Childcare

Rob Schlegel
Four Way Books ($17.95)

I woke up today intending to review Rob Schlegel’s new collection—his fourth, shortest (by line count), and maybe his best. Then I couldn’t find the book for hours, because one kid’s D&D backpack, a bag of dog food, my own undone dishes, and a scheduled Zoom call got in the way. When I finally found Schlegel’s volume, I realized that my distracted, distressed, and familially challenged mood fit the book I wanted to recommend. Childcare is a book about parenthood, household maintenance, and daily life; about maximum distractibility and post-quarantine forced togetherness; about our manifestly required (but secretly fragile) emotional resilience in an age when capital and mass media tell us to find individual solutions for collective problems. Are we too busy making grilled cheese sandwiches to address the tragedy of the commons? Or vice versa? What will my words do for my kids, if anything?

Such questions have shown up, for decades, in poems by moms (Rachel Zucker and Bernadette Mayer are two shining examples) but they’re pretty new for poems about, and by, dads, whom adults expect to work independently and outside the home, and who don’t normally, if they are cisgender, come with the same umbilical connections to young children. Schlegel knows time spent writing is time not spent preparing that grilled cheese, and Schlegel’s kids know it too: “Daddy, my daughter says, / When are you going to stop?” “Poetry / Is pointless, my son says. If you write that down / I’ll kill you. I fear he fears / The attention I give it.” What poet parent has not felt that fear? Who has not asked, as Schlegel does, “When will I reach the people I love?”

If such lines—however quotable—sound bald, or abstract, or all too accessible, it’s worth mentioning the elegance and the sophistication in this volume too. Schlegel has learned spareness, abstraction, and accessibility from Oppen (who provides an epigraph), Niedecker, and Dickinson. He’s also learned how to bring readers deep into his own fact-studded idiosyncrasies, quick images (a baby is a “little herring”), and the sounds he makes when he’s alone: “The rolling hills of Pomeroy / Bring the locals local joy.” The diary, the flatness, and the divided attention between what the kids need and what the poet desires place Schlegel in a delightful—and young—tradition, among recent books about domesticity by poets such as Chris Martin, Nick Twemlow, Dobby Gibson, perhaps Dana Ward.

To their disarming ongoingness, to the “competing / Sorrows of parenthood,” to fears about being a man and raising men (“my son pinning the future against the wall”), Schlegel adds white space, concision, and the uncomfortable, imperfect elegance of a careful craftsman sharing a rough draft in the knowledge that making it smoother will ruin it. Those spaces are his self-divisions, his irresolvable quarrels with himself: “I’m two people— / One not speaking to the other.” Like the Bon Iver album he namechecks, Schlegel adds an explicit sense of multiple generations, but where Justin Vernon imagines “I am my mother on the wall,” Schlegel frames his own worries in response: “I’m angry at my father for aging.” His clipped lines suggest he feels the rebuke that sensitive adults get when we remember how privileged we remain: privileged just to have enough to eat, let alone to take care of our kids, to find time to read, to be alive: “I tuck my son into bed. / I wish I had better parents, he says.” Schlegel, and I, hold such wishes for our children too, wishes the poems work hard—and sparely—to name. All of our kids deserve better than we can give them, but they get, at best, you and me.

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Book Review, Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

A Double-Tongued Troubadour: An Interview with Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

by Jim Feast

A self-described New Romantic poet, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is also a publisher, art and literary critic, eco-activist, impresario, filmmaker, and visual artist. He is author of nineteen books of poetry, most recently a collection of sonnets and collages titled Doppelgängster: Self-Portraits in a Funhouse Mirror (MadHat Press, $21.95); his work has also appeared in anthologies ranging from Best American Poetry (Scribner, 2023) to Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry (Lamar University Press, 2022).

Wright, who published the long-running all-arts magazine Cover in the previous century and now publishes Live Mag!, has received the Kathy Acker Award for his publishing and writing. In the following interview, we discuss how all the doubles and others in his life as a poet add up to a singular, ongoing practice.

Jim Feast: My first question stems from a conversation we had about one of the poems in Doppelgängster, “Truth vs. Meaning”—you said that poem was “off to the side” of the main themes of the book. So, could you clarify what those main themes are?

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright: The themes, motifs, and icons that appear in the collages and poems engage a muse. My subjects represent a search for individuality within a context of membership in a family, a tribe, and a relationship. Romantic love, sex. A pioneering spirit harkening to my upbringing in West Virginia and Arizona. And being hep, defined in some older dictionaries of slang as “someone who could swing on any scene.” I wanted to be that someone. A merger of the Beat’s forbidden fevered pitch and the New York School’s breezy, cosmopolitan elan.

“Truth vs Meaning” presents a larger-than-life character, a sort of Everyman called “Mr. Universe.” It hints at political strife, personal responsibility, and selflessness, but after a bravura beginning, the character fumbles—he is after all, “outré” himself, eccentric but prepossessing. Never quite fitting in and yet bearing within himself nobility, agency, and aplomb. Like a troubadour, he is staying in someone else’s castle, or as this poem has it, he finds himself on a set, as if in a dream.

JF: How do the themes inform your process?

