems are also written with an eye to performance, and her readings reveal a sense of the poem as a complex body of feeling, tones, and thought integrated at the level of music.

The New Sun Time’s essential questions revolve around life, love, and freedom. Is life without love mere repetition? Is “loving a freedom state?” How does poetry access life? How does life access us? And do we feel it when the surface tension of the visible breaks and the invisible emerges: “When the stick figures leave / they go ‘Adios Bitcheros!’ Witty but will // their body get some spheres and arches?”

The poet is subject to the world and its conventions, limitations, and radioactive particles that “penetrate any place.” She can’t escape its scandalous rehearsals of law and power. But she is also prone to reversals, as when visitors from other zones enter and familiar orientations are turned on their head: “At the laundromat the earth shifted its / polarity. A child went missing.”

In a time of deadlocks and crises, The New Sun Time works toward liberation and healing. It argues for the transformative potential of the unseen and marginal over the captivating and narcissistic. The “new sun time” itself is perhaps the uncanny time of poetry, of approaching the sun’s place of “spheres and arches”—or life, which the poet moves inexorably toward.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2022 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2022

Mike Ingram
Awst Press ($14)

by Guillermo Rebollo Gil                        

The driver, about to turn thirty-eight, is driving his friend’s Subaru from Philadelphia to LA. It’s not like he drives for a living—he mostly reads and writes. He has a girlfriend but is unsure if they have a future together. He has a teaching job in a university but it’s not his dream job. Having written a few books that remain unfinished, he is doubting the course his life has taken. His friend, the car owner, just landed a job writing for television and it’s good money, more than the driver has ever made. He starts to cry, big, “embarrassing” tears. He pulls over; fortunately, he’s alone. Unfortunately, too.

Mike Ingram’s book-length essay Notes from the Road is about a low-key life crisis that leads the author to pack a bag and take a cross-country trip along Route 66. Personal crises are only low-key in comparison to obviously bigger phenomena, but they are not low-key if you happen to be in the middle of one. When writing about them, though, it’s important to avoid melodrama, and Ingram’s prose practices this subtle art of avoidance. He writes: “I ate lunch in Tucumcari, at a restaurant that billed itself as Mexican-American, which turned out to mean Mexican food prepared and served exclusively by white people. It was ok, in the way that about eighty-five percent of life is OK.”

The real trip is, of course, toward the self. Ingram is smart not to offer any big epiphanies in these pages, nor does he make any life-changing decisions. What he does, rather brilliantly, is inch closer to attaining some perspective—which, here, is not so much about seeing things any more clearly than before; it’s about seeing them with more honesty and vulnerability. Notes from the Road documents this process without spelling it out: “I’d been on the road for six days, but it felt like much longer. My back hurt. I’d developed a complicated relationship with the check engine light. I hadn’t smoked a cigarette in forty days . . . and the absence of chemicals in my bloodstream had left me feeling raw, exposed, as if everything inside my body was happening a little too close to the skin.”

At the end, Ingram is not in a better place. He’s in LA for a day and then must fly back home, where the same concerns and anxieties await. But he does manage to make a long list of things that bring him joy: apples, dad jokes, the first day of spring on a college campus. It’s unclear if these things make his life a good one, or if the doubts over the job, the girlfriend, and the unfinished books outmatch them. And isn’t that the crux of it?  With enough effort, we can come to recognize and count our many blessings, and still feel underwhelmed by the final tally. Ingram seems to know quite a bit about this process.

Importantly, though, Ingram has no expert advice to give, nor does he look to serve as our role model. He simply offers this earnest, moving account of his trip and his life, and it’s a generous gesture, like receiving the lecture notes from a loyal friend: You still feel somewhat lost upon returning to class, but at least you don’t have to start from nothing.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2022 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2022

