There's This Book You've Never Heard of

but if you had heard of it, you'd really enjoy reading it, which is why this unusual book review, Rain Taxi, continues to exist against what truly are the longest of odds

by Keith Harris

Watch your head.

To reach the office, you've got to duck. Yes, that means you, no matter how accustomed your fingertips may be to flailing uselessly at the topmost kitchen shelves or however familiar your unbowed head may be to slipping unscathed through the lowest doorways. The ceiling in this place dips low enough that even a five-and-a-half-footer like me can't enter upright. If you're given to romanticizing the mighty efforts of those who toil for their art--and what respectably employed bachelor or bachelorette of the arts, in his or her most self-hating moments, doesn't indulge such fantasies of gainful poverty?--you might be entranced by the cramped possibilities.

Yeah, well, daydream on your own time, 'cause it's just an office. When you get up the stairs the ceiling raises back up to full human height, and there's nothing mystical about the two computers that sit on two desks at right angles to each another, where words are processed and text boxes filled and images cut and pasted. Nothing unusual at all, except maybe the sheer number of books surrounding them. Like the small yellow South Minneapolis house of which this is an attic appendage, the office is compact but neat, overfull but not claustrophobic. There are books here as in the rest of the house, books that loiter obediently on their shelves rather than sloppily spilling over to consume their environment, books so plentiful that you wouldn't have time to read a fraction of them even if you weren't preoccupied with publishing a quarterly book review. And that's what Rain Taxi is. And this is where Rain Taxi comes from.

Four times a year, Rain Taxi compiles 50-odd pages of reviews: reviews of books that seem to range from the merely uncommercial to the downright obscure, reviews of books whose audiences vary from the merely specialized to the all-but-imaginary. But there are readers who want to find out about the poetry of Charles Borkhuis and the collected letters of Marcel Duchamp, and they want to do it in one sitting. There are readers who lust for a journal that highlights an interview with the surreal "storytelling poet" James Tate and a reconsideration of the "16th-century subversions" of Rabelais, as the cover of the most recent Rain Taxi advertises. There are readers who pick up the newsprint quarterly at St. Mark's in Manhattan or City Lights in San Francisco, just as locals do at the Ruminator in St. Paul. There are even readers who subscribe from Czechoslovakia and Korea. And there are enough of them--just enough perhaps--that Rain Taxi, lifted by a gentle dribble of ad sales that feeds into a sporadic trickle of grant funding, has remained afloat for five years now.

When I say Rain Taxi, I mean Eric Lorberer and Kelly Everding. They didn't start the magazine; Randall Health and Carolyn Kuebler midwifed the first issue, and nurtured Rain Taxi in its infancy. Unpaid interns drift regularly across the masthead. Fifty or so writers contribute their reviews each issue--that's contribute, not "sell," since said scribblers, whether they're still a quarter shy of escaping the U or taking time off from their eighth novel, go as unpaid as the interns. But despite the efforts of these volunteers, it's Lorberer and Everding who make sure the journal exists and who'd be out of a job if it didn't.

"Of course, there's the aesthetic issue--the pleasure of holding actual paper--but there's also the social issue, we want to reach readers from different segments of society, who might not have access to the Internet."

That's Eric Lorberer speaking about why Rain Taxi courts the added expense of remaining a print journal rather than merely existing online. This is his attic.

When Lorberer says Rain Taxi exists "to provide an alternative outlet for book reviewing," one might hear the flat, pointed prose of the grant proposal. When he continues, "Like the book industry in general, book reviewing was increasingly in the clutches of corporate powers and that didn't allow a lot of space for different voices to be heard, and also for certain kinds of books to be reviewed," you might hear the earnest, marginalized tone of the crusader. And you'd be right in both cases. Lorberer is a strange mix of the insistently pragmatic and the unyieldingly idealistic.

Lorberer is a curly-haired fellow in his late 30s who speaks in the even tone of the committed and who proselytizes without attempting to argue. The implicit assumption being: If his own evident commitment doesn't sway you, you must tarry beyond the reach of salvation. "Our mission is to reach as many people as possible and turn them on to books they wouldn't otherwise be aware of," he continues. All you've got to do is reach them.

"Eric is one of the true believers," says Josie Rawson, who lives across the alley and sits on Rain Taxi's board of directors. (Rawson is also a former associate editor at City Pages.) "He took a vow of poetry. He's got a vision of literature making the world safe for people."

It's safe to assume that Kelly Everding shares Lorberer's zeal, since she's his business partner as well as his domestic partner of some 14 years. She's quieter about the mission, though.

A recent afternoon visit finds Everding, a woman with long straight hair and pointed features, sitting in the attic finishing a flyer for the Twin Cities Book Festival. This one-day affair, to be held at Open Book in downtown Minneapolis on Saturday, October 27, is the first of its kind since the small, unsatisfying book fairs held in Calhoun Square in the mid-Nineties. For eight hours, the various rooms and crannies of the Open Book will be filled with panel discussions, readings, book sales, and book-arts demonstrations, capped that evening by a keynote reading by poet Robert Creeley.

As with so many book-related events, Rain Taxi has taken an active interest in the festival--Lorberer has been working closely with event organizers Jana Robbins and Tim Schwartz. In fact, the mag's sponsorship of the event marks its five-year anniversary, a testament to how far Rain Taxi has come since its inception.

In early 1996, a small, not dissimilar attic apartment not far away began to shrink. Two hundred copies of a fledgling journal called Rain Taxi showed up in the Harriet Avenue living room that Randall Heath and Carolyn Kuebler shared. Soon, the journal spread through the halls. Four times a year, their guests arrived. With each print run, the number of magazines doubled, and the space in which the couple lived dwindled.

"We'd line them up along the hallway," Kuebler remembers. "Soon it was impossible to move."

The initial idea had been to create a small press, though that notion quickly changed. Heath was working at Half Price Books, one of those morgues for the publishing industry where countless new books no one will ever read meet their lonely, remaindered deaths.

"We realized as we were fishing around that there are so many damn books out there already, it seemed kind of pointless," says Heath." Why contribute to this great mass of books that already existed? Why not try and review some of these books, and try to build a readership?"

Eric Lorberer showed up for the first issue with a review of a collection of Denis Johnson poetry that no one else wanted to publish. He was sucked into the Rain Taxi organization quickly afterward. To qualify as a nonprofit organization, Rain Taxi needed a board of directors, which meant they needed a third partner. When an early collaborator broke away, Lorberer was enlisted.