JW: Themes help structure the poems and propel them along. They color in the persona and become like characters in a play, providing an anticipatory tone. Double entendres and conundrums vibrate. Phrases blur momentarily before snapping into focus, as when “a naked siren and a burning fire engine” are contrasted in an ironic exchange. Such super-packed images hint at Symbolism but generate new, contradictory meanings. Going back to “Truth vs. Meaning,” a false choice is offered between related—but separate—ideals.

JF: Your poems are full of complex interplays and inlaying—I have to ask how you put them together.

JW: You “hear” a phrase in your mind and go: get up some steam, mumble along trying to say something, a twist here, a turn there, and invent, record, note, steal, personify—“November is packing its brown valise.” I’m attuned to alliteration, music, rhyme, cadence, association, appropriation, even affectation—I use everything in the craft box to keep going with white hot volition.

Then you can rearrange lines and edit bits here and there. Sometimes the initial impulse is erased in the revision. Some poems are really opposed to being written in one rush. Still, poems that need too much editing probably aren’t worth it. As Ted Berrigan, my mentor, said mercifully, “A poem doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to work.”

JF: In “Les Fleurs de Nuit,” you use the phrase “lead by dreaming,” which brings up a key dimension of your writing. You often begin with an evocation of a time and place: “Old dandelions tip / white hats to the wind.” Surprisingly, such evocations are followed by dream images: “We were toys in Babeland.” Can you comment on your combination of nature poetry with surrealism?

JW: That title began as an allusion to Baudelaire, but it’s also an unintended metaphor for dreams. That poem is unusual for me in that it has six dreams in it leading up to the final couplet, so it all fits together. I like to stick a dream in a poem if I can. It’s like an ingredient that most recipes can use—and inherently authentic.

Sometimes nature suggests a lesson. In “Rough Patch,” after “Old dandelions tip / white hats to the wind” comes “What’s above, calls / on what’s below.” We want to rise to the call. Nature becomes a stand-in for the muse, I think. I look and listen and maybe hear an inspiring line of description in my head. Images are the bones of a poem, and lyricism is the heart. From there you can jump-cut to other quotidian or ethereal elements.

“Learn by doing—lead by dreaming” is a misquote that I worked up. The poet is often seen as a dreamer. I think people look to poetry and dreams for the same things—magic, prophecy, and wisdom. One could also say learn by leading. The poet is fulfilling a shamanistic role in society, so there is often a moral bedrock revealed or an ambition pursued. Poetry has a spiritual quality people seek, especially as organized religion fades and leaves a vacuum. This is not new, but it is dire. The original Romantics saw nature as a gateway drug to the sublime.

People can be drawn to poetry for information as well as for an emotional reward. So I research topics and make the poems informative. It’s also good to balance adages, epigrams, encomiums, and dictums, such as “lead by dreaming,” with natural elements. It’s okay to make statements: “Let us be measured by devotion.”

I keep my eyes peeled for some connection with the natural world that suggests a simile such as “the wolf moon goes down like butter.” My poem “Temporary Sanity” starts off with a stanza that observes the natural world:

Winter’s white heart steams.
Venus pins night to the sky.
A few stars are hung out to dry.

And then I switch tracks, introducing the persona/observer who moors the collection: “On call at the dream hospital, / my gang of bells rings.” From there the poem goes into a persona-driven New Romanticism, interacting with the muse:

Listen. Your canals can hear
my eyelids beating time
into wings of gold foil.

This nod to classic Romanticism deepens the texture, mixing into and counter-balancing the jaunty banter. The poem is an embodiment of their juncture, their jouissance (and, yes, there is sexual content).

In the final couplet, the poem returns to the wider world it began with and ends up personifying nature: “Snow only really talks / when it starts to melt.” It suggests that to commune with our inner nature and each other, we must let down our guard. It also hints at the specter of global warming.

JF: Your poems often feature playful reversals and scrambling of cliches and commonplaces, which to me suggests a rejection of the dead language of banality. The line “I always led from the back of our class. / . . . It wasn’t / our thing to be official” suggests this rebellious stance began in high school.

JW: Yes, e.e. cummings and his nonconformity changed my world in high school. Playing with language is key for me. And I like that you say “commonplaces.” One can convert the cliche to make it a touchstone, a common denominator between the audience and the abstracted landscape of the poem. My classmate at West Virginia University, Jayne Anne Phillips, told me not to use cliches in 1972, but it only made me more aware of them as a class of phraseology that could be mined. Palindromes, anagrams, typos, malapropisms, mondegreens—all these offer new ways to “crack” the code, break the rules, refresh language, and find new meanings when combined with subjects that range from the personal and ordinary to the political and environmental.  

JF: You mentioned your use of a persona. This persona, moving amid the reverses and outpourings of your vivid language, seems a slippery fellow, yet he also anchors the proceedings.  

JW: He’s very slippery, but also revealing. The persona is upholding a set of principles, adhering to a standard as the troubadours did, and spreading knowledge of proper behavior for a courtier (see Paul Blackburn’s translations). Ted Berrigan’s “Code of the West” exemplifies this impulse to transcribe the tenets of the tribe and identify its boundaries.  