Julie Doucet
Drawn & Quarterly ($29.95)

by Steve Matuszak                         

“I had vowed never to draw myself again,” Julie Doucet tells readers at the beginning of Time Zone J, her first graphic novel since her comics diary 365 Days was published in 2006.  Time Zone J seems to be an emphatic repudiation of that vow, since Doucet’s face appears on practically every page, the self-portraits piling up like images from a stuttering video.  But the Julie Doucet who appears in these pages is like none we’ve seen in her work before.  Gone is the cartoony persona from her earlier comics, a character who represented the young cartoonist and her dreams, desires, hopes, and fears.  In Time Zone J, she is replaced by a figure who, while still exaggerated, is rendered with a more realistic drawing technique and is largely limited to narrating the story rather than participating in it.  The immediate effect is that this new “Julie Doucet” is at once more and less real than her earlier incarnation, playing out Doucet’s antipathy toward autobiography and her ongoing interrogation of visual and verbal representation—especially as they relate to memory, which sets the novel in motion, and to desire, its beating heart.

That Time Zone J should be seen as an intentional break from the comics that established Doucet as one of the most important cartoonists of her generation is established before the book begins.  In an introductory note, Doucet instructs readers to read each page “from bottom to top,” essentially upending the traditional Euro-American comics page.  Even the notion of the page itself is undermined.  Images bleed over the edges of the book’s uncut pages, suggesting that the entire novel is one long page that could be unfurled if one undid the book’s binding.  Gone too is the notion of comics panels, either explicit or implied.  Instead, the reader encounters reiterations of Doucet’s face, sometimes with shoulders visible, at other times revealing a bit more of her body, within a collage of text, word balloons, and random people, animals, objects, doodles, and abstract geometrical patterns that have little to do with the text.  A character might crystallize from a dream, as when a woman smoking a cigar appears alongside Doucet, or when Johnny Rotten makes a memorable appearance as Doucet describes the dream in which he has a key role.  But those characters are rare and seem to have no more importance than the figures surrounding them.

Admittedly, it is disorienting.  Adding to the disorientation, the book refuses at first to coalesce around a discernible structure—narrative or otherwise.  The overlapping images do not repeat, except for the ones of Doucet.  And the words articulate disconnected statements and ideas, like those passing through the mind of someone just waking up, phrases rising to the surface in word balloons and popping like soda bubbles.  Eventually, after a few pages, short recitations of dreams cohere from out of the chaos, vanishing as suddenly as they appear.  These shards of story plant the seeds for a more extended autobiographical narrative of Doucet’s youthful friendship with two men that collapsed after she’d initiated an unsuccessful affair with one of them.  That narrative is the prelude—or, as Doucet utters in the book, a “prolegomena,” which she defines as “a critical or discursive introduction to a book or: goiter of the Alps”—to the story that takes up the remainder of Time Zone J: a romance, or more accurately an amour fou, with a Frenchman that began in 1989 over correspondence about Doucet’s zine Dirty Plotte (which transformed within a couple years into the bestselling comic book of the same name).

The story is both heady and frightening.  The Frenchman, a young conscript in the 3^rd Regiment of Hussars in the French army, writes frequent letters to Doucet, sometimes several a day, that become increasingly romantic and erotic; Doucet does not quite keep pace, but definitely stays in the game.  In time, an opportunity arises for them to meet in France where, after a few awkward phone calls and encounters, they consummate their relationship, Gothically, in a cemetery.  At times throughout their days together, Doucet fears for her safety—what does she really know about this guy?  Unfortunately, though she is able to quell her fears in the moment, they never quite abate over time.

In a way, the representational strategy of Time Zone J enacts its themes.  By ridding the graphic novel of panels, pages, and identifiable characters, Doucet strips Time Zone J of time, much as those who are madly in love occupy a place that feels outside of time.   In fact, the novel gets its title from one of the young man’s letters during a period when he is learning morse code: “julie [sic] everything reminds me of you: Earth is divided into 25 time zones, each being presented by a letter.  only j is not used.” But if, in this metaphor, Julie, the object of his love, is timeless, so too are the dead, an insidious connection reminiscent of German Romanticism’s Liebestod, an association wholly in line with this young man’s dark intensity.  Moreover, for those who fear impending violence, as Doucet does at moments throughout her relationship with the hussar, by trying to anticipate its unexpected blossoming in the placidity of one’s daily routines, each second can seem an eternity—minutes, hours, and days dragging out interminably. 