All the clichés of home publishing in the digital age helped spawn Rain Taxi. Suddenly, the ubiquity of PCs and easy layout software meant anyone with more spare time than inhibition could reel out limitless broadsheets about his or her obsessions. The Internet meant you could publish distant writers you might never have spoken to, even by phone. The crew survived on the adrenaline of a new project.

Heath fondly remembers the spontaneity of those early excitable years. "We scheduled an interview with [avant-garde novelist] Rikki Ducornet, so we jumped in my truck and drove to Denver," he recalls. "We had dinner with her, interviewed her. Here was this excuse to interact with someone whose work you admire."

But beyond giddy moments like that there was a world of work to do. They had to edit. They had to write. They had to design. And when they dropped an issue off at the printer, their labors had in some ways just begun.

"Around Christmas time, we had 150 boxes, at least, to take to UPS," remembers Kuebler. "They wouldn't pick them up, so we had to rent a U-Haul. We drove them to the UPS countertop, and of course there was a huge line already. The manager was so mean to us: We'd already taped up the boxes, but she whipped out a tape gun and told us we were going to pay for extra tape."

This form of cooperative labor fueled every aspect of Rain Taxi's existence. It was a necessity for tackling distribution. And when it came to the much-loathed task of selling ads, each crew member would take turns hassling publishers as long as she could stomach the job, then pass the phone along to the next person. But in the more subjective realm of editorial tasks, such collaboration seemed downright perverse if not completely counterproductive.

"We would group-edit reviews," recalls Heath. "We would sit down together with a piece--we did this for almost two years, a year and a half at least. It was an ideal we strived for. It was about not establishing a hierarchy."

It was also a good way to waste valuable hours dickering over a slight change in authorial tone. For anyone who doesn't spend much time wrangling over words, it's difficult to imagine how impossible that ideal might be. Consider such democracy extended to the sidelines of a football game. Or, better yet, imagine the infield convening on the mound to debate the relative merits of each upcoming pitch.

"I don't have the same aesthetic as Eric," Heath says simply. "For me it was more of a question of audience, a tone that would cross more boundaries. I wanted to be the ignorant guy. I didn't want references that I didn't know. It all comes back to my original vision--a tool for readers to discover new books."

Gradually, Heath and Kuebler both withdrew from the editorial aspects of the journal they'd founded. Heath grew more interested in the design aspects of the magazine, Kuebler in reviewing.

As Lorberer puts it, "We all learned what we liked and what we didn't like about that job. I guess I liked enough of it to continue."

Neither of the original editors left over "creative differences," both are quick to add. Heath still creates the magazine's often abstract and gothic covers, and Kuebler remains a regular contributor. Instead, the balance of power gradually shifted from one set of hands to another. In 2000, Heath and Kuebler moved to New York City together, to further careers in editing and publishing. They still work in publishing: The intensity of working on an underfunded start-up for several years hasn't driven them away from the book world. (Though, for what it's worth, they are no longer a couple.)

Having lived through its start-up years and become slightly less underfunded, Rain Taxi has actually grown since the transfer of power. In addition to sponsoring a host of literary events, Lorberer and Everding now ship out some 15,000 copies of each issue, both to subscribers and for free distribution at bookstores in 45 states. Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, and West Virginia have yet to be infiltrated.

The phrase "literary community" should probably only be employed when the time comes each year to hoodwink generous foundations and their venerable administrators. Yet it is in developing a public presence for the local literary avant-garde that Rain Taxi has thrived in recent seasons. Josie Rawson has warm memories of Rain Taxi's first reading in 1998, given by the Chinese-born poet Arthur Sze. "He gave a reading that was transfixing," she says. "Here was a man who presented his own material in so compelling a way, all you can do was sit there sort of stunned."

More concretely, however, Rawson remembers what happened afterward, when Sze and his listeners converged upon her home. "There were a bunch of writers hanging out in a way that you'd imagine other writers in another time and another place did. We sat on my back porch, talking about poetry and writing for hours, like it mattered. It's the sort of thing I didn't realize was so rare until it actually happened."

Such an idyllic recollection offers a glimpse into the utopian literary community Rain Taxi imagines. Rain Taxi doesn't just stage readings. It brings writers to town--Victor Hernández Cruz, Claudia Keelan, Franz Wright, Clayton Eshleman--sets them up to speak in galleries, and ushers them into a local body of book people (the literary community, if you will).

Lorberer and Everding had initially found such an environment as graduate students at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, which is where they first met. Then they migrated to Baltimore, where they had a near miss in attempting to open a bookstore. The next stop was Minneapolis. "We threw a dart, basically," says Lorberer. "We'd heard it was a good place to live. But at the time I had no idea there was as substantial a literary community as there actually is."

Oddly enough, a big chunk of that community was composed of people Lorberer and Everding already knew quite well. "There must have been a half dozen people who went to the U Mass grad program who wound up in the Twin Cities," says Bill Waltz. Waltz, who publishes the local poetry zine Conduit was one of those transplants. "There was sort of this mass exodus," he adds with an inadvertent geographical pun.

And key to that collaborative spirit, it would seem, is the muting of individual voices for the sake of the project. "We're trying to give pride of place to the work, and to place personalities second," is how Lorberer describes the reviewing tone he nurtures. "I was talking to the editor of a journal, who should probably remain nameless in light of the story, and they were talking about their Web page. That journal's most accessed page, the guy told me, is the one where they have the pictures of their interns." Rain Taxi has no pictures of its interns online. In fact, it currently has no interns.

And so, it was a surprise to find a page full of negative letters responding to a review by David Foster Wallace in the summer 2001 issue of Rain Taxi. "Elegantly pointless, me-obsessed, academically-challenged, falsely objective, asshole-scratching, hickified piece of writing" is what Robert Bly called Wallace's essay. None of the responses to Wallace's review of The Best of the Prose Poem: An International Journal (White Pines Press) was packed with quite so much hyphenated vitriol as Bly's. The response from anthologist Peter Johnson himself, for instance, was appropriately bemused. Then again, one Morton Marcus declared, "Wallace's review was shameful, not only for him writing it, but for you printing it." Not coincidentally, Marcus is a prose poet himself.

To be fair, the piece in question invited some measure of controversy. Wallace's three-page spread was quite a coup for Lorberer and company, as this top-hole author was paid as much as all the other reviewers (which I will remind you is nothing). In a typical trumping of form, the author of the exquisitely and exhaustingly footnoted Infinite Jest broke down the anthology into numerical components. The result was a rather impassioned piece masquerading as a dry encyclopedic rendering, one you're certainly entitled not to be dazzled by, particularly if you've already consumed your annual quota of DFW metacriticism and minutiae. But it did address the work in question, even if it also went out of its way to tweak the phallic connotations of editor Peter Johnson's name. Unlike most reviews in Rain Taxi, this was a verbal performance, in which the critic assumed as much importance as the text.