You have to lure a reader and then steer them through the poem using both conventions and inventions. You pack meaning, knowledge, and experience within the artifice of whimsey, lyricism, and imagery to create insight. And frankly, there’s an entertainment aspect audiences go for. 

Myths are another inspiration/ muse source: “Hello, Sybil. Old fortune teller.” Orpheus, Pinocchio, Santa, Cupid, Hippolyte, Circe—my persona hangs out with the myths to become a legend. Ed Sanders wrote about this with regard to the myth-making of Charles Olson, that he could do it “safely & without duplicity.”

The central thrust is simply discovering an order while pursuing varying threads to a conclusion. As my old landlord used to say, “Work hard, have fun.” Celebrate life and contribute.  

JF: Your poems are chock full of amazing epiphanies; have any come via a personal epiphany?  

JW: A breakthrough moment came in an Alice Notley workshop. She instructed us to write while she read some texts. My effort became “Malaise in Malaysia,” and you can see the word play there, the alliteration, assonance, and anagrammatic quality. It was a revelation about how a poem could be stitched together from various patches of language to make a crazy quilt.

JF: Your poetry also draws language and metaphors from many different realms, and as a publisher, you created Cover Magazine and then Live Mag!, both of which combine art and writing from various fields. I see in the publishing a link to your poetry’s all-embracing tendency.

JW: All-embracing—I like that. Ted Berrigan was rather “all-embracing.” In 1978 he told us young guns at St. Mark’s to start a magazine—publish your friends and some poets you really admire. I’ve been doing that ever since. Publishing has encouraged me to reach out to writers and widen the horizon.

My girlfriend told me one should read twenty poems for every poem they write. I never had better advice. Running a magazine means you really live with poems—choosing, designing, proofing. Reviewing is even more insightful; you see patterns emerge in others’ writings that may later become part of your own lexicon. The magazines are especially helpful in creating events and maintaining community. Writing art criticism also hones my language skills.

JF: You have often spoken of your poetry as part of the New Romanticism. Can you describe more about this movement?

JW: It’s about extending beauty and experiencing passion. At Brooklyn College (where I studied with Allen Ginsberg and William Matthews), I became enchanted with Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sydney, who brought the sonnet, the persona, and a proto-Romantic impulse to the forefront. (I was also having a torrid affair and was deeply in love; my muse liked that.) I learned about Romantic symbolism such as the “blue rose” and discovered John Clare (one of John Ashbery’s favorites). The Romantic impulse never goes away. A lot of erudition started going into my work, and that continues.

There was also a New Romantic moment in the late 1980s that included fashion, classical music, and art, and I felt tied in with that. Lord & Taylor ran an ad in the Times that blared “New Romantic” and I used it in a workshop I taught. I thought we needed a better tagline than “New York School Third Generation” or “St. Mark’s poets.” And I still believe the emotional tenor of the Romantics is built into our poetry DNA, as is Surrealism. I find New Romantic qualities is in the work of contemporaries like Elaine Equi, Will Alexander, Bob Holman, Dorothea Lasky, Sampson Starkweather, Kevin Opstedal, and Andrei Codrescu.

JF: Another thing that gives your poems traction is reference to family. You say, for instance, “From my mother I inherited // easy grace and savior faire.” In the poems, this network of relations includes friends and colleagues, too. 

JW: Before I got to New York in 1976, my family moved a lot as my father climbed the academic ladder. So, we were a tight family, but I had to keep making new friends, and I was keen on knowing the latest slang as a point of entry.

I saw the New York school mentioning their friends all the time, and it worked for me. I’m in awe of my circle: “What dudes we be, / skimming masks of glass / across a bourbon sea.”

JF: Some poems in the book are paired with your drawings and collages. It’s almost a chicken-egg situation: Did a picture inspire a poem, or did the poem lead to the visual art? How do words and images interact in Doppelgängster?

JW: There is a recurrence of iconographic/archetypal imagery that appears in both my text and visual work. Sometimes the two overlap, but they’re not usually created simultaneously. Pinocchio is a natural “persona” for me to identify with—along with many others who have appeared over the years—so Pinocchio appears in both a poem and artwork. Other subjects include Tinker Bell, Aladdin, chimeras like the mermaid and the gryphon, and mythic characters.

Once I have a motif, I tend to recycle it from time to time. The cuckoo clock is an example of a motif I was repeating both in verse and imagery. Lori Ortiz, who designed the book, made the pairings based on feeling and tone, as well as subject.

So I would say these are parallel practices. There is a collage quality to my poems—juxtapositions of images, shifting scales and perspectives. A palette of varying textures. Rhyming shapes. Different directional focuses. The collage is built, and the poem is too—with a lot of pondering, structuring, and conjuring.

JF: In an artist’s statement you sent me in an email, you say these poems bring two aspects of your personality into juxtaposition, yielding “self portraits partially created by admitting an ‘other’ self (a doppelgänger).” Do you anticipate psychic benefits from this doubling?  

JW: Hopefully. [Laughs] You can only see yourself in a reflection in a mirror, a lover, or a muse—or in self-reflection. Self-reflection is another way of developing character, and you can find this ‘other’ self by trying to meet the challenges a poem requires. One deals continuously with the duality of being one among many, the observer and the observed, and to the extent that these two interact, the more the poems live.