Doucet’s approach in Time Zone J also points to a discomfort with autobiography that she expressed in a 2010 interview for Ladygunn magazine: “For me autobiography is a disease.”  As she contemplated the possibility of returning to comics in a 2017 interview with cultural critic Anne Elizabeth Moore, Doucet pronounced, “I wouldn’t do autobiography.  Never again.  Impossible.”  One senses that aversion in the book’s form, sapping the material of some of its strength.  Granted, by not depicting the events from the past that the book recounts, by not giving the young man and the young Julie Doucet pictorial form, by not animating them through the sequential storytelling of comics, Doucet doesn’t misrepresent them.  They do not become subsumed, however subtly, to her current desires and thoughts, which remain clearly delegated, however parsimoniously, to the older Julie Doucet who is narrating the novel, somebody who remembers the events she’s telling us and comments on them from a distance.  In avoiding this question of representational truth, however, Doucet misses out on the aliveness of representation itself, a quality that pulsed in her earlier comics.  Then, her imagination played over the objects of her attention, transforming them by rendering them in pictures and narrative, creating meaning and pleasure by how they were presented, how they were brought to life for readers.  For all the pleasures that Time Zone J offers, it leaves us with a lingering impression more of Doucet’s memory and less of her beating heart.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2022 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2022

by Mike Dillon        

 Modern readers do not need to be told to admire John Keats: whether they know it or not, he has already entered their dreams, he is a portion of their hopes, he lives in their desires.

—Stanley Kunitz, “The Modernity of Keats”

Orphaned at fourteen and dead of consumption in 1821 at twenty-five, John Keats was the son of a London stablemaster who lived his life as an existential errand. Had Shakespeare died at the same age, the Bard might be remembered for a few light comedies, and the works of Chaucer would not exist at all. But Keats is not only still with us; in some ways his work is more modern than ever. In one of his many matchless letters, his modernity shines through in a mere seven words: “That which is creative must create itself.”

And so, the books about John Keats keep coming, delivering fresh angles of approach. Lucasta Miller’s Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph (Knopf, $32), is an intimate, informed journey of discovery — “a book by a reader for readers,” she writes. Miller, author of The Bronte Myth and L.E.L., examines nine poems and the famous epitaph inscribed on Keats’s tombstone in Rome—“Here lies one whose name was writ in water”—as entry points for exploring the circumstances of Keats’s life.

Miller writes with incisive, poetic succinctness. She finds Keats’s last, great poem, “To Autumn,” is marked by its “loamy Anglo-Saxon vocabulary,” and notes critic Helen Vendler’s treatment of Keats’s development of the sonnet form as “brilliantly exploring its workings like some sibylline car mechanic.”

“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Keats’s “breakthrough poem,” as Miller calls it, starts things off. What was it about George Chapman’s 1611 translation of Homer that triggered one of the great tone poems in the English language? According to Keats’s friend Charles Cowden Clark, who read the Chapman translation one evening alongside Keats, a passage from Book Five of the Odyssey stood out:

His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath
Spent to all use, and down he sank to death.
The sea had soak’d his heart through . . .

Miller compares that last line, with its Shakespearean grit, to the period’s popular yet  enervating translation of Homer by Alexander Pope: “And lost in lassitude lay all the man.”

It’s difficult, from our postmodern perspective, to see through Keats’s sometimes archaic diction and grasp the young poet’s quest to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound would urge poets to do a century later. But, as Miller points out, Pope-admirer Lord Byron, after reading “Ode to a Nightingale,” famously complained to Leigh Hunt that he did not understand what “a beaker full of the warm south” meant. This, from the most famous poet in Europe.

When Miller contrasts the richness of “The Eve of St. Agnes” with the spareness of “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” written a few months later, we enter speculative terrain: “Its protagonist is a medieval ‘knight-at-arms’ who has loved and lost a supernatural femme fatale; she feeds him, tells him she loves him, and lulls him maternally to sleep, only to abandon him to an eternity of anemic loneliness on a cold hillside.”