Perhaps the vehemence of the response suggests just what an exception this piece was to Rain Taxi's typical fare. The journal does indeed publish negative reviews, but it does so sparingly, and none are outright diatribes. The journal is not argumentative in tone. As Lorberer explains, "The reason that the majority of the reviews are positive is that the process of selection itself is an aspect of reviewing--we're trying to select the best of the best. My hope is that the reviews are substantive, and that they're not just cheering the writer on."

Rawson agrees. "There are so few avenues in the reviewing press for praise for books from small presses, independent presses, it's hardly worth wasting space on books nobody should be reading anyway."

Yet not everyone believes that treating lesser-known works with kid gloves does the literary scene any favors. In a trenchant (and characteristically bombastic) broadside on his Web site www.cosmoetica.com, local gadfly and poet Dan Schneider argues that Rain Taxi's "puff pieces" ultimately add up to nothing more than a "magalog." "These 'supposed' journals," Schneider writes, "have become--in effect--mere book catalogs. They give title, author, publisher, price, a rosy review, and sometimes even ordering/contact information."

Many of the contributors to Rain Taxi are either published or prospective poets or writers of fiction, and this may inform the occasional gingerly handling of others' work. The right of a particular book to exist--or the value in its existence--is rarely questioned. A Rain Taxi review doesn't argue.

A journal reflects the tone of its editor, and like Lorberer himself, these reviews are sure in their presentation of the facts--not smug, but so assured they feel no need to protest. Which raises the question of whether it is possible to have a dialogue when both sides agree. After all, when we imagine Rawson's evocation of "writers in another time and another place," staying awake long into the night, we imagine them arguing. Surely a literary community could be created from vigorous dissent, no?

Don't ask me. I'm not about to risk my livelihood on that assumption. Eric Lorberer, however, relies on his ethos for groceries and the mortgage. And it's a belief he's been laboring to disseminate just about anywhere people discuss contemporary literature. Which is why Lorberer doesn't have to make an argument for his editorial position. Until Lorberer gives up or the money runs out, his vision will continue shipping four times a year.

City Pages Volume 22, Issue 1090 October 24, 2001

Ecstatic Mundane: An Interview with Elaine Equi

by Jim Feast

A mainstay of the New York literary scene since the late 1980s, Elaine Equi is known as a writer of aphoristic wit, philosophical depth, and visual precision. Her many books include Voice-Over (1999), which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems (2007), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize; and Sentences and Rain (2015), all published by Coffee House Press. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, and in many editions of The Best American Poetry, for which she served as guest editor in 2023. In 2024, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Equi has always been fascinated by how the consumer products we live among form ties with the self. In The Intangibles (Coffee House Press, 2019), for example, discussing her mother’s scent bottles in “Perfume Dioramas,” she links family memories to these store-bought items, deepening both. In Equi’s latest book, Out of the Blank (Coffee House Press, $18), her fascination continues, but here the products are more often connected to fantasies—as in “Maple,” where observation of a bottle of syrup leads to a vivid daydream of vampires. Few other writers have so gleefully and trenchantly examined the commodification of everyday life.  

     

Jim Feast: In poetry, the notion that we should appreciate the simple things in life has become something of a cliché, but you take this theme in new directions, working at times straightforwardly and at others ironically. In “I Saw Delight,” for example, you describe walking after a rain shower with extraordinary precision: “The shadows were dark and luxurious / beneath silver trestles of light.” My sense is that you put great pressure on words to capture the everyday, using terms that are suitable yet never expected. Does that sound true?

Elaine Equi: I’m happy you started with this poem, because it’s an unusual one. It’s true I often do write about mundane things and everyday life, but I think of this particular piece as being the record of a real vision—a true moment of illumination. It came about as the result of my drinking a cocktail made from several different gem elixirs designed to increase the flow of light into your body and energy field. Gem elixirs are small bottles of water or alcohol in which different stones or flowers have been steeped in order to charge them with their essence. You can buy them online or in some health food stores. I’m not an expert by any means, but the idea of them appeals to my imagination. Their effects on me are usually subtle, but on this occasion, they were quite dramatic—almost psychedelic. When I stepped outside my front door, I swear I could see light traveling. As I say in the poem,

I saw a woman carrying the trophy of a gold balloon,
letting it bounce lightly above her head—
her thoughts golden.

Someone else was walking a diamond dog.
Each of its hairs was polished to perfection.

From every object, prisms of paths opened.

I was ecstatic. Of course, when I tried the experiment again, it wasn’t the same—not even close. The title “I Saw Delight” is a one-line poem by Robert Creeley called “Homage to Hank Williams,” a play on Williams’s famous spiritual song “I Saw the Light.”

JF: Another way you handle the quotidian is to mention one of life’s small pleasures and then use it as a springboard into magnificent whimsy. An example is “Maple,” which begins with a deft description of “its high-pitched sweetness,” but then segues into a lurid territory where in a dream vision you are swigging syrup, saying, “I am drinking the blood of the forest.” Can you talk about creating these flights of fancy?

EE: I’m often influenced by writers of short prose works that have a dark, fantastic, or satiric side. Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen is tattooed on my heart. I’ve taught and read it many times. I’m also thinking here of Kafka’s short stories and aphorisms, and Robert Walser’s quirky sketches. From all the above, I’ve studied the art of making absurd statements with a straight face and matter of fact tone. In the poem you mention, I found it funny to treat maple syrup as a dangerous substance. I was exaggerating but not all that much; I do find maple hard to resist. Plus, I like the idea of using its sweetness to mask a hidden wild or aggressive nature.

JF: Both these strategies of dealing with the everyday could be considered labors that bring poetry closer to the real. Alain Badiou says that to reach the real, “there is an art of rarefaction, an art of obtaining the subtlest and most durable results, not through an aggressive posture with regard to inherited forms, but through arrangements that place these forms at the edge of the void, in a network of cuts and disappearances.”[i] Could you talk about your approach to the real?

EE: That’s an interesting quote by Badiou. I don’t think I come close to “the edge of the void” in my poems. I do try to use very precise and vivid language, and often focus intensely on a simple subject, maybe to create a sense of the hyper-real. One of the things I like about photography is how it shows you a very different aspect of what you think you’re seeing. I’m also a fan of the sur-real, a reality that encompasses dreams, the irrational, the unconscious. Is there just one “real” with different levels? I’m not sure, but I think that as a writer, whether you’re committed to absolute realism or pure fantasy, the real is something you can’t avoid. You can use language to explore and engage with it, but I don’t know that you can ever come close to actually describing or representing it, even in purely mathematical terms. It’s bigger than that. When I write, I feel, or perhaps imagine, that I can sense the real as a kind of gravity or pull. It’s the page beneath the page.