The poem is an instrument that looks into your soul—both writer and reader.  

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Interview

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

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Rain Taxi Spring Fling

Rain Taxi’s BANneD BOOKS spring fling on Friday, May 3, 2024, was a great success, with 100 people enjoying the riveting musical performances by The Muatas, Zak Sally, and Willie Wisely, and spellbinding literary readings by Dessa, Klecko, and special guest Carolyn Kuebler, amid the beautiful Granada Theater backdrop. Thank you to all who made this fundraiser a smashing success: the Rain Taxi Board, the talented artists, our sponsors, and everyone who attended! Click on the photos below for a fun slide show:

— FEATURED ARTISTS —

THE MUATAS, Ayanna and Cam Muata, create an original blend of post-punk, trip hop, dark wave, shoe gaze, and electronic music. The Muatas have released three albums since 2020, most recently Battle Weary. With a sound that mixes sampled and programmed beats layered with synthesizer, guitar, bass guitar, ambient strings, and vocals that often range between the melodic and spoken, they desire to share a bit of their story through their music, and to connect with others through that experience.

ZAK SALLY has been making comics and art (Recidivist, Sammy The Mouse), creating music (Low, The Hand, solo work), publishing books (via his small press La Mano), and otherwise engaging in various creative WTF’s for 35 years (and counting); he recently published a prose memoir titled Folrath. He lives and works in Minneapolis.

WILLIE WISELY is equal parts Minnesota music scene veteran and Laurel Canyon devotee. Wisely remains that rare bird mixing profound power pop with vaudevillian showmanship, a troubadour on an all-night rave, a cold Komboucha on a hot California day, a McCartney-ite taking a break from his Japanese import of Ram for a quick canyon run listening to João Gilberto. Singer, Guitarist, Producer, Composer, and sometimes Clothes Horse, he has released over a dozen albums, the latest of which is Face the Sun.

DESSA is a singer, rapper, and writer who has made a career of bucking genres and defying expectations. As a musician she has performed at Lollapalooza and Glastonbury, collaborated with the Minnesota Orchestra, and had entries on the Billboard charts. As a writer, she’s been published by The New York Times and National Geographic Traveler, penned the acclaimed memoir-in-essays My Own Devices, and has had two chapbooks of poetry published by Rain Taxi, A Pound of Steam and Tits on the Moon. Also a noted public speaker on topics from art to entrepreneurship (including a TED Talk about her science experiment on falling out of love), Dessa is the host of the podcast Deeply Human. When not on the road, she calls both Minneapolis and NYC home.

KLECKO studied breadmaking at Dunwoody Technical College in Minneapolis and the American Institute of Baking in Manhattan, Kansas. He spent the first decade of his 45-year career running ovens on the night shift; often, while waiting for the loaves to bake, he wrote poems. He has since written several books, including the Midwest Book Award-winning collection Hitman-Baker-Casket Maker and the memoir A Bakeable Feast; his work has also been featured in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times. An ardent fan of “all things 651,” Klecko lives in a St. Paul mansion across the street from where F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his first novel.

CAROLYN KUEBLER co-founded the literary magazine Rain Taxi and has been the editor of the award-winning journal New England Review for the past 10 years. Her short stories and essays have been published in numerous venues including The Common and Colorado Review; her piece “Wildflower Season” won the 2022 John Burroughs Award for Nature Essay. She has published scores of book reviews, small-press profiles, and author interviews in Publishers Weekly, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi, City Pages, and other venues. Now residing in Middlebury, Vermont, Kuebler returns to Minneapolis to launch her debut novel, Liquid, Fragile, Perishable, described by Michael Collier as “A true-to-life, richly detailed American tale in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, and Thornton Wilder” and named one of Oprah Daily’s Most Anticipated Books of 2024.

A note to help you find your way and park in Uptown:

The Granada Theater is located at 3022 Hennepin Ave in Minneapolis, but since Hennepin Ave. is currently under reconstruction, the road between Lake Street and 31st, including in front of the Granada, is closed to drivers. This means people can’t get dropped off directly in front of the theater—so you’ll get to take the scenic route there after you disembark or park!

For parking, the closest, easiest is in the Seven Points (formerly Calhoun Square) pay ramp across the street from the theater — from there simply exit to 31st St., head west to Hennepin, and then north on Hennepin to the Granada. Free street parking is also an option on residential cross streets (Holmes, Humboldt, Irving, etc.). Further navigational directions and a detailed map of street closures and parking availability is available from our official event bookseller Magers & Quinn, whose store is just a few doors down from the Granada: https://www.magersandquinn.com/directions
No matter how you’re getting to the Granada, you will be ready for a drink, a bite to eat, and a show. We have all three areas covered with our celebration of books, bands, and lively fun at BANneD BOOKS!