It’s risky to apply biographical underpinnings to a work of art, but this feels right. As does Miller’s insight on Keats’s letters: “Their very fluidity reflects the society in flux to which he belonged, in which issues of taste, authority and literary register were up for grabs.” She goes on to show how the Enlightenment, which put humans rather than God at the center of consciousness, incubated “the development of the private realm as a site of emotional and aesthetic value.” Miller’s book is shot through with terrific moments like these.

In another new tome, Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Yale University Press, $30), Jonathan Bate delivers a masterful exploration of affinities. Bate is the author of more than a dozen highly regarded books, including biographies of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, John Clare, and Ted Hughes; here he weaves two literary lives modeled on Plutarch’s Lives of notable Greek and Roman personages.

Bate acknowledges Fitzgerald’s affinity for Keats is well known, but that “the full extent of the influence, its pervasiveness across Fitzgerald’s career, the sense that he saw himself as the prose Keats, remains underappreciated.” With a sympathetic and sharp eye, he clearly aims to correct that, excavating the subterranean veins of gold flowing from Keats to Fitzgerald. Both were filled with unattainable longing. Both died thinking they’d fallen short of the mark. For Fitzgerald, Keats’s “Bright Star” became Jay Gatsby’s light at the end of Daisy’s dock.

Three novels—This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby—were published between 1920 and 1925, before Fitzgerald’s twenty-eighth birthday. Tender is the Night, published in 1934, with its title taken from a line in “Ode to a Nightingale,” represented a brave act of resistance during the author’s downward slope. While H.L. Mencken saluted The Great Gatsby for the “charm and beauty of the writing,” Bate observes, “That beauty would not have been possible without Keats,” and backs up his statement with a dive into “The Eve of St. Agnes,” which Fitzgerald believed exhibited “the richest, most sensuous imagery in English, not excepting Shakespeare.”

Near the book’s end, Bate recounts a story about Fitzgerald walking along Hollywood Boulevard with his paramour, Sheila Graham, in 1940, the last year of his life. With years of alcohol abuse in his past, along with tuberculosis and a legendarily tempestuous marriage to Zelda Sayer, the literary boy wonder of the Jazz Age had found refuge in Hollywood as a scriptwriter. The pair came across a shop sign: “Make your own records—hear yourself speak.” They stepped inside and paid their money.

We can hear Fitzgerald’s recitation of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” online; there are a few miscues in diction, and Fitzgerald trails off before the poem is finished. But to hear Fitzgerald recite Keats’s haunting masterpiece is to hear a great American writer, steeped in his own mortality, do deep justice to a young English poet dead for almost 120 years. Bate writes: “Go, now, listen.”

Shakespeare’s influence on Keats is well chronicled. Bate has done the same for Keats and Fitzgerald. Thanks to Lucasta Miller and Jonathan Bate, we glimpse how a community of writers and readers carries on through the ages.

Click here to purchase Keats at your local independent bookstore:

Click here to purchase Bright Star, Green Light at your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2022 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2022

Iliana Rocha
Tupelo Press ($18.95)

by George Longenecker                      

In this startling collection, Iliana Rocha writes about the unsolved homicide of her grandfather in Detroit in 1971; each of the twenty-six poems that have the same name as the book’s title offers a different interpretation of Inocencio Rodriguez’s death, based on the memories of family members in Texas and elsewhere. The details of the murder were unclear, thus the many versions of the story. Photocopies of Rodriguez’s autopsy report are printed several times, providing a terse contrast to the imagery of the poetry.

The title poems are interspersed with poems of other crimes; Rocha also writes about missing and murdered women, famous killers, death row prisoners, and last meals. These contents may dissuade some readers, but Rocha suggests that to have empathy, we must know the darker side of humanity. She has decided to face the fact of a family homicide head-on and put it in context of other crimes and tragedies. These are not easy poems to read, but they’re well worth reading.

In the first title poem, Rocha says of her grandfather, “His donations to the sun, /the backbreaking work of immigrants / . . . // Lavender & homicidal, dusk.” Her language is lovely, but don’t expect a literal police report. These poems are impressionistic paintings in which the author expects us to step away from comfort and literality. But the very next poem, “Bird Atlas,” uses a more surreal imagery as Our Lady of Guadalupe returns: “. . . she was heartbroken. At her feet, a pigeon crushed under the weight of a Ford 4x4, preserved in its own feathers & blood. . . . // . . . // She crouched closer to the ground to examine the bird atlas, wept in tangled rivers & tributaries.”