JF: Your ability to discern effervescent qualities of ordinary reality is often used to examine slight objects to which most people would offer little attention. In your previous collection The Intangibles (Coffee House Press, 2019), poems such as “Monogrammed Aspirin” and “Still Life with Radish” did this too. Can you discuss your communion with things?

EE: Objects have always been one of my favorite subjects. When I first began writing, I was an avid reader of the French poet Francis Ponge. He wrote almost exclusively about objects. He had a book called Things and another one called More Things, and another called Soap, which was all about soap. As a tribute to him, I named one of my early chapbooks Friendship with Things. I also had a full-length collection inspired by his work, called The Cloud of Knowable Things (Coffee House Press, 2003).

Not surprisingly, I was also a fan of William Carlos Williams—and of all the Objectivist poets. They gave me a way to think of the poem itself as an object—“a small machine made of words”—and to see words themselves as objects.

We’re now so used to digital and virtual realities that real things seem a bit dated. As I say in the poem you mention from my previous book, “These days, all objects are antiques.” In my new book, I was pleased to find a way to write about mental states as if they were objects—I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner. In the poem “Emotions: A Boxed Set,” for example, I write about the heebie-jeebies as “the kind of tail-in-socket anxiety / that plugs directly into the body— / manifesting in myriad symptoms of dis-ease.”

JF: When you were going to school and growing up as a poet, Chicago had a bustling and distinctive poetry/arts scene. How did that milieu influence your work?

EE: I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather have studied poetry than Columbia College in Chicago—it was a fun, loose, and creative place in the ’70s. It had an excellent film and photography department, and in creative writing, they had just hired an exciting poet, Paul Hoover, to replace Bill Knott. Paul and his then wife, Maxine Chernoff, edited a very cool magazine called Oink! They knew everybody and were really plugged into contemporary poetics from the New York School, the Beats, Black Mountain, fresh takes on surrealism, and beyond. I was in heaven. Every semester I’d sign up for an independent study with Paul just so I could hang out with him and Maxine in their Rogers Park apartment, peruse their bookshelves, and discuss goings on in the poetry world.

Shortly after graduating, I met up with another young poet, Jerome Sala, known for reciting his work to growing numbers of enthusiastic fans in a punk bar called La Mere Viper. By then, I had published my first chapbook, Federal Woman. We each had a glimmer of reputation and the desire to do something out of the ordinary (maybe a tad more flamboyant) with our writing, so we started reading together, mostly in bars and art galleries. It didn’t hurt that we were wildly attracted to each other, too. We had good chemistry off stage and on. Our events were more like parties; sometimes they involved bands, and people you wouldn’t necessarily think would enjoy poetry would show up. You could call us performance poets—we did perform our poems, but we were also performing the idea of poet-ness, often in a satiric way, inventing our identities as we went along. Everything we did had a DIY quality. We’d spend hours combing thrift stores for just the right retro fashions. What I remember most is that the arts were not so separate then—there was much more overlapping between different scenes. Partly it was the times, but it was also something Jerome and I cultivated by exploring the idea of a poetry that could be entertaining and appeal to non-poets.

JF: Earlier you mentioned trying “elixirs designed to increase the flow of light into your body.” This ties in with the poem “My Mother And I Send Each Other Circles,” where we learn that when your speaker talks on the phone with mother, “We telepathically juggle globes of color.” Both seem like nurturing forms of practice, but I wonder if you are working from a particular spiritual framework—or if, like a bricoleur, you are putting together different customs that seem to work together.

EE: I credit my maternal grandmother and my mother—Out of the Blank is dedicated to both—for giving me a deep appreciation of magic, the metaphysical, and the occult. But it was never connected to a particular tradition, and it certainly wasn’t formal. The spirit of our investigations was more like an imaginative game. My grandmother had a lot of superstitions. She also told good ghost stories and was really into Greek and Roman mythology. My mom and I liked to read horoscopes and tarot. We used to drink tea and do our cards as a ritual after I got home from school.

When I moved to New York, we’d talk on the phone a lot, and we came up with the idea of sending each other circles of different colored light before hanging up. It was mostly done as a fun way to liven up our conversations. What I especially like about this poem is how it captures, almost word for word, exactly what we’d say. Another poem later in the book, “My Mother Dreams of Dying,” is entirely in her voice. I didn’t add anything to this amazing dream she had told me about, also over the phone.

JF: You usually have a number of short poems in your books, and Out of the Blank is no exception; maybe there are even more in it than usual. What is it about them that appeals to you?

EE: Formally, I’ve always been drawn to compression and tend to write shorter poems with short-ish lines. Like one of my all-time favorite writers, Lorine Niedecker, says in “Poet’s work”: “I learned / to sit at desk / and condense // No layoff / from this / condensery.” I remember, when I first came upon her work, feeling a sense of joyful recognition, almost as if we were related. I identified with her—here was a Midwestern woman poet who came from a more working-class background and who valued brevity. Her poems are so lucid—simple yet subtle and nuanced.

Other writers who have dazzled me with their ability to do more with fewer words would have to include Robert Creeley, Charles Reznikoff (there’s a poem for him in the book called “C.R.”), Joe Brainard, Tom Clark (there’s a poem for him in the book called “T as in Taut”), Aram Saroyan, and Ian Hamilton Finlay, to name just a few.

To return again to photography, another passion of mine, I think of short poems as being able to zoom in like a telephoto lens and create a close-up of a few words. If they were buried in a longer line, you might not notice the tension or vibration between them as much. Take, for example, my poem “Goblet”; it lets you taste or swirl the shifting sounds as if you were sipping a glass of wine:

my grape       my globe      my gape

my glazed     my glare      my grimace

my glint        my grant      my giant

my goose      my gravy      my grail

I don’t always write such compact things, but even in pieces with more syntax, I try to boil down my ideas to make them more concentrated, as in this next poem:

The Marrow

Of a poem.

Meat of meaning

that travels with Bashō
the narrow road—

network of veins
leading to leaf-lip.

Magnetic pull
of green-blooded words.

Actually, there is no short answer to why I find short poems endlessly fascinating. I just do.

[i] Badiou, Alain, The Century (Polity Press, 2007); English translation by Alberto Toscano.

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Henry Martin: An Active Ear

Selected Writings, Conversations, and Correspondences

Edited by Emanuele Guidi and Egidio Marzona, with text by Lisa Andreani, Jordan Carter, Luca Cerizza, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Emanuele Guidi, Henry Martin, and Elisabetta Rattalino
Spector Books ($45)

by Richard Kostelanetz

The remarkable African American art critic, curator, and translator Henry Martin, who died at the age of eighty in 2022, finally gets to be the subject of focus in Henry Martin: An Active Ear. Martin, a native of Philadelphia, was an expatriate author; after attending New York University in the mid-1960s, he traveled to Italy and stayed there, marrying visual artist Berty Skuber and settling with her in the mountainous South Tyrol, where other Americans were scarce.

Martin made his living by contributing articles to magazines and translating Italian texts into English. He was a literary man who came late to art writing; the greatest influence on his prose was another Henry, surnamed James, from whom Martin learned the art of composing extended sentences in long paragraphs. The primary source of his enthusiasm for visual art was Marcel Duchamp, whom he discovered as a teenager in 1950s Philadelphia:

Marcel Duchamp first entered my life when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, surely before I was sixteen when I was old enough to drive. He connects directly to the old red bus at the stop on the corner of the road where my family lived, then a transfer to the green municipal bus somewhere inside the city, and finally the trolly through Fairmount Park to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is a great fake Parthenon atop a great fake Acropolis that stares from a distance towards the center of the city and the statue of William Penn on the summit of City Hall.

Fortunately, one of Martin’s first jobs in Italy was helping the Milanese art historian Arturo Schwarz prepare The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (Abrams, 1969). This immersion explains, perhaps, why the most profound essays in An Active Ear discuss aspects of Duchamp, who became Martin’s principal teacher in modernist aesthetics as well as a touchstone he returned to for decades; with the Italian painter Gianfranco Baruchello (1924-2023), Martin wrote Why Duchamp (McPherson & Co., 1985).

Nearly all the other people whose work is discussed in An Active Ear descend from Duchamp; about pre-20th-century visual art, of which Italy has so much that is excellent, Martin says little. He favors post-Duchamp artists such as Ray Johnson (1927-1995) and George Brecht (1926-2008), not only in discrete essays but in extended probing interviews. Often does Martin reveal that he knows his subjects personally, not to boast but to give his commentary an intimate authority. Only one of his many subjects is African American: Fluxus artist and musician Benjamin Patterson (1934-2016), who likewise resided for a time in Europe.

Emanuele Guidi has constructed An Active Ear to be an alternative kind of biography; in addition to Martin’s essays and conversations, Guidi includes correspondence between Martin and his favorite subjects as well as occasional informal photographs. Of the last, my favorites appear as endpapers, with Martin holding a white bird (perhaps a dove) on his outstretched hand on the front spread and raising his middle finger beside two white guys on the back spread.

What further makes this book a de facto biography are five appreciations written by people who aren’t artists and a remarkably elegant foreword by John-Daniel Martin, Berty and Henry’s son. The only ungainly thing about the book is its format: the sans serif type and small margins make the reading experience challenging.

Henry Martin with Roue de bicyclette by Marcel Duchamp at Philadelphia Museum of Art, from Henry Martin: An Active Ear

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Absent Here

Bret Shepard
University of Pittsburgh Press ($18)

by Jeff Alessandrelli

Bret Shepard’s second collection, Absent Here, could be called a “project” book, in that all its poems are centered on one topic—in this case Alaska, which here seems less a state than a state of mind. Tundra, darkness, Arctic, body, language, absence: certain words that repeat in the text feel less written than lived (and indeed, as the author bio on the back cover tells us, “Bret Shepard is from the North Slope of Alaska”). Lines from the serial poem “Here but Elsewhere” are emblematic:

The absence is enormous in the Arctic.   

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

Some deaths create other ways to die.

Some losses you only understand once

your body and mind come back together
wherever it is beyond what we name.

Shepard’s approach in Absent Here is both reflexive and discursive. Early in the book, “On Ice” asserts:

Faces retain what the world gives back to us. We see it
in the mirror. Because it is already done, the mirror reflects

small ways we reduce. Like ice rolled over mistakes,
we grieve what we touch, the selves we try to change too late.

Toward the end of the collection, in “Summer Camp,” a bull caribou falls dead, and by being “taken apart” it is simultaneously “also reduced to more.” From any angle, there’s a sadness to Shepard’s Alaska, an overhang of the past’s erasure against the present’s inevitability; the speaker is often looking back at what once was and is no longer. “Territories,” which contains the epigraph “Report paints grim picture about Alaska Native language fluency, but hope remains,” begins with the decree “I’m missing a language for what is lost,” followed by the repetition “Tundra. Tundra. Tundra. Tundra” and the lines “In difficulty, a grammar for the vastness // measured in millions of eye lengths.” In this white and desolate landscape, the speaker considers the weight of poorly made past decisions (“The village voted itself dry / again. What is paradise // but a final tally of choices / given to innocence, sin // given to sunless days”), and what isn’t seen—absence piled upon absence—matters just as much as what is.

“Territories” is also notable for the line “I don’t have a language that isn’t white,” a reference to the region’s tumults of snow that also hints at a racial component to Shepard’s picture of Alaska. The observation is well-deserved—after Hawaii, Alaska has the highest percentage of Indigenous residents among U.S. states—and Shepard is wise to foreground the particular absence of non-whiteness his own whiteness dictates. Still, Absent Here is not a confessional text in any standard conception of the word; its poems are imaginative, far flung, and oftentimes non-linear, and even moments that seem to relate the author’s personal experience exhibit a stark refusal to accept a solid version (or vision) of selfhood. Take the opening section of the collection’s final poem, “Here but Elsewhere”:

Language doesn’t make decisions. It keeps
guessing. When I was given my Inupiaq

name, Jenny Felder talked me into sounds

from the book listing each possible version
nearby. I still hear her. I would speak them

now if my mouth could shape the words.

In his well-known review of Kenneth Lonergan’s Oscar-winning 2016 film Manchester By the Sea, critic A. O. Scott notes that it is “less concerned with nostalgia than with the psychology of loss.” Absent Here is squarely interested in the same thing. Although the book is filled with ideas and images of Alaska that a non-resident might also initially recognize (darkness, isolation, snow, etc.), Absent Here steadfastly troubles any fixed picture of Alaska—as a project, as a state, Alaska (like the self) remains ongoing amidst its vast and immediate absences.  