Thank you to our sponsors for their support:

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Rain Taxi Volume 29, Number 1, Spring 2024 (#113)

To purchase issue #113 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Darryl Pinckney: The Women Who Shaped Him | interviewed by William Corwin
Jody Hobbs Hesler: Atonement Is Not Transactional | interviewed by Sharon Harrigan
Dorothea Lasky: Why Horror | interviewed by Zachary Pace
Patty Crane: Hues of Translation | interviewed by Dennis Maloney

FEATURES

Plus cover art by Noah Lawrence-Holder

NONFICTION REVIEWS

Dear Jean Pierre | David Wojnarowicz | by Patrick James Dunagan
Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith | John Szwed | by Richard Kostelanetz
The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality | William Egginton | by David Brizer
The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters | Benjamin Moser | by Allan Vorda
New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust | Howard Debs and Matthew Silverman, eds. | by Gale Hemmann

FICTION REVIEWS

POETRY REVIEWS

COMICS REVIEWS

Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story | Julia Wertz | by Greg Baldino

To purchase issue #113 using Paypal, click here.
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Noah Lawrence-Holder

Noah Lawrence-Holder is a black, nonbinary artist from Madison WI, now based in the Twin Cities. Their work consists of illustration and animations centered around racial justice, equity, intersectionality and gender identity. They have featured work in gallery shows highlighting queer and black artists across Minneapolis and beyond. Visit their website here.

Move Like Water

My Story of the Sea

Hannah Stowe
Tin House ($24.95)

by Elissa Greenwald

In her debut memoir Move Like Water, Hannah Stowe immerses readers in the world of the ocean. Early on, the Welsh author connects the constantly changing outer world of the ocean with her troubled inner one: “There was a current inside me. At times, it swept along straight and true, serene on the surface, but determinedly fast flowing. At others, the winds of life would turn against the tide . . . and I would rage, tempestuous.”

In the book’s opening chapter, Stowe tends to pile up phrases, with many sentences using five or more commas. While the lyrical style may lull the reader like waves, we start to long for events and characters that comprise a life, though we are given brief glimpses of the author’s mother (her parents are divorced) and companionable brother. Her mother, however, becomes more important as the book progresses; we learn it was she who both inspired Stowe’s artistic impulses and taught her how to swim, “moving with—moving like—the water.”

The book finds momentum in the second chapter when the author goes to sea, on a ship where “it was hard to tell the sea from the sky—the water was everywhere.” At sea, Stowe is continually off-balance, literally and metaphorically. In order to cook on shipboard, “You have to lash yourself to the stove, which swayed wildly on its gimbal, the pivoted support that allows it to swing with the motion of the boat.”

The dramatic action at sea brings the narrative to life. “In my roamings around the coast back home, I had moved through the landscape,” Stowe writes; “Now, the seascape built, fell, hurled, roared, and hurtled around me, dictating my movement with a Mephistophelian chaos.” There is no doubt that the ocean is Stowe’s true home: “I had found my north, the area of life into which I wanted to pour my passion.”

Stowe’s adventures at sea, where she crewed for scientific expeditions as far as Newfoundland, recede into memory after she suffers a surfing injury. Move Like Water here becomes a memoir of healing, both of body and mind. Comparing herself to Icarus for being dissatisfied with her life and always seeking new adventures, Stowe experiences recurring dreams in which she alternately becomes an albatross and a sea captain. Both dreams help her grow—the first through study of how the wanderings of the albatross resemble her own, and the second by inspiring her to buy her own boat.

The author’s rapturous descriptions of the sea and its inhabitants, from the lowly plankton to the lordly sperm whale, fulfill her goal to give the reader “an ocean to hold in your hands.” With a scientist’s perspective, a sea captain’s knowledge, and a poet’s soul, Stowe takes readers on a journey that enlists us in her project to preserve the ocean and its creatures.

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

Book Review, Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Meltwater - Curve

Meltwater
Claire Wahmanholm
Milkweed Editions ($16)

Curve
Kate Reavey
Empty Bowl Press ($16)

by Jessica Gigot

Poetry focused on the experience of motherhood, or that has the perspective of a mother figure, is sometimes seen as overly domestic. However, the many dimensions of mothering can inform other aspects of human experience. Two recent collections, Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm and Curve by Kate Reavey, illuminate what we all gain when we examine the intricacies of life with a maternal lens.

Wahmanholm’s Meltwater is a somber feast of sounds and images, part remembrance and part gut-wrenching prediction; in poems both playful and bleak, the author employs lyrical repetition and fierce honesty to explore topics ranging from ecological change to personal grief. A series of poems titled after letters of the alphabet offer a particularly rich slurry of language, alliteration, and imagery: In “M” Wahmanholm writes, “I am a mare rolling in a midnight / meadow, all musk and muzzle,” while in “P” she speaks of her daughter directly: “I place her outside my arm’s parenthesis so she can’t feel my pulse/ pounding.”

Several poems in this book share the same title, such as “Meltwater” and “Glacier”; these poems are in conversation with each other and also serve as a touchstone for the rest of the collection. The “Meltwater” entries are erasure poems taken from an essay by Lacy M. Johnson called “How to Mourn a Glacier,” and the “Glacier” series examines glaciers as both abstract concepts and fleeting creatures. Wahmanholm’s treatment of water imagery can get confusing as she considers its various transformations, however, in the final “Glacier” poem of the collection she brings it all under one rubric when she writes, “It is the water I am trying to teach my daughters to float in.” There is deep reverence for the changing state of glaciers as well as immense guilt for what they will represent to future generations.