Other people from the annals of crime history, some famous and infamous, others little-known, appear in these poems. Scott Peterson, who killed his pregnant wife Laci in 2004, has been the subject of many crime articles but few, if any, poems. In “Love Letter to Scott Peterson,” Rocha writes of the woman who proposed to the convicted murderer soon after he arrived in prison: “Would you ever consider getting married again? Wouldn’t it be funny for our wedding cake to be a chocolate bar, the vending machine our priest?”

The author is aware that readers may want to know more, so she provides notes at the end of the book. This is especially useful for the poem “Texas Killing Fields,” which Rocha explains in the endnotes as “an area between Houston & Galveston that is a notorious dumping ground. For over four decades, women have gone missing or have been found dead there.” In the poem, Rocha renders the fields artistically: “At the spot where the girl lay, I see the refineries. Their stencils are blurred on the horizon . . . Her screams like steady streams of dark smoke.”

As the granddaughter of a murder victim, Rocha feels we must understand violence in order to stop it. Violence is central to her poetry. In “True Crime Addicts,” she writes of Charles Manson acolytes Susan Atkins, who killed Sharon Tate in 1969, and Squeaky Fromme, who tried to assassinate President Ford in 1975. Rocha writes: “I’ve been elsewhere, researching serial killers & unsolved murders because at least I don’t have to convince myself that this is horror.” She finds empathy for the needlessly murdered as well as those who languish for decades in prison or face execution.

In “Collective Memory,” Rocha writes of the thousands of Mexicans murdered in the U.S. between 1848 and 1948, some “left to suffocate in a trailer,” others lynched. In her philosophy, “what violence gives back to us is more of itself.” Violence is not easy to comprehend, especially when one knows it as intimately as Rocha; there are no perfect answers to the tragedy that lives on in a family’s memory and in the collective memory of a people. These are not easy poems to read, but they are necessary to read if we want to come closer to understanding violence and tragedy.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2022 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2022

Christian Hawkey
Action Books ($18)

by Michael Overstreet

Midway through translator-poet Christian Hawkey’s intimate literary rapprochement with Georg Trakl’s life and poems, Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), he asks the late Austrian writer the question, “What do you mean by ‘read’?” Trakl answers him, “I mean widen your nostrils when approaching any text.” Understanding the act of reading—and, more particularly to Hawkey, of translation—through the context of the body is an aspect of his art that Sift, his latest book, carries forward.

In Hawkey’s poetry, translation acts as a point of departure. Ventrakl brings us into what feels like a posthumous familiarity with Trakl himself; woven among Hawkey’s experimental and sensitive translations of Trakl’s verse is a gradual introduction to the dead poet’s childhood and psychology via a portraiture of him and his family. Hawkey’s immersion in Trakl’s biography and writing becomes so far-reaching that he begins to address him directly, conducting dialogues with him and imagining his responses. Hawkey succeeds in rendering appreciable the most intimate, interior, processes of translation; namely, he allows us to become privy to the productive communion between author/translator. And yet despite the tremendous intimacy between Hawkey and Trakl, Ventrakl leaves us feeling oddly bereft. But of what exactly?

The 150-page book is home to many of Hawkey’s translations, as well as many homages to Trakl’s life. In the pages that do not contain actual translated verse, Hawkey attempts to express those aspects of Trakl’s corpus that were not expressly written: he translates the silence of photographs and the languor of a restless mind prematurely brought to rest at the age of twenty-seven. The question Hawkey’s work poses is intriguing: why does the addition of these other pages, which render Trakl’s person rather than his poetry, make Ventrakl such an effective work of translation?

As its playful title lets on, Ventrakl explores the liminal space of translation—the interaction of two discrete, corporeal existences; the productive play of that which lies outside, but which is also certainly involved in, the text: “We are two sternums, facing each other. Two rib cages. I do not know, at this hour, where the space my chest inhabits ends and his begins, where one language ends and another begins.” To translate, to read, to write, is to first and foremost filter language through our own proprietary sieve of bodily experience. Whether it be an ill-timed bit of sneezing, a headline of news in the corner of our screens, a loved one in need of attention, or the steady tapping of a leaky faucet, our individual ecologies of miscellany influence how we interpret it as language sifts through us. This brings us back to the question of Hawkey’s work: if a translator’s extra-textual experience during their act of interpretation is necessarily different from their writer’s experience, how can a translator ever achieve true fidelity?

Hawkey’s newest book-length poem, Sift, explores the messy, hermeneutic space of translation, albeit in a radically different form than Ventrakl. Hawkey wrote Sift while co-translating, with Marouane Zakhir, an essay by Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali, “In the Mirror of the Other.” Sift addresses the intertwining of as many subjects as one would find in their favorite internet feed—politics, personhood, parenthood, capitalism, mundanity, tangential rabbit holes—through the framework of his own etymology-tracing, language-dissecting task as translator. It is well worth showing how Sift starts us off:

               amir         emir        
  ammiratus  amiral   
                         larimda
                      أمير البحر






                              & later weavers        & later a place                
      en face       the eyes toggle       
 back and forth     a gutter             
gulf self    third text            
breaking       
the mirrors
of translation      a factory

The text begins by fragmenting us, shattering our reading confidence, subverting our expectation of finding ourselves in another monolingual—English—book of poetry. Our initial lack of understanding of the first words disconcerts. It requires us to learn that, here, we must also read right to left. The slow trickling of our reading down the stilted stairs Hawkey sets before us reveals how vulnerable this lingual space has made us. He calls attention to our toggling eyes, tying them back to the text that they read, and he bids us to notice how they scan the page, how they hesitate each time we cross the divide, the “gulf self”; we wonder if there’s another way to read all this, or if there’s something we’re not catching. To call attention to our own act of reading is to break the mirror, to challenge the normative paradigm, or hierarchy, of author/reader in the interest of establishing a space where there can be productive hermeneusis, or one's own interpretation of text. Hawkey quotes from his and Zakhir’s translation of Benabdelali in his epigraph: “For translation is not a sign of dependence at all. Rather, it is transformation, renewal, migration, openness, reproduction, proliferation, and life.” Just as Hawkey calls attention to his own creative uncertainty while at work at his computer,

                my cursor  
over this phrase     hovers
            how much time 
                   in a given day
                   spent deciding
               whether to click

we, in turn, receive his incertitude as if by transference, perhaps beginning to feel that there is no other text besides the interpreted, which is naturally accompanied by hesitation, frustration, and loss. Because the meaning of each line is dependent on how we interpret it, we are bereft of a certain comfort—that of an authorial presence, or guidance. Hawkey plays on this discomfort:   

covered in thin gauze      
   segap eht
         open     
the margins      further       er
     fusal                     
                             re      htruf
                          turn 

What exactly is being subverted here? What exactly becomes exposed? Perhaps the only answer is that we, the reader, here share in the translator’s struggle to yield a static, monolingual interpretation of a text wherein every word can be shattered into a migrant etymological past as well as a fragmented, culturally subjective present.

i was born    
my spine       
left justified     what
dominates       who
within a previously agreed order
                          gets to        marginem         
          “edge, brink, border 
gnidaer
what returns blood 
to lungs      sdrow
as if language ever  
was one         

skin     eyelashes                  
along my spine        
                                 reading     the longest vein               
  femorally                
         translation       
 “the slow time between languages         
  as triangle        no one side sings
              equally        uoy &
              a reverse     
        self    not un     

It is hard to say whether Hawkey’s intent with Sift is to render the frustratingly inchoate space of translation-at-work—utterly unbounded, yet necessarily riddled with our own person—or if his aim is to encourage us to question how we process language into meaning, and if this meaning is actually dependent on the exact language we just consumed. Just as Hawkey had allowed his own subjectivity to shine through the quiet, posthumous interstices of Trakl’s life in Ventrakl, in Sift, we are given a riddled and pocked tranche de vie of Hawkey’s own life.

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