2025 Rain Taxi Readings and Events

Independent Bookstore Passport 2025

April 23 through April 27, 2025

Hundreds of people took part in celebrating and supporting our local independent bookstores by picking up a free Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport and filling them up with stamps! See more info here.

Damion Searls

Sunday, June 8, 2025

Rain Taxi held a literary salon celebrating the publication of The Mariner's Mirror, poems by acclaimed writer and translator Damion Searls! You can purchase this chapbook here.

Vincent Katz

Thursday, June 12, Milkweed Books

Rain Taxi and Milkweed Books welcomed poet Vincent Katz to the Twin Cities! Katz will read from his newest collection, Daffodil and Other Poems, and then was joined in conversation by local poet Dobby Gibson.

Areca Roe

Minnesota Zoo, Apple Valley #2 by Areca Roe

Areca Roe is an artist based in Mankato and Minneapolis, Minnesota. She uses photography as well as video, sculpture, and installation to explore the interface between the natural and human domains. 

Roe is an Associate Professor of photography and video at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a member of Rosalux Gallery, an artist collective in Minneapolis. Her work has been featured on several websites, including The New York Times, Lenscratch, Colossal, Slate, Juxtapoz, WIRED, National Geographic, and Fast Company; as well as in print for Der Spiegel Wissen and Le Monde. Her work recently became part of the permanent collection at the Minnesota Museum of American Art and the Minnesota Historical Society. Roe has received several grants and fellowships supporting her work, including the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and the Art(ists) on the Verge Fellowship. Visit her at arecaroe.com.

Vincent Katz

in conversation with Dobby Gibson

Thursday, June 12, 2025, 6:30pm
Milkweed Books
1011 S Washington Ave, Ste 107, Minneapolis
Free and open to the public—please RSVP here!

Rain Taxi and Milkweed Books are delighted to welcome poet Vincent Katz to the Twin Cities! Katz will read from his newest collection, Daffodil and Other Poems, then be joined in conversation by local poet Dobby Gibson. This event is free and open to the public.

About Daffodil and Other Poems

With his painterly eye and disarming concision on the page, Katz opens this book with a powerful image of “all time sequestered in the fold of a daffodil,” setting the stage for an encounter with the immediacy we must embrace to see the world around us with clarity. At the center of this collection are his captivating poems about animals—“The hope in fear / In thrill to run” of the rabbit, the snapping turtle “nestled // Next to brother rock”—as the poems continually engage with the heady passage of days and years, and the promise to honor a life in the here and now, to walk the street with the sense that, “It’s not about buying / But rather about feeling the air.”

“Whether in nature, or on a crowded or empty city street, was all a dream?” Katz writes, considering Daffodil. “Surely, there was and is still someone close, and that continues, as animals, despite war, despite incursions, continue. New York is a place of return, where we’re aware of faces and other things; there, or in a field of flowers, in places in the distant past and present, love has some inexorable way of continuing.”

These poems evoke the exact scenes that command our daily thoughts, that usher in grace and beauty, with their quietly urgent moral qualities, which, Katz suggests, can shape our days if we allow them to.

About the poets

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and critic. He is the author of the poetry collection Daffodil, out this year from Alfred A. Knopf, as well as the collections Broadway for Paul, Southness, and Swimming Home, among others. He collaborated with Anne Waldman on the book-length poem Fantastic Caryatids and with Andrei Codrescu on A Possible Epic of Care. Katz is the author of The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius, translations of the Roman love poet, and is currently translating the Works and Days and the Theogony of the ancient Greek poet Hesiod.

He is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, and his writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He lives in New York City.

Dobby Gibson is the author of Polar (Alice James Books), which won the Alice James Award; Skirmish (Graywolf Press); It Becomes You (Graywolf Press), which was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award; Little Glass Planet (Graywolf Press); and Hold Everything (Graywolf Press).

Gibson’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications, as well as anthologized in books including Good Poems American Places (Penguin Books). He’s been a visitor to colleges and universities including Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, New York University, UMass-Amherst, and the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in Saint Paul.

An Image Not a Book

Kylan Rice
Parlor Press ($16.95)

by Jami Macarty

Kylan Rice’s poetry collection An Image Not a Book takes its title from a line in Yeats’s 1917 dialogue poem “Ego Dominus Tuus” (which translates to “I am your Lord”), a phrase originating in turn from Dante’s La Vita Nuova. Rice’s poems craft a “branching opening” conversation with Yeats, Dante, and the reader, boldly asserting, “I am here to try to tell you / what I love.”

What better place to begin such a conversation than a wedding. Opening with “Epithalamium,” the collection introduces the marital scene and offers the first image to the reader’s eye: “a banquet in a field.” The following poem, “Garland,” presents ten intertwined portraits described as “[a garland of souls].” Together, these two poems chronicle the “strain / of assembly” and cue up the collection’s themes of eros—intimacy, promise, betrayal, abandonment, and apology. Throughout this exploration, Rice artfully holds “in tension” the observer and the observed, reminding us that “looking / in” does not equate to truly participating.

The reasons behind the poet’s sense of separation seem to relate to the concept of the “book” more than to that of “image,” suggesting a struggle with the very nature of his art form. Rice yearns for an image of “fidelity” intertwined with “levity” to soothe the restlessness accompanying his quest for connection amidst disconnection. His poems pulse with this tension, enacting a “bent-thorn syntax” and often evoking a feeling of wading through water “to the thigh” or “hip-high.” After being “loosened by a wound,” the poet craves fidelity to self and others, yet he grapples with the fear of losing sight of the line between realism and idealism, caught between “the object in the image” and “my desire for it.”

Ultimately, Rice’s poems wade deeply into the anxiety of the search and wrestle with the haunting fear of not finding the elusive ideal image. Striving for “something less / / than groundedness,” Rice beckons readers to join him in a quest for love amidst the paradox of existence as it “speaks its alternating oath of late / and soon.”

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

The Matrix and Eecchhooeess

The Matrix
N. H. Pritchard
Primary Information ($20)

Eecchhooeess
N. H. Pritchard
DABA ($24)

by Richard Kostelanetz

N. H. Pritchard (1939-1996) was a New York-based artist and writer whose The Matrix Poems 1960-1970, originally published by Doubleday, has the significant distinction of remaining the most innovative one-author collection of poetry ever released by a commercial house in the U.S. It was groundbreaking at the time not only for its typographical and verbal departures, but for its author’s race, as fifty years ago, in the wake of Civil Rights protests in 1968, our commercial publishers became more open to Black authors than they had been before. It is only appropriate that his innovation be honored now in our current time with new reprints of his two major works.

The Matrix’s cover had a knockout black and white photograph of its author with half of his face in shadows, wearing a collared shirt with a tie and jacket. Pritchard looked elegant, much as Ralph Ellison was elegant—but whereas Ellison emerged from a fatherless family, Pritchard’s father was a physician who immigrated to New York City from “the Antilles,” as his son so elegantly put it. Whereas Ellison didn’t finish Tuskegee, Pritchard went to prep schools before taking his B.A. with honors from NYU and continuing with graduate school in art history.

When I first met Pritchard in the early 1970s, soon after The Matrix was published, he greeted me in his darkened studio apartment on Park Avenue. Though only a year older than me, he seemed not just more sophisticated, but unique in all the ways that a creative person can be. Pritchard’s personal letters resembled the illuminated manuscripts of William Blake; to my copies of his books he added not just a personal inscription but a handmade enhancement of colors and lines that I treasure.

The poems in The Matrix appeared in several formats that still look alternative today. Words were crushed together; some were printed upside down. Weighty phrases were repeated within the page. Words both familiar and unfamiliar had extra spaces between the letters. While some pages had just a large single letter, on other pages the print ran to the outside edges, suggesting that it might well have continued beyond it. The Matrix challenged how a writer’s Collected Poems should look.

As for the texts themselves, they approached the limits of semantic comprehension, as Pritchard’s ideal was what he called the “transreal,” a reflection of his awareness of mystical, supernatural modernism in the visual arts. On an opening recto page was this epigraph for himself: “Words are ancillary to content.” Later in the book, the fourth page of “Gyre’s Galax” repeats the phrase “above beneath” from top to bottom, sometimes amended by the words “it” and “in.” Pritchard wanted to take poetry into a domain previously unknown, one that was indeed above beneath.

In 1971 a second Pritchard collection, Eecchhooeess, appeared from New York University Press; it is perhaps the most radical one-author poetry volume ever to appear from an American university press. Repeating many of the same challenges posed by The Matrix, Eecchhooeess is no less brilliant; its eerie sounds and typographical innovations chimed right in with the Black Arts movement of the day (Pritchard was affiliated with the literary collective Umbra).

The most unusual quality of these new reprints of Pritchard’s books is that they appear intact, with their original front covers duplicated, each totally devoid of any new preface or afterword. Not even Pritchard’s biographical note is updated; only the title and copyright pages are different. While contemporary readers might wish for more background on this utterly unique writer, to get such authentic reprinting a whole half-century later is a treat for fans of groundbreaking poetry indeed. 

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Rain Taxi Review of Books Volume 26, No. 3 (#103) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021

The Mundus

N. H. Pritchard
Primary Information ($20)

by Richard Kostelanetz

When I reviewed in these pages the reprinting, fifty years later, of two books of N. H. Pritchard’s highly innovative poetry, I assumed that no more books would appear by this Jamaican American author, who died in 1996. I was wrong. Primary Information, which had previously reissued his 1970 collection The Matrix, has published his manuscript of The Mundus, which I would characterize as the first masterpiece of typographic abstract “graphic” fiction. I emphasize abstract because it differs from Emmett Williams’s Sweethearts (1967), likewise a typographic fiction and likewise a masterpiece (composed only with words made from the seven letters in its title), but explicitly about love. Considering himself to be a spiritual “transreal” artist, Pritchard regarded aesthetic abstraction as superior to, say, representational portrayals of religious themes.

While the publisher presents The Mundus as a single continuous text, it may also be read as a sequence of shorter narratives, each with its own typographic signature that changes visually from page to page, thus suggesting narrative, before skipping onto a different typographic signature. If this book is “a novel with voices,” as Pritchard reportedly suggested, then it could be read as monologues by several visually distinct visual “voices,” some of whom speak words and pseudo-words, others just certain letters. For instance, the book opens with over forty pages of the letter O—just the letter O—both upper case and lower case, distributed over the page’s entire field, occasionally with the addition of a few short words. Another voice says “sh” in a single horizonal line without spaces continuously over eighteen pages.

As innovative as Pritchard’s narratives still are, what marks this book as belonging to the 20th century, rather than the 21st, is that all the letters are roughly the same size, because they were produced on a typewriter. Had Pritchard survived into this century, he surely would have exploited the enormous typographic opportunities now offered the visual poet composing on a home computer.

This new edition of Pritchard’s magnum opus includes a short afterword by Paul Stephens, a young but already distinguished scholar of avant-garde literature. And now that The Mundus has (re)appeared, one wonders if other extant Pritchard material—work only published in magazines and anthologies or previously unpublished—might be collected and released. Until then, The Mundus must be seen to be read, let alone believed.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

At His Desk in the Past

Franz Wright
Foundlings Press ($20)

by Jon Cone

The son of a literary giant who became a prolific and beloved poet himself, Franz Wright died in 2015. While Wright’s poems were unsparing in their examination of his troubled past, they often moved heroically towards light, reaching for the possibilities of grace and transcendence in volumes such as The Earth Without You (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1980), Entry in an Unknown Hand Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1989), and The Beforelife (Knopf, 2001). Wright frequently used religious terms in his work, but even this never seemed heavy-handed, because he never let go of his profound belief in poetry’s ecumenical capacity to provide solace. This new chapbook offers readers one more chance to enjoy the pure devotion Wright had for poetry and to witness the craft as he practiced it in his final years.

At His Desk in the Past, which contains an informative and lyrical afterword written by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, comprises fragments Wright composed during five days in January and March of 2012. Subtitled “an homage to Karl Krolow,” a well-known German poet and translator, it riffs on a single Krolow line of six words—“It’s raining in a dead language,” as translated into English by Stuart Friebert—that Wright considered sublime. Like Coltrane moving into and eventually beyond the melody of “My Favorite Things,” Wright uses Krolow’s line as the elementary substance for fueling further poetic imaginings rich with meaning, where his memories crest the surface and his emotions live and breathe anew. These fragments feel part of a much older poetic tradition, an oracular performance only a poet as committed as Wright could achieve. There’s additional emotional poignancy in knowing these fragments come to us while the poet battled the cancer that was killing him.

The homage begins at the moment of inaugural light, the moment of birth: “First light. It’s raining again in a dead language. Green. It’s raining in a dead language. . . . The empty and utterly silent house filled all at once with the sound of my name posed, in my young mother’s voice before I finally slept.” In the next fragment Wright suggests via a third-person analysis that he is writing of Krolow, though it is impossible not to imagine he is also writing about himself, recalling his own early formative and mysterious encounters with language: “He has lived a long time. It has happened before. He suddenly heard quite distinctly and apropos of nothing words that enchant him and continue to throughout the day although he could not tell you why or what they mean and wouldn’t try.” This is what language does for Krolow, Wright imagines, and what language does for Wright too, we can imagine: It enchants.

Wright worked with a digital recorder, and these poems maintain an incantatory force. They migrated from an original sound recording—Wright had a superb reading voice—to transcription onto the page and eventual assembly into this volume. Because of that method, the reader can find at certain points a searching hesitancy as Wright employs iteration (oral composition naturally allows iteration as a technique to facilitate continuation) as well as the sudden and abrupt stop that approximates the musical rest. Thus:

IT’S RAINING in a dead language he writes at his desk in the past, silent man of the millions of pages still traveling toward the world

no

The wonderful movements in Wright’s fragments seem to carry both original poet and Wright far from the world where they first appeared. In one of the book’s most exquisite moments, the house where the mother and the new child are first encountered is transformed into a church where the mother sits with the son as the world outside darkens at dusk and candles burn and flicker inside. Implied here is the presence of sacred beings, angels and bees:

HE SMELLS AGAIN the faint honey scent dust and incense speechlessly he feels the loneliness of tapers as the stained glass turns to black; they wane in there alone with no company but him and his mother and fueling the small brilliant radius of fire that auras varying altitudes of fire and honey-colored irises of icon eyes that follow unseen beings, muted beings of invisible gold iridescent as they gravely

The sudden broken stop is lightened by the following fragment with its delightful wordplay:

BEE-iridescent

In the poem’s final lines, there is a duplication of the poet at his task of repeating the hexagonal line, after having recalled his “mother’s shadowy face in profile” and “storing up Christ’s eyes ultimate altitude forever gazing down.” Wright returns us to the image of himself speaking the six words of Krolow:

AS HE QUIETLY SAYS THE HEXAGONAL sentence aloud barely breathing silently reciting

EACH WORD of it once before writing it down, feeling blessed, and once more before giving it back.

Perhaps that is what all poets do: Listen to the rain and hear in it a long-dead language which is the mystery of poetry itself, beyond our power to explain or understand. At His Desk in the Past is only forty-seven pages, but it speaks volumes and adds much to the Franz Wright canon.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Loving Sylvia Plath

A Reclamation

Emily Van Duyne
W. W. Norton & Company ($27.99)

by Nic Cavell

Emily Van Duyne’s Loving Sylvia Plath is a five-star act of reclamation, eschewing the densely plotted brilliance of Heather Clark’s 2020 biographical masterpiece Red Comet (Knopf) to prioritize a communicable ethic of care. This refreshing take encompasses not only a vision of Plath as stubbornly vital in the face of her violent partner, the British poet Ted Hughes, but also the memory of Assia Wevill, one of Hughes’s lovers who took her own life (and that of her four-year-old daughter Shura) in a largely forgotten act that came not long after Plath’s own highly publicized suicide. Plath would stand among the giants of twentieth century poetry regardless of her suicide, Van Duyne concludes, and her apparent rival was no demonic femme fatale but a wry woman with her own voice—the first successful translator of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai and someone who toyed with the Lilith myth as a copywriter for a groundbreaking commercial in the 1960s.

Both women, who wore colorful dresses that marked them like movie stars in drab, midcentury London, found their final resting place in Hughes’s hometown of Heptonstall, West Yorkshire, on barren land known as Brontë country. Hughes, an enormously influential figure in literary circles, has controlled the narrative about both women even since his death, flattening them into totems in support of his own epic narrative—to the extent that repeated revelations of the intimate partner violence Plath and Wevill sustained have been submerged in myths about their obsession with death and the inevitability of their demise. Hughes was buried in the famed Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. Plath’s partisans have made the trip to Heptonstall to regularly efface Hughes’s name from her headstone, one of the few acts of reclamation available to them outside the official narrative in the decades following her death. Van Duyne herself carved Wevill’s preferred epitaph in clay and placed it at the site where her ashes and Shura’s ashes were scattered, granting Wevill the words in memoriam that Hughes had denied her: “Here lies a lover of unreason and an exile.” Newly available letters and sharp archival work by Van Duyne and other scholars have led to reappraisals of both Plath and Wevill.

Hughes’s focus on the tyranny of the natural world in his poetry belied an interest in fascism that animated his friendship with the Nazi sympathizer Henry Williamson; he had dreams in which he imagined taking orders from Hitler to leave Plath. In a letter to her psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher, Plath wrote of being struck by Hughes just days before her miscarriage. Enduring the humiliation of Hughes’s infidelity, she later repurposed the images found in his own poems, including “The Thought-Fox,” when she wrote about burning his letters at their rural home in Devon, which she likened to letting the dogs loose on a fox: “This is what it is like— / A red burst and a cry.” Wevill, keen to Hughes’s mythologizing tendencies, wrote a tongue-in-cheek commercial for Sea Witch Hair Dye which featured men in suits arriving at an island paradise to confiscate the secrets of hair sorcery from the witches, who reveled in their stewardship of this natural resource: “Was this the real location of Eden? The banished descendants of Eve?” In fact, both women influenced Hughes’s poetry in their lifetimes.

Van Duyne, writing to set the record straight on Plath and Wevill, is well positioned to accomplish that task, being a survivor of intimate partner violence herself (she lived with an addict who threatened to take custody of her son, she writes, before absconding with the boy one day and never looking back). It was Plath’s poems and will to create a multitude of worlds as a mother, writer, and lover that gave her the strength to pursue a life of her own and eventually marry a supportive partner with whom she had two more children. Like Hughes, Van Duyne sees Plath as a totem important to her narrative—albeit one who inspires feelings of hope rather than depths of guilt.

The research for Van Duyne’s volume was funded by a Fulbright scholarship, and in the course of it, she serendipitously discovered Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019). The book, in which Machado tackles queer intimate partner violence, presented Van Duyne with the revelation that although “the abused woman has certainly been around as long as human beings have been capable of psychological manipulation and interpersonal violence,” in recorded history she “did not exist until about fifty years ago.” Plath helped speak the archetype into existence with the help of feminists who championed her story and her groundbreaking second collection of poetry, Ariel (Harper & Row, 1965). Marital rape, however, has only been outlawed in the U.S. since 1993.

In retelling Plath’s story in ways that decode its violence, Van Duyne illuminates both the poet’s struggles and her own. Obscured so long by Ted Hughes’s own controlling narrative, the stories, intimacies, and revelations about Plath and Wevill in Loving Sylvia Plath deserve to be celebrated for their clear-eyed expansion of the living record of Van Duyne’s artistic forebears.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

A Book About Ray

Ellen Levy
The MIT Press ($54.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

By far the most complete framing of coyote trickster artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995) to date, Ellen Levy’s A Book About Ray engages with the work of the artist on his own terms, or at least as approximate to them as possible. Given the often abrasive opacity of Johnson’s (non-)engagement with curators, critics, and scholars, this can’t have been easy. Levy herself describes her book as “not, or not exactly, a life story. This is an art story.” Some may think they know that story from John W. Walter’s 2002 documentary How to Draw a Bunny, however that film portrayed Johnson mainly as a mail art collagist, adding to the quizzical and cryptic sense of Johnson that had already given him cult-like art celebrity status. Levy’s book reveals more of Johnson’s work and investigates the overall drive behind it.

A Book About Ray progresses in roughly chronological order, though it also freely cycles forward and backward in time via artistic statements on recurring motifs and themes found in Johnson’s work. After early years of artistic output in Detroit, Johnson attended the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s, and there he flourished—especially as a favored talent in Bauhaus artist Josef Albers’s classes, dutifully attentive to “the clear, wise, and constructive ideas” behind “the relational nature of color” Albers championed. That aptitude led to a November 1947 cover of the magazine Interiors by Johnson consisting of three rows of colored upright rectangular boxes full of polka-dots of varying size and color along with one row of rectangular boxes with parallel stripes of various colors running across them. His painting Calm Center (1951), a grid of squares each containing a plethora of colored lines that offer “variations on the square,” is also very much in the Albers vein, save that the square at center is solid black. 

Also at Black Mountain, Johnson established friendships with fellow student artists such as Ruth Asawa, who he heard speak of “the Taoism philosophy of nothing ness [sic] being everything-ness”; Johnson realized, “I feel that way.” It was at the college as well that he took up with a teacher, beginning the longest romantic relationship of his life with the married sculptor Richard Lippold (it ended in 1974). Leaving the school, Johnson followed Lippold to New York City; in the summer of 1951, they took up residency downtown “in the shadow of the Williamsburg bridge,” occupying individual studio spaces alongside Morton Feldman and John Cage (each of whom had also spent time at Black Mountain). Thus, from a young age Johnson was very much in the thick of the burgeoning New York City art scene, where he would remain even at a distance after moving out to the North Shore of Long Island in 1969.

In addition to the cover of Interiors, Johnson designed now-iconic book covers for New Directions, including William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain and Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations; the Rimbaud cover utilized a portrait of the poet, which Johnson would continue recycling by using it in several collages. In the New York art scene, Johnson knew Andy Warhol and there are significant associations between Warhol’s work and his own. This is particularly true of his use of portraits: Johnson often drew upon images of iconic cultural figures such as Marilyn Monroe, and in fact, pre-dates Warhol’s use of such images with works from 1956-58 featuring James Dean collaged with the Lucky Strikes cigarettes logo and Elvis covered in red wash and bleeding tears. 

Levy reports how “Ray and Andy were known to shop together sometimes for movie stills and magazines.” Johnson, however, did not share in Warhol’s loftier ambitions. His portraits of these stars “got progressively grungier” and always remained small; “made to be held in hand by their recipients,” they “speak volubly of the artist’s hand” in their making, as opposed to Warhol’s industrial, oversized mass screen prints. And as weird as Warhol’s reputation holds him to be, Johnson was even further afield. Factory participant Billy Name demonstrates this with a telling comparison, saying “Andy was still like a person” whereas “Ray wasn’t a person. He was a collage or a sculpture. A living sculpture, you know. He was Ray Johnson’s creation.” Art for and on art’s terms alone was always Johnson’s sole intention.

At the center of Johnson’s work are mutually unachievable co-existing wishes. As Levy describes, “Ray Johnson wanted to be famous, and he wanted to remain unknown, and he clung to the belief, whose absurdity he relished, that it was possible to be both at once.” Johnson enjoyed the dilemma of always choosing to have things every and any way he desired, regardless of the lasting impact upon himself, his work, or anything else. Nothing mattered less to him than what many others valued most—critical acknowledgement, financial success, and media attention. Not that he didn’t pay attention to such matters; he simply refused to directly pursue or be enticed by them. The introduction of these concerns into any exchange with Johnson regarding his work would immediately sour further discussion. Yet Johnson nevertheless would send unsolicited correspondence to gallery owners and museum curators, and he had shows and would lecture at art schools during residencies. To be seen and not seen. Chameleon. Enigma. Artist shapeshifter. Johnson was all of these. 

In his collages, Johnson constantly interchanged his own set of iconic figures and related symbols, creating exchanges of identity and associated possible meanings. As he announces, “One can pretend to be someone one is not. Children’s play. I’ll be you and you be me. Be my valentine.” There is implicit intimacy behind his work, only it is not necessarily personal: instead Ray Johnson was “a person who lived for art to a point where he convinced others, and perhaps at times even convinced himself, that any aspect of his life that could not be assimilated into his art should not be considered part of the Ray Johnson story.”

Johnson was “a creature and creator of networks,” and one of his first was what became known as the New York Correspondence School. Within what became a vast interlocking web, Johnson openly handed over the reins of creation to others, asking the recipients of collages and other materials he mailed them to work on them and then send them on to others he named, putting all involved on the spot. As Levy asserts, “To correspond with Ray Johnson was to assume the role of artist.” The fact that he was continually looking for opportunities to diminish showing his hand in any artistic activity brought tension into his correspondence, however. Artist-performer Jill Johnston states it plainly: “I didn’t correspond with Ray because he scared me. I found him kind of intense.”

Levy tracks each of the several altering forms Johnson’s artworks took shape in. Among the earliest series were the Moticos, which had the appearance of being “paper scraps” yet were “made things, artworks of a kind” that held meaning beyond any literal, physical manifestation. As he stated: “perhaps you are the moticos.” Johnson would send these works (which easily slipped into envelopes) to Correspondence School participants, and as a result, many of them ended up in the hands of art collectors and dealers without his knowledge, let alone any control over sales or financial compensation. Another important work was A Book About Death, “one of his strangest and most enigmatic projects. The ‘book,’ never constituted as such, consists of thirteen unbound prints designed one by one between 1963 and 1965, each mailed out as it emerged to various correspondents.”

Later came the bunnies—“his signature icon a crudely drawn rabbit-head”—issued with a seven-step set of drawing instructions under the heading “New York Correspondance School”; Levy notes that the “simplicity of its rendering suggests that the icon is rooted in the Duchampian ethic that held that everyone and anyone could be, in fact already is, an artist.” Near the end of Johnson’s life arrived the Move Stars, a series of images forming an “assemblage, laid out on the ground, of graphic images of bunnies and other icons,” each panel-like piece being “32 inches high. And vary from 7 ½ to 8 inches wide,” which Johnson arranged at various suburban locales around his local Long Island home, photographing them with dispensable one-click cameras. These were not seen by many until long after Johnson’s death, when “in 2019, Joel Smith, curator of photography at the Morgan Library, searched them out and went through them all and calculated that the artist had run through 137 cameras, from which he had printed over five thousand images.”

There’s not the space here to cover every aspect of Johnson’s work that Levy brings to light. Her book includes ample color images, scattered as if collaged at times across the pages, and care has been taken to have the book resemble an art object itself, an experimental risk which pays off. Levy’s eye-opening A Book About Ray mirrors Johnson’s elusive disappearances even as it highlights what made this unique artist the phenomenon he was.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Hailing Rain Taxi for years of service

City Pages | Wednesday, September 17, 2008 by Ed Huyck

It's a common story in the arts. Young, fresh, and brash group hits the scene, be it a band or a theater company, a visual arts group or a magazine. The group burns white hot for a time—six months, a year, maybe even a few years—before the fire burns out, the collective splits apart, and a new venture, hopefully, takes its place.

So you may consider it a minor miracle that Rain Taxi—the iconoclastic literary arts magazine dedicated to uncovering the best the world of print has to offer, no matter how obscure—published its 50th issue this summer.

"It's not typical for a literary venture like this to last," says Eric Lorberer, who has written for the magazine since its inception and has served as the journal's editor for many years. "It is largely dependent on people who have the energy to fight the system for a while. But there eventually is a danger for burnout, or not developing the level of funding you need."

Every quarter, about 18,000 copies of Rain Taxi are distributed nationwide, putting it in the middle of the market—large for a literary magazine of its type, but a far cry from the major players, like the New Yorker or Harper's.

Then again, considering its esoteric bent, its modest circulation shouldn't be surprising. Rain Taxi is a place to learn about Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish or to read an interview with music and cultural critic David Hajdu—you won't find reviews of Dan Brown's latest opus or this week's celebrity tell-all.

"There is a community for this writing, even though it's in a lot of little small pockets. If you aggregate them," Lorberer says, "you get a sense of the vitality of what is going on. If you look at it in dribs and drabs it may not seem impressive."

These are dicey times for serious literary writers, publishers, and reviewers. Many newspapers have drastically cut back their book review sections. And between increased media consolidation and the shrinking of independent booksellers, it seems as though non-mainstream works have been shut out of the discussion.

"I think the death of a lot of indie booksellers is hurting the culture," Lorberer says. "There is less choice and access. Writers and publishers who have something serious to say and have the tenacity to persevere will eventually persevere. We are trying to be a part of the voice for that and a mechanism for those endeavors to stay healthy."

Rain Taxi exists to explore these cracks in the facade. Since the beginning, the journal has championed little-known works.

"Generally there is a dearth of criticism for non-mainstream books. We are about shining a spotlight on non-mainstream publishing—work that has a smaller audience but has a real literary need," he says.

Still, Lorberer sees some promising avenues worth exploring in the book world. "Chapbook publishing is the underappreciated sibling in the community. These are small books [often 16 to 20 pages] that are printed in small runs. There's been a real explosion of them in the last few years."

Meanwhile, graphic novels and other comics continue their fight to get out of the superhero "funny book" ghetto. "We're seeing creators in this medium really pushing their boundaries, in the same way that poetry or visual art did in the early part of the 20th century."

Visitors to Rain Taxi's annual Twin Cities Book Festival this year on October 11 will get a chance to hear about the growth of that medium with Jaime Hernandez, who has worked on the leading edge for nearly three decades, either as the co-founder and contributor to the comic magazine Love and Rockets or in a bevy of limited series in the past three decades. "He's really been a part of the aesthetic maturity of the medium," Lorberer says.

The daylong event has a number of other attractions as well, including public radio commentator and writer Alan Cheuse and novelists Valerie Martin, Ana Clavel, Jess Winfield, and Bragi Olafsson, whom eccentric pop music fans with long memories may remember from his days with the Sugarcubes, but who has crafted a second career as an award-winning fiction writer. The event also includes the local launch of a book of selected poems by Olav H. Hauge, featuring Robert Bly and Robert Hedin; panel discussions; and an expo hall packed with books new and used.

Lorberer has no doubt that the Twin Cities is a perfect home for the festival and for a journal like Rain Taxi. The area has a strong writing and publishing community (and, Lorberer notes, a fine mainstream critical community), which help foster the environment.

"The greatness of the Twin Cities is the mixture we have. There are obviously large presses and organizations here, but there are also tiny and grassroots things happening," Lorberer says. "The book festival is a way to gather that ecosystem in one room for a day."

The eighth annual Twin Cities Book Festival runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, October 11, at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, 1501 Hennepin Ave. The event is free. For more information, visit www.raintaxi.com.