In the book’s penultimate poem, “The Empty Universe,” Wahmanholm writes:

I cannot, this night, stop myself
from listening to my daughter wail
and wishing she were less like herself
therefore less like me

Meltwater is the poet’s wail against the way our environment is changing. With the discerning eye and open heart of a mother, she startles the reader awake—in no small part because of her willingness to divulge her own vulnerabilities.

Reavey’s Curve navigates the full arc of a life, starting with poems focused on early motherhood, then moving through stages of parenting, marriage, and loss. Curve alludes to the shapes that contain us, the roles (like motherhood) that give us perspective on how the world works and for whom. In the poem “Curve is a word” Reavey sets the scope of her observational task: “that the curve / of the earth / is too small to see, / yet defines us // allows us to breathe.” Through the container of these observant and autobiographical poems, Reavey shares the textured experience of her own life as a woman, wife, and mother.

Reavey is focused on the body, particularly the way it transfigures through time and with age. The collection’s first poem includes a vision: “as I, in my own bed, dream of being / a mother.” Later, in “After the Hysterectomy,” the poet confesses, “Mine as verb // no longer possible.” Her physical experiences within a mother-body speak to a broader understanding of longing and the challenge of grappling with temporal changes to identity.

The poems in Curve elevate the quotidian in surprising ways; a series about grief, for example, melds the making of blackberry jam with the death of the poet’s mother. In “Grief,” she writes, “Fruit ripens, even in rain”; “Grief II” begins, “Blackberries boiling on the stovetop / are not violence. Their color changes.” In “Grief III,” Reavey concludes:

Come December I will wrap the jars, drop them in the heel
of stockings.
Christmas morning, the fruit will remind me
of everything
except loss.

The metaphor is clear: Through the process of creating something, the poet becomes able to let go of the past; tending to others she is also modeling renewal.

These two collections offer distinct visions, to be sure—the fractured nature of Wahmanholm’s work is perhaps a generational artifact, rooted in skepticism, defiance, and frustration, while Reavey’s poems focus on complexities within relationships and between self and place rather than global urgencies—yet they both traverse wide swaths of emotion while anchoring their poems in the grit of life. As we continue to face ecological catastrophe, political collapse, and a thousand paper cuts of isolation from human contact, the tender and receptive voice of the mother may be what is needed most.

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Book Review

Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport 2024

Thanks to all who visited metro area bookstores in the days surrounding Independent Bookstore Day!

Another successful Independent Bookstore Day is in the books! Thousands flocked to their favorite bookstores with the Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport in hand to celebrate.

Congratulations to Prize Pack winners Tess B., Betty S., Julie R., Mel R., Stacy R., Lynn S., Kenneth C., Serena A., Aaron K., Kali G., Zan A., Lizmarie I., Kelsey L., Haley D., Nicole G., Hattie D., Supriya R., Amelie H., Christine T., and Amy A.C., and to our Grand Prize winner: Jessica O.!

This year’s prize-winning travelers journeyed from places such as Woodbury, Bloomington, Champlin, Watertown, Shakopee, Minneapolis, and St. Paul to complete the challenges. Many more cities and towns (and even a couple of surrounding states!) were represented in the hundreds that entered the prize drawings.

277 people obtained enough stamps to be entered in our prize drawings this year; of those, 92 intrepid book lovers got all 28 pages stamped and were entered to win the Grand Prize as well! Congratulations to everyone who entered the drawings – you are all bookstore champions – and to everyone who got their Passport stamped by even one store! Don’t forget: Stamped pages are now valid as coupons, and your Passport remains a useful guide to the best indie bookstore community in the country!

The Passport wouldn't be possible without our incredible sponsors. Thank you to Between the Lines Publishing, Libro.fm, Graywolf Press, Button Poetry, Professional Editors Network, Calumet Editions, The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library, Lerner Publishing Group, The Loft Literary Center, University of Minnesota Press, and Verso Books for supporting our cities' great independent bookstores and this fun program, and for all you contribute to the world of books!

Rain Taxi's Twin Cities Literary Calendar is once again publishing its pocket-sized Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport—and offering readers fun ways to visit the stores and win discounts and prizes. Our annual Bookstore Passport celebrates both Independent Bookstore Day (this year taking place on April 27, 2024) and our metropolitan area’s bounty of great community-based bookstores!

Illustrated by local artist Kevin Cannon, the Passport is FREE to pick up at any participating store (listed below) between Wednesday, April 24, 2024 and Sunday, April 28, 2024. During these five days, travel to as many participating Twin Cities area bookstores as you can, because you can get your Passport stamped at each store you visit during that time span for a future discount at that store and a chance to win great prizes!

Read on for more details below. We’ll see you in the bookstores!

How It Works

While this Passport can serve as a year-round guide, during the days surrounding Independent Bookstore Day, Rain Taxi and the stores invite you to get your Passport stamped to collect discount coupons and enter to win even more!

CHALLENGE 1:
Collect any number of stamps and activate coupons!
Grab a free Passport from any participating store, and from Wednesday, April 24 to Sunday, April 28, you can ask each store you visit to stamp its respective page. Each stamped page activates a coupon at that store, valid May 1 - August 31, so if you return to that store, you’ve got guaranteed savings!