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Fragments of a Paradise

Jean Giono
Translated by Paul Eprile
Archipelago Books ($18)

by Alice-Catherine Carls

Long before dictating the eight chapters of Fragments of a Paradise, Jean Giono spent three years translating Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; during World War II, he pursued this nautical theme with an homage to its author, Pour saluer Melville (“To Greet Melville”), published in 1941. Later, almost five years into the Nazi occupation of France and having been under suspicion of pre-war pacifism and wartime collaborationism, Giono conceived a Moby Dick à la française, turning Ahab’s anger into a scientific expedition to the South Atlantic in a surreal blend of science and poetry. These circumstances call for reading Fragments of a Paradise as both a literary feat and a testament.

Critics have seen the novel as a divide in Giono’s work, a shift away from the tragedy of the world that defined his earlier works. In Fragments of a Paradise, the main topic is no longer man’s confrontation with nature but his enchantment with it. Depending on one’s education or social status, the gateway to enchantment can be a child’s innocence, a scientist’s reasoned understanding, or the delightedly fearful awe of past legends. Officer Larreguy, a graduate of the prestigious engineering school Centrale, has an awakening that relies on all three when on a visit home he notices an unusually large ox footprint that reminds him of the winged bulls guarding the gates of the city of Nineveh he had learned about during history classes.

This quixotic quest for Arcadia leads the ship’s captain to the most remote island on earth, Tristan da Cunha, after struggling through angry seas and skies with pre-industrial tools (the only radio on board remains unused, and the sailing vessel is a three-mast corvette). This unmooring process, says Giono at the end of the book, is the only way to fight the dulling of one’s senses from the pettiness and boredom of a routine in which the deadly tanks and airplanes of war have replaced nature’s wonders. Fighting “the most terrifying thing a man can imagine: to be inanimate,” the book concludes, “This is why all the men on the ship are hastening to find a soul within themselves.”

The ship’s quest, however, remains unfinished. Michael Wood, in his pertinent introduction, lists critical interpretations but does not address whether Fragments of a Paradise should be considered a finished work. The open-ended status of the novel is in character with its focus on the dualities of life/death, good/evil, creation/destruction, and nature/civilization. Giono hinted at revisions, calling the eight chapters a “future poem”—perhaps emulating his friend C. F. Ramuz, who wrote “poetic novels.” On the other hand, Giono typically wrote quickly, and rarely made any corrections to his texts.

An armchair traveler who lived most of his life in a small town in southeastern France, Giono had an encyclopedic book knowledge of geography and foreign cultures. Interestingly, he does not list these disciplines among the expertises possessed by his fictional crew: “Zoology, Botany, Geology, Paleontology, Bacteriology, Hydrography, Oceanography, Meteorology, planetary Magnetism, atmospheric Electricity, and Gravity.” In the fourth and fifth chapters, the reader is served a heavy dose of what critics call “borrowed information” in the vein of Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Joseph Conrad—or for that matter, Giono’s own readings of the complete works of 18th-century naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who was a founder of the theory of ecological succession, and Jules Dumont d’Urville’s multi-volume Voyage de la corvette l’Astrolabe, published serially from 1830-1833. Giono also drops clues about his knowledge of current sea exploration; expeditions to the island of Tristan da Cunha in the 1920s and ’30s made the island popular, and the sporadic discovery of Antarctic islands in the 1930s by French expeditions perhaps explains Giono’s captain’s choice of a reconnaissance area between the 66th parallel and the Tropic of Cancer.

The novel’s structure is supported by Giono’s use of both poetic and scientific language, with shifts between scientific prose, nautical jargon, rank-and-file sailors’ idioms, and dialogues replete with vieille France formulas of politeness. The first three chapters are pure poetry. The Franco-Basque crew sees a giant stingray and sperm whale through the eyes of medieval writers and in the language of John Milton, so they are unable to explain the sea creatures’ extraordinary feats of light, sound, and smells. These are explained more scientifically by the captain and the ship’s officers in the following two chapters, with a profusion of details to anchor them in verisimilitude. Poetry returns when Noël Guinard, the storekeeper, climbs to the top of Tristan da Cunha, fulfilling Giono’s idea of complete solitude and preparation for death. Poetic images are scattered through the chapters; technicolor visions of monsters and sunsets and a symbiosis between land, sea, and sky unmoor the mind as surely as the motion of wind and water. Paul Eprile’s conscientious and sophisticated translation must be commended for sparingly “paring down” the original text and preserving its stylistic richness.

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Patriot

Alexei Navalny
Translated by Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel
Knopf ($35)

by Grace Utomo

For some, the difference between what if and what is is a single character. For others, it’s the gulf between silence and annihilation. Alexei Navalny, intrepid critic of Vladimir Putin and leader of Russia’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, chose the latter. Navalny’s memoir, Patriot, which blends traditional narrative, prison diaries, and social media posts, was released posthumously by his widow Yulia Navalnaya in October 2024 after the opposition leader was allegedly killed in one of Russia’s most brutal penal colonies. From surviving assassination by chemical agent in 2020, to 295 days of torture and solitary confinement during 2023-2024, Navalny remained steadfast in his dissent.

Although Navalny composed Patriot in spaces ranging from a tranquil asylum in Germany to a punishment cell above the Arctic Circle, the book’s tone is strikingly consistent. Its opening captures the author’s tongue-in cheek approach to both politics and memoir: “Dying really didn’t hurt. If I hadn’t been breathing my last, I would never have stretched out on the floor next to the plane’s toilet. As you can imagine, it wasn’t exactly clean.” Navalny describes his near-fatal poisoning—believed to have been ordered by Putin in response to Navalny’s carefully documenting Russian political corruption, as well as his two attempts to run for political office—with humor and irony without overplaying either.

As Patriot progresses, Navalny reveals that the memoir he’d begun writing to uncover the truth about his mysterious “illness” has morphed into something else: the saga of an unbreakable battle with the Kremlin. Navalny never doubts the truth will prevail, but his glasses are not rose-colored. He wrote to followers shortly before his death:

Nineteen years in a maximum-security penal colony. The number of years does not matter. I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Whether “life” is defined either by the end of my life, or the length of  the life of this regime.
   The sentencing figure is not for me. It is for you. . . . Putin must not achieve his goal. Do not lose the will to resist.

Notably absent from Navalny’s messages to supporters and prison diaries are details of what he endured during 295 days in solitary confinement—perhaps an indication of Navalny’s focus on the cause of Russian freedom and of his reluctance to proclaim himself a martyr.

Crucial to Patriot is Navalny’s sensitivity as a husband and father. Starvation and sleep deprivation should desensitize the most high-minded empath, but Navalny remains tender. Halfway through his imprisonment, he writes to his wife Yulia: “I hate glass. Because for six months now I’ve only seen you through glass. In the courtroom, through glass. During visits, through glass. . . I adore you, I miss you. Stay well and don’t get discouraged . . . As for the glass, sooner or later we’ll melt it with the heat of our hands.” This missive demonstrates Navalny’s resolution to lift others up, though a birthday message to his son Zakhar also reveals regret over the collateral suffering Navalny’s activism inflicts on his family:

    What sort of pathetic greeting is it to send a letter to your son on his fourteenth birthday? What kind of memory will that be of being close to his father?

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

    Let’s face it, you don’t get to choose your parents. Some kids get stuck with jailbirds.
    But it is on my children’s birthdays that I am particularly aware why I’m in jail. We need to build the Beautiful Russia of the Future for them to live in.

Few of Patriot’s readers in the U.S. will risk imprisonment, torture, or assassination for our ideals, yet Navalny’s call to unmask lies and elevate truth invites global application. This trenchant memoir might prompt us to ask ourselves: What are we doing today to make the world a better place tomorrow?

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High Solitude

Léon-Paul Fargue
Translated by Rainer J. Hanshe
Contra Mundum Press ($21.50)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Picture dragging yourself from bed with mounting anxiety in a small and dingy (yet Parisian, so not all bad) flat to the windows overlooking a boulevard and adjacent alleyways abuzz with city life. Looking out at streets you once rambled as a youth in jubilant company, with literature and art coursing through the veins, you now feel dejected as you begin a series of notes on Parisian city life. The writing isn’t some tell-all exploitative tale concerning now-famous lives of those you once knew. Rather, it’s a series of inner visions relating the strife and turmoil, sometimes imagined, that can be found in abundance on the city’s streets. Your name is Léon-Paul Fargue, and your book is High Solitude. 

Fargue’s idiosyncratic book resists easy classification. Are these tales autobiographical? Yes and no. Are they fiction? Sort of. Might they be essays cast in fictional glow? Perhaps, at least sometimes. Whatever it may be, the book certainly contributes to the literary lineage of the flâneur, that indelible Parisian lurker of corridors and street cafes: “How sad it was to walk on and encounter the utmost end without finding anything of what I had loved or hated! I was lost in a forest of strange noctilucas, in a helpless city that hovered like a hawk over the stampede. I recognized everything and I recognized nothing.”

The streets of Paris are a central theme, if not an outright character, in High Solitude; the descriptive detail and moody tenor of Fargue’s writing gives them an eerie glow. There’s also an edgy despair embroidering these scenes as outer and inner experience jostle against each other: “These endosmoses between the past and myself, these returns to experience, the gone-by, the ground-down, I am exhausted, I am overwhelmed, I am drunk with them.” As if trapped in a grim arcade, Fargue implores, “What can I do to avoid these hordes of myself that go up the avenues, stand in line at the stations, occupy café tables?” He doesn’t really have any answers, but on occasion proffers a learned observation or two: “Order offers mortals pillows. Disorder puts them on the road towards the possible.” These occasional morsels of guidance encourage readers along Fargue’s lonely peripatetic journey. 

Lacking cohesive narrative attraction, High Solitude does stumble here and there, only to recover and doggedly continue. Such is life, it suggests—although Fargue’s anecdotes and reflections magnify aspects of it few discover on their own.

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May Our Joy Endure

Kev Lambert
Translated by Donald Winkler
Biblioasis ($18.95)

by Marcie McCauley

The lifeless furred and feathered bodies and heavy Gothic font on the cover of Québécois writer Kev Lambert’s third novel, May Our Joy Endure, prepare readers for a tragic story, and we get one, of sorts. From its opening pages, the novel offers a trenchant social critique in a chaotic unspooling of words—Lambert’s prose is relentless as perspectives shift rapidly with scant stops for respite.

While the telling feels urgent, the novel’s construction is impeccable. The middle segment of the three-part narrative belongs to Céline Wachowski, a world-renowned architect and host of her own Netflix reality series, Old House, New House, just when her studio is breaking ground on a complex for the corporate behemoth “Webuy.” Titled “Time Passes”—a deft foreshadowing of Céline’s obsession with Proust—this center section is the most conventionally styled of the narrative; it is bookended by untitled segments written in more experimental prose. To top it all off, the novel’s final sentence echoes its title, creating a loop to snare the contents between them: an exacting design, not unlike the figure-eight-shaped blueprint Céline has created for Webuy.

Céline’s career began with residential structures in the ′90s, and as her portfolio swelled with celebrities’ homes and important buildings across the world’s capitals, her accomplishments as a woman in a male-dominated profession intensified her star-status. With due pride, she has brought the Webuy complex to her native Montréal, but an article in The New Yorker scrutinizes Céline’s commitment to “ethical architecture” and accusations about her surface and spiral. Caught in the firestorm of criticism, Céline laments that a “climate so injurious is only possible in Quebec where a plurality of discourses cannot possibly coexist,” recognizing it as “a vestigial heritage of the Yes or No referendum debates” in a “powerless and panicked” province.

Most importantly, however, the novel’s focus is on the frameworks that gain invisibility as structures take their true shapes in the world. Foundationally, readers can explore concepts like neoliberalism and gentrification; in the basement, injury and trauma lurk. Various windows reveal not only literary influences—James Baldwin and Nelly Arcan, Virginie Despentes and Virginia Woolf, and most significantly, Québécois author Marie-Claire Blais—but also intertextual relationships with Lambert’s previous books: Their first novel, You Will Love What You Have Killed (Biblioasis, 2020), explores the thin line between love and hate as well, and their second, Querelle of Roberval (Biblioasis, 2022), dissects power structures in the context of queer sexuality and labor politics.

As May Our Joy Endure suspends its heroine from a hook so that readers can examine the shell of what remains, the authorial voice seems to conclude that we’ve all had a hand in stringing her up, and that any one of us could be similarly exposed and flayed: “we can be as hypocritical as those we constantly reproach for their own hypocrisies.” Like the best social novels, Lambert’s holds up the mirror: We are not simply witnesses to the story, we are participants.

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What Good Is Heaven

Raye Hendrix
Texas Review Press ($21.95)

by Jennifer Saunders

A remarkable debut collection, Raye Hendrix’s What Good Is Heaven interrogates kindness and mercy while exploring love’s complicated gestures. In “Animal Instinct,” the speaker remembers finding a squirrel “fallen from its piney drey, eyes still sealed // with birth” while walking in the woods with her father and dog. She jerks the dog’s leash to prevent it from eating the squirrel; her father tells her to “leave it to die quickly— / let the dog have his merciful doggy way.” Instead, she brings it home to “a slow death over days / in the rust of a long-dead hamster’s cage.” The adult speaker wonders how “to know when kindness / means crush instead of heal.”

The animal world often provides Hendrix with fodder for such meditations. In “The Bats,” the father and daughter find baby bats frozen to death. The daughter reaches for them, but her father

says to leave them for the wildcats
             and the dogs that run the mountain

he asks me to be more like
             winter                     beautiful but hard

he says despite my softness
                                             everything must eat

The poem “Mercy” shows the inverse: kindness dressed as harm. Here, child and father find a near-dead raccoon, and this time he “gave me the rifle / said it was time I learned // mercy.” The father’s efforts to push the softness out of his daughter is not an unkindness but an attempt to armor her against the violence of the world.

Just as kindness and harm are intertwined in these natural scenes, so too do they interface in human relationships. As a Southern queer poet, Hendrix understands that people and places one loves can do harm. “Daughter” begins:

I was loved with a Bible
              a belt        I ate Ivory

soap          I was sent out
              to choose the switch

Perhaps even more tremulously, it ends:

He once told me         (made me
               swear to keep it secret

to never tell my sister)
              that he loved me the most

Thus is the recipient of the father’s greater love also the recipient of his greater harm. In “Bloodletting,” Hendrix writes directly about the relationship between care and harm:

if the Greeks can be believed
then opening a vein
is Hippocratic: violence
cloaked in an oath of care

Hendrix also interrogates their own complicated love of a Southern home that has not always loved them back. They depict their hometown of Pinson, Alabama as a place where roads are “pothole-pocked / and going nowhere,” “the people are proud // to be holdout Confederates,” and the corrupt Mayor is replaced by “another reclining in his chair.” “But there’s jasmine here,” Hendrix counters; “There’s light.”

In “Pinson” and in What Good Is Heaven as a whole, the litany of details accumulates with force. Noticing and holding them itself seems to offer a proof of love—who but a lover could write “the algae // a million emeralds sunk just beyond / the shore”—but Hendrix gestures at their own love through these observations as well. Some of the softness the father in these poems had hoped to temper remains, and Hendrix’s readers are the lucky beneficiaries of its survival.

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Near-Earth Object

John Shoptaw
Unbound Edition Press ($25)

by Lee Rossi

Poetry can be personal, but as T. S. Eliot famously insisted, it can also be impersonal. Can it ever be both at once? In his latest collection, Near-Earth Object, John Shoptaw mixes disparate elements—formal and informal, autobiographical and traditional, and, yes, personal and impersonal—creating a work that takes various paths to express the existential crisis of our time: the effects of climate change.

From the outset, Shoptaw offers a guided tour of various disasters and disaster zones: the asteroid Chicxulub, clear-cut forests, the North Pacific Gyre, climate refugees, desertification in the Sahel. It’s not pretty. “Dry Song,” which beautifully reworks some of the basic motifs of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” reveals the terrifying reality of salmon unable to reach (or leave) their spawning beds because streams are running dry:

But the drought has pierced to the mountain route
and shown me rock under the shrunken mantle
and sand it fed to the river mouths, barring
salmon on their redds from salmon in the sea.

“Back Here” takes the tack of using the patois of “Swampeast” (southeast Missouri), Shoptaw’s boyhood home. “We believe in everything life has given us,” the speaker says—the few good things, the many disappointments. “We believe in you,” he tells the prodigal poet, but goes on to say, “Honestly, we don’t know what to believe. / We don’t believe you do either.” Finally, though, the speaker admits: “We know. The earth is dying. We get that. / . . . / Naturally, we’ll do what we can.  / Only please don’t ask us / to change our climate for yours.”

Employing skewed formalisms in many of the poems, Shoptaw emphasizes that resilience and creation are as much a part of our behavioral repertoire as violence and despoliation. He craftily leans into the little-used “Poulter’s Measure” (a popular Renaissance meter) for an antic anecdote about the fried chicken of his youth. The poem begins with memories of a visit to a boyhood chum:

        We play with our trucks out back in the dirt, where plump
red hens peck for bugs but keep clear of the hackberry stump.

        Then checkers on linoleum in the kitchen
where Chuck’s mom in a red housedress turns: Cornflake fried chicken?

The music is charming, but there are deeper currents. Comparing himself to his friend, the speaker notes:

        I grew on the wrong side of the rails but the right
side of the river in Missouri, Chuck on the wrong side

        of both.

Shoptaw also likes large canvases; the final sequence in the book, “Whoa!,” revisits the myth of Phaeton in light of the environmental woe already upon us. Throughout the work’s twelve parts, Shoptaw offers many of the traditional pleasures of the long narrative poem, among them learned lists (flowers, decaying glaciers, unrepentant polluters), elaborate similes, and inflated rhetoric. Shoptaw’s list of “wide-waking annuals and perennials,” for example, is as specific and delightful as Milton’s famed list of flowers in “Lycidas” without dispelling the somber and elegiac tone of the whole:

snowdrops, crocuses, daisies and daylilies,
rice in flower and maize in silk,
woozy jasmine and heady grapevines . . .

Of course, all these pleasures are in service to a larger design. As our modern-day Phaeton (here cleverly named “Ray”) courses recklessly, he disturbs the jet stream and sends untimely cold snaps on New England and New York, causing disaster around the globe:

                                                          Coulters
and ponderosas, yellowed and browned, engraved
with trilobite grooves by pine-bark beetles
wintering northward, had turned from trees 
into tinder.

Notice how Shoptaw’s four-beat lines evoke but don’t slavishly imitate Old English accentual verse, the alliteration deployed almost casually to reinforce the drive of the narrative.

Ray, it might be noted, is clueless, but at least he has the excuse of youth and inexperience. Not so “the fossil lordlings / . . . out / sledding with their kids in Central Park”; “Where’s the heat?” they want to know, their cluelessness a testament to their motivated ignorance. Since this is a mock epic, retribution is called for, so in Shoptaw’s telling, Earth herself fires a lightning bolt at Mister High and Mighty, ejecting him from “his plump white boy’s life.”

What Shoptaw offers readers, then, is not an answer but a fantasy of reprisal, one with no more impact on social policy than the tagging of a freeway overpass has. Perhaps that’s what most writers do—scrawl texts in hopes it might shock us into saving ourselves from tragedy. Few, however, do it with the force and elegance of Shoptaw.

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