CHALLENGE 2:
Collect 15 stamps and enter to win a Prize Pack!
Get your Passport stamped at any 15 bookstores by Sunday, April 28, and make sure the 15th one stamps the special page in the back of your Passport. Then follow the instructions there to be entered to win one of our Passport Prize Packs — see details below!

CHALLENGE 3:
Collect all 28 stamps and enter to win the GRAND PRIZE!
If you visit all 28 participating stores by Sunday, April 28, make sure the 28th one stamps the special page in the back of your Passport. Then follow the instructions there to be entered to win the Grand Prize: $25 gift cards to all 28 stores (a $700 value)!

How to Enter

If you have obtained 15 or all 28 stamps, email a picture of the Bookstore Hero stamps page near the back of your Passport to calendar [at] raintaxi [dot] com, including in the email your name and city/state of residence, by end of day on Monday, April 29, or tear it out and mail on Monday, April 29, to Rain Taxi, PO Box 3840, Mpls MN 55403 with your email address and name included. Winners will be notified by email on Friday, May 3.

Thanks and best wishes on your travels with
the Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport!

Tip: Click the [ ] icon in the top right corner of this map. When the larger map opens, click the three vertical dots to view options including to print the map or to copy it to your own Google Maps account, where you can create your own routes.

2024 Participating Stores

Click on these links to learn more about the open hours, special activities, and limited or exclusive items available at each participating store!

2024 Passport Sponsors

2024 Passport Prize Packs

We’ve got seven different Prize Packs on deck, and multiple sets of the first four, so over 20 bookstore travelers will win one! Get your Passport stamped at 15 or more stores by Sunday and then follow the instructions in it to enter to win one of the following prize packs. Winners will be notified by email on Friday, May 3.

PRIZE PACK #1: Library Friends Gift Set
A Minnesota Book Awards tote bag and the novel Under the Tamarind Tree by Nigar Alam—plus a Libro.fm credit for either 3 or 6 audiobooks!

PRIZE PACK #2: Multi-Genre Gift Set
Great new titles published by Graywolf Press, Lerner Publishing Group, University of Minnesota Press, and Verso Books—plus a gift card to either Moon Palace Books or Paperback Exchange!

PRIZE PACK #3: Button Poetry Gift Set
Three Button Poetry books in a Button Poetry tote bag, plus a Button popsocket and notebook—and a recent issue of Poetry magazine, too!

PRIZE PACK #4: Avid Reader Gift Set
Nine titles from Between The Lines Publishing, plus a t-shirt (name your size)—all in a bookstore tote bag from either Next Chapter Booksellers, The Vintage Storyteller, Excelsior Bay Books, or Subtext Books!

PRIZE PACK #5: Milkweed Gift Set
A snazzy tote bag plus three signed books of life-changing importance published by Milkweed Editions—and an enamel book pin, too!

PRIZE PACK #6: Youth Book Gift Set
Two middle-grade books and two YA novels, all by landmarks Minnesota authors—and a gift card to Excelsior Bay Books!

PRIZE PACK #7: Book Lovers Grab Bag
A Tropes & Trifles tote bag, a Cream & Amber t-shirt, three Calumet Editions books, a Wild Rumpus gift card, and a Libro.fm credit for Audiobooks for a Year—wow!

2024 Passport Grand Prize

To reflect the record number of stores in the Passport, this year’s Grand Prize is the biggest in Passport history: $25 gift cards to ALL 28 stores in the Passport — a $700 value!

Bon voyage, bookstore travelers of the Twin Cities!

SMRTi

Nina Zivancevic
Spuyten Duyvil ($20)

by Jim Cohn

The title of Serbian-born poet Nina Zivancevic’s vivid travel memoir, SMRTi, comes from the Sanskrit—literally, “that which is remembered.” Historically, smrti refers to written Hindu texts composed by authors seeking an ever-evolving yet precise and compact prose form to capture the passing of essential facts, principles, instructions, and ideas from generation to generation. In Zivancevic’s hands, smrti is an ideal and flexible form to present memorable distillations from her sojourns to India, Egypt, Italy, Spain, England, Paris (her present-day home), Lima, and Peru over the period from 1990 to 2015.

Zivancevic is an intrepid, eclectic world navigator and chronicler. She applies her own extensive and unique knowledge of European intellectual and aesthetic movements as well as Beat Generation writers and poets in a style exemplary of the international post-beat avant-garde, alive and well today. Cornerstones to her sense of lineage and tradition include the Serbian poet Ljubomir Micić, founder of the avant-garde movement Zenitism; the raw and transgressive French writer and dramatist Antonin Artaud; the Belgium-born French writer and visual artist Henri Michaux; the Bulgarian-French philosopher, semiotician, and feminist Julia Kristeva; and two American poets associated with the Beat Generation, Ira Cohen and Allen Ginsberg.

As a writer who has lived an international life in the arts, Zivancevic describes how she approached the writing in SMRTi based on something Michaux said after his travels to India: “I was observing myself during my journey as if I would observe someone else who was observing the world with emotion, remembering an imaginary land.” But they have differing relationships to this “imaginary land”: Whereas Michaux believed that he did not “inhabit” the lands to which he traveled, that he “was not there” and “did not even visit it,” Zivancevic argues that she had “always lived there . . . I am a part of it, I was there even when I did not live in it.”

The writing in SMRTi is delightfully fresh as a result and gives space to unexpected scenes and commentaries. Steeped in the history and cultures of the places she visits, Zivancevic approaches the world as a multilingual surrealist poet or anthropologist might, with a distinct and inventive sense of detail and a mashup of intellectual and colloquial subject matter.

Zivancevic is also grounded in a Buddhist practitioner’s understanding of breath, which sustains the rhythm of her prose. The poems in SMRTi are sequenced from longest to shortest and give rise to a stylistically oblique autobiography, filled with slanted and implicit recounts of investigations into the memory of ex-lovers and the development of her own maternal sense.

Perhaps most importantly, Zivancevic’s travel writing is a welcome departure from the colonialist norm. Her travel-memoir language has little relation to any National Geographic documentary or hired tour mentality—the kind of habitual, dull bubble of travel where people never really leave their cultures behind while abroad. Citing the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, as the basis for her own way of being, she writes:

Italy, Serbia and India are not so different; at the same time they are just singular entities, as Deleuze would have explained when he was creating the notion of “singularity,” opposing the notion of “otherness” which purported the Euro-centrist theory. In other words, one should view the cultural differences not so much as the post-effect of “otherness” but as an act of exhibiting equal cultural entities. What follows is a possibility of observing all cultural singularities as equal participants in our mutual presence, rather than treating them as different relics of the past.

It is this egalitarian and transformative approach to otherness that contextualizes Zivancevic’s perspective throughout SMRTi as a series of memory-oriented and dream-connected aesthetic singularities. She writes about her travels to India: “I close my eyes . . . and for a second I fall asleep, float away, as if I am Sarasvati, the goddess of poetry, noise and music in person.” Such “invasive souvenirs” allow Zivancevic her the opportunity to notice “quick passing memories” or, in her words, “what’s the most important thing to remember while passing out.”

This line of thinking brings her back, while traveling to the south of India to attend a yoga retreat, to memories of Allen Ginsberg, with whom she studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, who also journaled about his travels to India. As she notes, “Ginsberg called this particular experience in poetry ‘the direct (subjective or objective) approach to an object,’” adding that Ginsberg got this notion from Ezra Pound, who decades earlier advocated this same poetics based not on the Western version of concept or “sentimentality of abstraction” but on “the direct observance of things, without a particular conceptualization.”

SMRTi thus not surprisingly operates with a vigorous dedication to William Carlos Williams’s poetics of “No ideas but in things.” Writing in this mode can lead to brilliant anthropological investigation; it can also work on an individual, psycho-emotional scale. Take this reflection about the deep south of India and its coconut trees:

In order to drink coconut milk you have to cut off almost half the coconut very fast. The movement has to be stable and rapid, and then only at that point you’d be able to get the sweetness of that milk. And so with our life, when we grow older and weary of it, we have to cut it off, throw the negative part out––so we can get deeper into something better.

Zivancevic’s chaotic coherence throughout SMRTi aligns masterfully with her own life changes, and her approach to change as the essence of travel is informative even in its most comic and distraught moments of revelry and remembrance. This philosophy is most apparent in her explorations of her dreams, especially her four major “karmic dreams.” In one of these dreams, Zivancevic describes an argument regarding the nature of feelings between German artist Joseph Beuys and “a French sociologist standing next to me” who responds to Beuys in this way:

“You probably imply here a certain anti-realism. Feeling defends itself by preventing itself from observing something which is unbearable, thus replacing it immediately by a certain illusion.“
“However, you must agree with me that the ‘feeling’ became immune from persuasion and the commercial propaganda imposed on it by that very man who creates perfect illusions but who does not accept the truth of a lie which reality feeds him.”

Dreams like these make Zivancevic question her reality as she travels in the south of India: “Am I dreaming all this, or am I really in a certain film, more precisely, am I in a film where I’m having a dream about cinematography”? Her cinematic dream continues, with scenes of the green fields of Lido changing into the “pavilion of ex-Yugoslavia,” land of her birth, where the subsequent history of civil wars “mingle with the stories of the killing of the population, torture and mutilation and all this repeated every ten minutes on the screen in an endless loop” like one may experience at any museum of fine art.

History as memory, as future, as travel, as illness, as dream, as museum installation—all these divagations allow the reader to realize that for Zivancevic, the ancient cults of the goddesses still exist, that they live in universes that thrive by a matriarchy we cannot apprehend. It is a universe in which parents and children appear in a story when their grandparents are still children themselves, or not yet born. In such a universe, it is possible to go, as Zivancevic did, “right back to the only landscape where I truly belonged, the country where any real family of mine lived––of poets, writers, philosophers and artists. And it is not important really where I live as long as these people are directly or indirectly in my company.”

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My Story of the Sea

Thanks to all who visited metro area bookstores in the days surrounding Independent Bookstore Day!

How It Works

How to Enter

Thanks and best wishes on your travels withthe Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport!

2024 Participating Stores

2024 Passport Sponsors

2024 Passport Prize Packs

2024 Passport Grand Prize

Bon voyage, bookstore travelers of the Twin Cities!

Thanks and best wishes on your travels with
the Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport!