Joan Cusack Handler
CavanKerry Press ($18)

by James Naiden

This collection of poems is an extended elegy to Joan Cusack Handler’s parents, who were immigrants from Ireland. The lives of the Cusacks were centered around work and belief in the Catholic god—and that meant the rosary, Mass attendance, and being dutiful about it. The poet’s mother didn’t last as long as her spouse, who lived to be ninety-nine. Cusack Handler’s lines are heartfelt bordering on sentimentality at times, but not enough to forget cleavages in any relationship:

Fifteen years she’s gone, there’s still
such regret—never enough
phone calls, secrets, girl talk;
she craved more; I kept her
safe an arm’s length away—that chasm
I constructed to mute the bite of her
silence, innuendo, accusation.

In strong, terse lines the poet conveys her own longing in the aftermath of a parent’s death. Much of this book contains elegies of forgiveness mixed with remnants of anger at both parents. In unrhymed couplets spread across the book’s wide pages, Cusack Handler evokes the frustration of loving a difficult person:

I catch myself praying again.
My mother’s failing.

How long have we left?
She has a right to what love

You can help me feel now, Lord;
she’d know it.

As the poet remembers and depicts her father, she also reflects on her own mortality. Now over seventy, both she and her husband face the inevitable. For this reader, this section is the richest, most moving part of the book. Naturally, the poet examines her own terror of death, and who could blame her? The lines between life and death can blur in an instant.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Swan Huntley
Doubleday ($25.95)

by Rebecca Clark

Debut author Swan Huntley spins a spellbinding novel in We Could Be Beautiful, over three hundred pages that explore wealth, trust, and the tumultuous nature of familial relationships. Drawing parallels to J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy and even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Huntley paints a haunting picture of the lives of affluent socialites.

We Could Be Beautiful tells the story of Catherine West, a forty-three-year-old small business owner in New York who seems to have it all: a large sum of money, thanks to her wealthy father; a beautiful house, complete with a maid and a masseuse; an immense collection of artwork from all over the world; and stunningly good looks, especially for a woman her age. There’s just one thing missing: love. Catherine desperately longs for a husband and a child to love. She wants a family more than anything in the world, assuring herself that she can only be truly happy once she has achieved this. When she unexpectedly runs into an old family friend at an art gallery, William Stockton, the pair’s whirlwind romance gives Catherine hope for her future. As Catherine’s relationship with William progresses, however, secrets about William and the West family begin to emerge, forcing Catherine to face a difficult dilemma.

Although the plot is somewhat basic, Huntley demonstrates her wit, strong attention to detail, and ability to leave the reader on the edge of their seat. Written from a first-person perspective, Catherine has a strong narrative voice and evokes empathy from the reader despite her excessive wealth. In the first few pages, Catherine laments “there was something about having money that made the incompleteness sharper,” that “people didn’t feel sorry for you” and “decided not to like you before they even knew you.” We eventually root for Catherine and feel sympathetic towards her and her situation; our hearts break for her when the economy forces her to close her small business, “Leaf.” While at times we may question her thought processes or intentions, our support for her happy ending never wavers.

Another theme emerges fairly early in the text: the complexity and intricacy of familial relationships. With her mother battling dementia and her younger sister falling victim to a crumbling marriage, Catherine must untangle the snarled web of family secrets completely by herself. With this extra layer added to the main storyline, Huntley paints a narrative full of twists and turns, upside-downs and turnarounds.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Tomaž Šalamun
Translated by Michael Thomas Taren
Black Ocean ($18.95)

by John Bradley

When Tomaž Šalamun died on December 27, 2014, the poetry world lost one of its most playful and fearless practitioners. This can be seen on every page of Justice, his sixteenth volume translated into English.

As this is the first work of Šalamun’s to appear after his death, it's tempting to see the book as a collection of his last poems. This isn't correct, however, as the book was drawn from "several collections and unpublished works," notes the publisher. Both titled and untitled, the 103 poems appear in six sections: "The Waterfall," "I Value My Semen," "Justice," "Red Mustang," "The Nightingale," and "Windy But Nice."

Šalamun’s droll humor abounds. In "Ma Charge N'est Pas Mon Moi, Mon Moi N'est Pas Ma Charge," the three-line poem proclaims:

I'm the greatest idiot in the world.
I'm the greatest blockhead.
I'm the greatest asshole in the world.

As usual, Šalamun subverts any expectation of a poet who takes himself too seriously. In "The Master," his experimentation becomes more even playful, as words began to break in unexpected places: "He op ens his mo uth. // He mis ses his glas ses." While some may wonder if the translator took liberties with the original poems, this is not the case, as the translator's note calls these "our translations.” Šalamun was quite involved with the English versions. The translations consistently charge the language, as can be seen in the second section title.

This title, "I Value My Semen," reveals a theme in the book. More so than any previous collection of Šalamun's work, sex enters the stage. In "Stripper," we learn how "the audience starts yerking on their seats." In "My Pricky Wants to Fuck! My Pricky Wants to Fuck!" sex is addressed as if a person or god: "O juice, I see you in yellow blinkers. / Caress a bit my little prick, caress me!" In an untitled poem that consists of only one line, the speaker tells us: "I see sex I eat sex roofs are soaked by rain." The speaker’s appetite halts at the view of the rain, nature’s fertility—or is this rain a projection of the speaker? At times, the sexuality can be disturbing, as when Šalamun writes of "fat decadents who day and night / sucked tender boys' penises."

While sexuality often roils the poems, mortality counters it. An untitled poem closes with "I don't want to die on the steppe, I don't go on / I want to be killed by a cicada, the earth's womb." There's comfort to be found in this odd disclosure. Likewise, mortality informs the most moving poem of the book, the untitled last poem. The tone here, unlike that throughout most of the book, feels somber:

Are you here?
I don't know, Unnamed, I don't know.
Look at me.
Look at me.
When you like.
When I die.
When it shines.
When my body is extinguished.
When I breathe.
When I go.

The shortness of the lines implies a struggle to breathe. The speaker later tells us, “When I’ll breathe, I’ll die,” and eleven lines later, “I breathed.” There’s ease and grace in this departure.

Justice leaves us with Šalamun at the top of his form, effortlessly creating incandescent poems. Given that he penned over fifty collections of his poetry, surely it isn't unfair to expect many more translations of Tomaž Šalamun’s work in the years to come? May they all be as vibrant as those found in Justice.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Gabriel Gudding
Ahsahta Press ($18)

by Garin Cycholl

In The Middle Ground, Richard White explores the history of Great Lakes tribes in the seventeenth century and attempts to recollect colonization’s “story of fragmentation.” In Literature for Nonhumans, Gabriel Gudding offers a poetic work that explores another empire, one defined by agri-industry and the slaughterhouse. Gudding approaches his subject through “zoopoetics,” which eschews the false beauty of pastoral and attempts to recover the othered perspective of the billions of animals sent through America’s disassembly lines. Centered in “an Illinois” defined by Chicago’s offal run-off, the book is a history of blood and loss.

Some critics might be tempted to class Gudding here simply as a ranting vegan or a poet-gadfly buzzing around inside poetry’s corpse. Similarly, claims could be made that Gudding is too strident as he explores Illinois as “a class of sub-apocalypse characterized by melancholia... [with its] notable absence of nonhuman animal.” Yet, in an age of digital invention, is there any other way to invoke what’s disappeared? The poet takes sight of the hinterlands: “Beyond the barrel the whole west was soft.”

Gudding underlines the self-deceptions at the heart of a culture hellbent on technological and apocalyptic vision, a city on a plowed furrow with invulnerable, padlocked seeds and heavenly-rinsed waters. He writes, “Illinois is the history of at least two kinds of bullshit confronting each other”: “the increasing nonmateriality of agribusiness” and “the sub-notion that Jesus is an eschatological drain.” The real result of that vision, for Gudding, is Chicago’s “Bubbly Creek,” the waterway that contains the blood and offal from the city’s South Side slaughterhouses. The waters there extend commercially and ecologically into “the denuded shade-sucking waste here called farmland.” The killing floor, including its ecological consequence and human disregard, is Gudding’s real subject here, “an industry of the distribution of indifference toward the suffering of other beings.” In the poems, this indifference plays itself out as antipastoral, an index of species not seen in Illinois since the sewage-rich flow of the Chicago River was reversed and sent southwest into the Illinois River: the “Pallid Owl . . . Horsebloodying Watersnake . . . Least Lefteye Prairie Shinbreaker . . . Arrogant Shawnee Toad . . . Ironcolored Hellbender . . . Redspotted Madonna . . . ”

The writing confronts our convenient, collective nostalgia that forgets whose blood was spilled on our patch of ground. Gudding extends the definitions of “who” and “our” here to reconsider the ecological and personal impact of humans’ use of nonhuman animals. In the poems, this empathy’s loss results in none other than the loss of ourselves. Gudding shakes the language into memory, recovering the written and sung line’s consequence of shared breath. It also reclaims the “common ground” of waters. He writes, “in the modern world rivers mostly constitute edges, borders, the lines between maps, in a sense rivers are not really there.” These waters become a vibrant “here” for Gudding, a shared and contested space in which empathy can be regained with this redefined “who.” These poems are a diagnosis of American imperial self-deception and anger, the empire as a disposable and violent space; a spot on that map, Gudding’s Illinois is brutal and clear-eyed.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Sara Majka
Graywolf Press ($16)

by Montana Mosby

Sara Majka’s debut novel, Cities I’ve Never Lived In, blurs the line between memory and fact in a dream-like prose that follows the narrator, a women re-evaluating her life after a divorce, through a series of fourteen sad stories. These works include the protagonist’s process of falling in love with an alcoholic, the reunion of a couple years after their daughter’s death in a car accident, and the title piece, which details a cross-country journey spent serving in soup kitchens. Though the protagonist traces her memories through New England and cities abroad such as Poland and Berlin, the cities act merely as settings to the important people in her life that she associates with said places.

The opening story involves the narrator staying in a friend’s apartment on the East Coast while they are away, where the narrator confesses, “I was full of the feeling of being nowhere, or in someone else’s life, or between lives.” This feeling is translated exceptionally to the reader as the narrator recounts the melancholic lives that she knows intimately. The tales include ones of estranged fathers, husbands, and childhood friends, carrying an emotional weight that leave the characters and readers alike with an empathetic discomfort.

Majka’s prose is written in a fluid form that makes these stories appear dreamlike, or as if we are watching them from the back of a theater, unable to see the actors’ faces but able to follow the plot and see colors moving across the stage. The narrator’s observations are often accompanied by personal thoughts and questions about what she is witnessing: “She didn’t seem to want to look away, in the way that shy people can have while examining things at parties. Is that why shy people are so curious?” This strategy works well with the melancholic tone of remembering people one is no longer connected to in the same way. Lack of quotation marks blurs the space between what is thought and said aloud, an aspect that adds to the subdued, dreamlike feel of the work.

Though beautiful and poetic, the book can become tough to get through due to its morose and nostalgic content. For this reason, Majka was smart to break the work up into stories, allowing the reader to set down the book when the content sits to heavy on the heart. Although you may have to set it down at times, Cities I´ve Never Lived In is definitely one to pick up.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Michael N. McGregor
Fordham University Press ($34.95)

by Linda Lappin  

Visitors to the Greek island of Patmos in the 1990s might have noticed a lean, lanky older fellow with baggy jeans and a goatee, sipping lemonade at cafés while chatting with fishermen or waiting in line at the post office with a bundle of letters in hand. Passing by his house atop the whitewashed stairs, you might have heard the tapping of his keyboard after lunch when he left the blue-shuttered windows wide open to let in the breeze and the cats. A reclusive person, but by no means a hermit, he kept up a copious correspondence with poets, editors, and admirers all over the world, publishing poems in venues from the New Yorker to New Directions. The islanders called him Petros, as in Saint Peter, the Rock, whom he had grown to resemble. His real name was Robert Lax. He was an experimental poet, lifelong confidante to Thomas Merton, and unofficial spiritual advisor to Jack Kerouac, and he traded a mainstream literary career for a contemplative life on the island where St. John had envisioned the Apocalypse.

This unconventional soul is the subject of an insightful and generous biography by Michael N. McGregor, Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. Inspiring and thought-provoking, it delves into questions still haunting us sixteen years into the new millennium: How to free ourselves from the materialism of our society? How to practice our faith and our art while keeping our bodies alive? The choices of Robert Lax followed the meanders of an all-consuming interrogation: how to live, love God, and be a poet, all at the same time. The answer lay in paring down the needs of daily life to the essentials, and stripping away the superfluous in his poetry to lay bare the innermost, authentic self.

McGregor traces Lax’ s origins as the son of Reform Jewish immigrants and his brilliant years at Columbia University where he forged friendships with Thomas Merton, Mark Van Doren, Ad Reinhardt, and many other artists and intellectuals. In this period, he also befriended a Hindu holy man in blue sneakers, Mahanambrata Brahmachari, who pointed out the path he was destined to take. No need to adopt a new religion if you feel a hunger for the sacred, the Hindu sage suggested: go deeper into your own tradition, which you will be better able to understand.

New York was a world hub of literary life in the mid 1930s, and Lax dallied in the bohemian atmosphere, reading William Blake and Christian mystics, talking philosophy and poetry with Merton until late into the night. Merton’s influence, the guru’s advice, and his own pondering of the Old and New Testaments would guide him toward a conversion to Catholicism a few years later. “The essence of religion . . . is to love the Lord with all your heart and all your soul and with all your mind or might and to love your neighbor as yourself,” he wrote. In 1943, Lax was baptized in the same church on 125th Street where Thomas Merton had been baptized five years earlier.

His early career touched all the milestones a young writer might dream of—a job writing for the radio, work as a reviewer for prominent newspapers, a position at the New Yorker, a stint in Hollywood as a researcher and screenwriter, employment at Time-Life, a teaching job in Chapel Hill followed by a prestigious fellowship—but none of this made him happy. At the New Yorker he was particularly miserable. The commercial aspects of the magazine and of Manhattan depressed him, he couldn’t hit the right tone to please his editors, and a war was on in Europe—it was 1941, and American involvement seemed inevitable sooner or later. As he brooded over the lack of peace and understanding in the world, his moral and social consciousness expanded. “All the world is wasting my time,” he wrote.  “I know there are only a couple of things worth doing. Things like feeding the poor . . . Here I sit in an office doing nothing.”

During the grim years of the war, Lax sought solace by putting his faith into practice, helping out in Harlem at a Catholic charity, and later moving to a tenement to be closer to the people he wished to serve. It was here, McGregor tells us, that he began to see that “poverty—of many kinds—was the necessary ground on which to build the life he envisioned.” When Merton withdrew into a monastery, however, Lax chose a different path: a short gig with a traveling circus.

The circus had played a key role in Lax’s personal mythology ever since his childhood, when his father used to take him to watch the tents being set up at dawn whenever a circus pulled into town. The intrusion of the exotic into his sleepy hometown—(Olean, New York)—the gaudy colors, glamorous beasts, sleek performers in sequined costumes—stirred an excitement he never forgot. Invited to tag along with another New Yorker writer on assignment to interview the Christianis, a family of acrobatic bareback riders, Lax was drawn into their world, making friendships that would last a lifetime.

The camaraderie of the circus people and the simplified needs of life on the road strongly appealed to the young Lax, as did living on the edge. The circus performers threw themselves with a passion into daring, physical feats while remaining exquisitely balanced, mindful in a whirlwind of movement. It was the perfect metaphor for the inner presence he sought in life, and also for artistic creation. In his acclaimed cycle of poems, The Circus of the Sun, Lax would celebrate his acrobat friends as God’s chosen people whose eyes were “portals to a land of dusk.” During his brief time with the circus, he developed and performed his own clown routine and even learned to juggle. Then it was back to reality and the same old problem. McGregor writes:

The need for an income was the only thing standing between Lax and the life he wanted—that and a deeply American idea implanted in him in childhood and amplified at Columbia: that public recognition of one’s success is tantamount to being successful. . . . He would come to see that the alternative to increasing income is decreasing need and that success is interpreted differently if one’s primary audience is God. In this, as in so many important matters, his model was Brahmachari. It is better to have faith that what you need will come to you than the assurance of money in the bank, he wrote in his journal . . .

After the war, Lax set out for Europe, armed with a Brownie camera and a portable typewriter, eager to test how far his faith would take him. In Marseille, he found himself sharing rooms with a band of petty thieves. He intentionally sought out situations that forced him to confront his fears. In the Alps and in Rome, he was welcomed at monasteries and Catholic sanctuaries. From this point on, “the wandering and wondering became his life.” Eventually his wandering led him to the east Aegean, to the island of Kalymnos, and later to Patmos.

On Kalymnos, Lax came to know the sponge fishermen, whose lives in some ways resembled those of the circus people: their daring dives required physical control and mindful presence; myth, festivity, and danger infused their lives. Observing the island people at their daily tasks, Lax believed they had “found their center.” Still, all was not ideal. After living in Kalymnos for a while and falling so much in love with the place that he felt married to it, he discovered, to his horror, that many locals presumed he was a spy, and despised him for it. The political turmoil in Greece from Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos’s take-over in 1967 to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 had created a climate that fostered such suspicions. On occasion his rooms were searched and his mail opened. One wonders what the authorities might have made of his vertical poems consisting at times only of colors, or a repetition of nouns, one syllable to a line. The poisoned atmosphere eroded his peace of mind, and with much regret he relocated to Patmos where he spent his final years.

Throughout his time in Greece, Lax’s literary reputation grew, partly thanks to his close association with Merton, whose autobiography and collected letters had made their friendship public, and partly to the recognition of his own achievements in avant-garde poetry. Shortly after moving to Greece in 1962, Lax had written in his journal, “This doesn’t sound like me at all, you say? Good. It’s cost me a terrible effort all these years to sound like me, and I’ve only now decided to give it up. That goes for looking like me, dressing like me, and preferring the kind of thing I prefer.”

Never once, though, did he consider giving up poetry. Expenses for international postage to send poems out into the world were as vital as food or fuel. “Reject slips are not supposed to build humility,” he wrote to poet Michael Mott, “Humility is truth: humility is recognizing your gifts as a poet and using them.”

Robert Lax divested himself of everything unnecessary in order to reach the place from which acts of true poetry might spring—that core of pure consciousness from which we witness the world. “Deeper than all the things he saw, was the watcher . . . deeper than all the things he heard, the listener,” he wrote, enjoining us to seek that same crystalline awareness and discover the poetry of our own lives.

 

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

by Stephen Burt

Rachel Gold is the author of two terrific young adult novels with trans girl protagonists: Being Emily (2012), a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Just Girls (2014). Both books won the Golden Crown Literary Award in YA for their years. Her latest novel, My Year Zero (Bella Books, $16.95), is about mental health, dating, making mistakes, being a young artist, and writing your own story; it takes place in Duluth, in Minneapolis, and at several locations in outer space, because that’s where the story within the story—the story the characters tell together—goes. Its point-of-view character, Lauren, falls for a charismatic girl named Blake who brings her into a circle of gamers, science fiction fans, and creative young people who may, or may not, be just right for her. Having spoken with Rachel while she was writing the novel, I asked her some questions about the completed work via email, being careful to avoid major spoilers, while still noting a few of my favorite parts.

---

Stephen Burt: What YA clichés or set pieces did you set out to avoid in My Year Zero?

Rachel Gold: I didn’t want to write that girl-meets-girl story where everything is pretty much perfect except that one of them has to come out. There’s nothing wrong with that story, but it’s been done well a few times already. A lot of queer and trans YA ends up being about identities, including books I’ve written, so this time I wanted to do a book that wasn’t about identity.

I was also avoiding the cliché of “person with bipolar disorder has a manic and/or depressive episode that drives all the conflict.” I wanted to upend the idea that the mentally ill character is the problem for the hero. That’s why early on in the story, and in the jacket copy of the book, it looks like it might go there—and then it so does not. It’s a story in which the character with a mental illness is helpful and heroic. But I didn’t want her to be unrealistically amazing either. Blake goes through rough spots. Of course Lauren is more of a mess, but I’ll leave it to the readers to discover just how much of a mess.

SB: The first scene in My Year Zero has a ton of foreshadowing: Lauren realizes that someone who seems dangerous isn’t dangerous, and there are nanite-like drones, and multiple escapes from authority . . . did you know you were doing all that? How should we feel about foreshadowing anyway? Are you consciously writing to be re-read?

RG: I was aware of maybe half of that. I did set out with that scene to create a microcosm of the themes of the book. Both with this novel and Just Girls, my second, I went back and wrote an early scene after I’d finished the draft to give readers a sense of what they’re in for. This is also why Lauren tells you on page one that the story is about sex. You get to choose if you’re on board for that or not.

That early scene was also key for showing readers that Lauren isn’t completely reliable about her world because she’s not feeling most of her emotions. I love foreshadowing. To have twists and surprises feel natural and inevitable, they need to be foreshadowed. You need to be getting a sense that you don’t have all the information and things are not as they appear.

In terms of re-reading, there’s definitely the hope that readers will come to love some of the characters almost as much as I do and want to keep spending time with them, whether that’s through re-reading or reading future work about them.

SB: I do! That’s a teaser for sequels, isn’t it? But let’s move on: there is a remarkable and pivotal scene in the last half of chapter twenty-one which maybe shouldn’t come up explicitly because of spoilers, but if you do want to talk about it, here’s your chance: did writing that scene pose different challenges than writing any other scene in the book?

RG: That was the first scene I wrote when I was thinking about this story. It’s the moment when Lauren’s life starts to break open. There’s a lot of confusion for her in that scene, but it’s also the pivot where she starts to realize what it feels like to be loved and seen as an adult.

I wrote and re-wrote it many times. I kept working out how to reveal things to the reader subtly that Lauren didn’t get yet. Plus, I wanted to keep it all awkward and wonderful at the same time. If I did my job right, that scene is surprising but it’s also roughly what you want to happen. Maybe not exactly that way, but with the results it leads to. And by the middle or end of the scene, you might be way ahead of Lauren in knowing what it means.

SB: What was the hardest scene for you to draft, or to rewrite? Can you say why?

RG: In my other novels, the heroes are very heroic right from the start. You like them, you know what they’re up to, you want them to win. With Lauren I wanted her to change so she had to start in a place that was hard to write at times.

For editing, there are two scenes toward the end with Lauren and Blake that kept making me cry. I’d have to walk away from the computer for a while. The scenes are very much not how it went in the real life events that inspired this novel—they’re how I wished it had gone. My therapist saw me a lot during the writing and editing.

SB: Do you ever imagine yourself entering a story and meeting your characters? What would you say to them? And do you ever imagine yourself entering other people’s stories and meeting their characters?

RG: I don’t go into their story, but I do bring them into my world. I’ve gone for walks with them and run errands. I played a lot of Hearthstone (an online card game similar to the game in the book) with Blake. We talk about infinities and she usually wins.

In Just Girls I did get to bring someone else’s characters into my story world: Kirstin Cronn-Mills let me borrow her characters from Beautiful Music for Ugly Children. We realized that our Twin Cities trans teens could reasonably know each other and decided they’d be friends, so her characters show up at a party. I love the interplay between different characters from different worlds.

SB: Like the best 19th-century novels, all your books have instructional components: Being Emily shows one way (there are many) to come out as a trans teen, one way (there are many) to be a trans teen’s cis ally, Just Girls shows a couple of right ways, and a couple of wrong ways, to handle gender diversity on campus, and My Year Zero can help youngish readers answer hard-to-answer questions around (a) mental health and (b) sex. But these instructional aspects never slow down the plot; we learn things because the characters need to know them, and we get to watch the characters find out. How do you craft this instructional aspect? Do you create incidents so that the characters have an occasion to learn something your readers need to know?

RG: Not at the incident or scene level—I try to create settings where characters are learning. In My Year Zero if I had a scene where “Blake explains bipolar disorder to Lauren,” that wouldn’t come out very well in the writing. She does explain it at points, but only where it naturally comes up in their conversations. There was never a specific scene planned where that would happen. I try to keep the learning character-driven.

I did spend a chunk of time trying to figure out how to get information about safer sex into the book and I couldn’t come up with anything that felt natural to Lauren. I put resources in the back because that information is so important.

I think in YA there can be this idea that we as authors have a responsibility to show teens the consequence of bad actions. But that’s not especially helpful or realistic. Sometimes bad actions don’t have punishing consequences, which is really good news for every person who’s made a mistake at some point in their lives.

That doesn’t mean you should, for example, have unsafe sex or unhealthy relationships. But if you’ve already done that, don’t beat yourself up about it. I didn’t want to write a story that shames people. I’ve made my share of mistakes and it’s important to know that you can recover from them, learn, grow.

SB: As I reread the book, I kept thinking about the metaphorical work done by zeroes and infinities, and I realized that both zero and infinity are the opposite of one; it’s as if Lauren—and Blake, and in another way Sierra—couldn’t be one thing, or couldn’t be the same thing all the time. Is that just me (since I can’t either), or did you put that there?

RG: Blake for sure can’t be one thing, which is why she loves zero and infinities. In the book she says she’s a transfinite number and describes Lauren as pi, which is both transcendental and irrational.

Lauren is much more singular, but she feels she’s coming apart into pieces a lot because she’s been so cut off from herself. Her character in the science fiction story is a shapeshifter in part because she’s had to change herself to fit in, to try to survive in a hostile environment. I think by the end of the book she’s much more settled into herself.

Sierra, well, I have a lot of opinions about her. Non-spoiler-wise I can say that she’s changing in response to the people around her. She’s changing to find better positions for herself. I’d see her as more of an algorithm than an infinity or a zero.

SB: What else should we know about infinities and zeroes?

RG: I highly recommend both Amir D. Aczel’s The Mystery of the Aleph, which I used for a lot of my infinities research, and Charles Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.

SB: LBGTQYA has become a way larger field even since Being Emily. Have those changes in publishing and in reader feedback changed what you want to do as a writer—either with this book or with future books?

RG: It makes it easier to go beyond the basic stories about wrestling with identity in a one-dimensional way. In 2012, when Being Emily was published, trans was such a new concept to a lot of non-trans people that it took most of the book to get a variety of readers to a common understanding. As people understand more about different identities, it’s easier to work with them in combinations. Plus we get to have a lot more stories featuring queer and trans characters who just get to be people instead of their identities all the time.

Reader feedback does influence what goes into future books. I like hearing what people loved and what they want to see that they haven’t seen. I do take requests. I can’t do a lot of them, but if a request intersects with something I’m knowledgeable about, I do what I can.

SB: The characters in My Year Zero are writing a science-fiction story together; MYZ contains parts of it. Did writing the story within the story i.e. the bits that Lauren, Blake, and others would have written—affect the development of the realist main story? Did you learn things about your characters by plotting or writing their space opera segments?

RG: Those sections were tons of fun to write, especially playing with their writing styles. Technically, it should’ve been less well written, but that would have made it less readable. I tried to put in enough mistakes and clumsy moments to make it sound real, but not so many that you groaned every time you got to it.

I didn’t learn as much about the characters as I did about me and my friends as teens. We were also writing a story together. I still had it in my basement and upon re-reading it and then creating a new story, I saw so many layers of how we used the story to interact with each other. That included how some writers of the story were using it to manipulate others or to say things they didn’t know how to voice in their real lives. At sixteen I didn’t see it, but now . . . wow. I worked that new understanding into the way Blake, Lauren, and Sierra use their story to express their changing feelings about each other.

SB: “I dug into the story more, even though some of it was pretty bad. I mean I’m no J. K. Rowling, but I can write in complete sentences,” says Lauren. First-person narration always poses challenges about voice and sophistication, since very few first-person narrators are as sophisticated as their authors (not a problem unique to YA); was keeping Lauren believably sixteen a particular challenge, since she also has to work as a writer, planning a story within a story? Or did her slightly snarky, disillusioned, prove-me-wrong voice come easily to you?

RG: In addition to reading my sixteen-year-old writing, I listened repeatedly to two books to create Lauren’s voice. I didn’t want her to sound too much like me. Those books were Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which was much funnier than I remembered, and Aisha Tyler’s Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation. Somewhere between those two was her perfect voice.

SB: “I wasn’t in my real life anymore,” Lauren says to herself; “I saw us as our characters.” Should your real-life readers try this at home? What do we get out of role-playing games and group stories, and is it the same thing we can get from reading single-author realist fiction?

RG: I recommend both, if you’re interested in them. I think single-author fiction brings you along more strongly. You still have some work of imagination to do in order to see and inhabit the story, but you can let it carry you to new places, give you experiences you might not have otherwise.

In role-playing and group storytelling, you have to drive your character. You’re less likely to encounter something completely new, but you’re mapped directly onto yourself, so I think it can change you in profound ways. One of the immense powers of storytelling together, especially when you’re young, is that you get to make up definitions and characters for yourself that are far outside the stock identities you might be getting from your culture.

SB: Do we all live in a group story, and is that story more realistic—more bound by convention and precedent—than it needs to be? Is part of growing up (whatever that means) realizing that we do write our own stories, but we don’t write them alone?

RG: Yes, it’s much more bounded than it needs to be! I wouldn’t say it’s part of growing up, at least not the way our modern culture understands that process. Kids can be extremely wise about their unbounded stories. But it’s definitely part of being a vibrant human being—having the skill set to write the story of yourself with others who are doing the same.

SB: Being Emily could take place in any of several dozen big towns an hour away from a metropolis, whether that metropolis is the Twin Cities or Chicago or Atlanta; Just Girls requires a liberal arts college campus, but it could be Kenyon or Carleton or Pomona. Do you think of My Year Zero the same way, or is it more clearly a Minnesota book?

RG: Can I say yes to both? I like that the novel feels strongly Minnesotan because the seasons impact Lauren’s choices, but I also want it to feel like it could have happened in your city.

SB: Let’s talk about ethnic belonging, and about communities. Lauren belongs, actually or potentially, to three: American Jews; the Twin Cities queer community, which she is sort of entering; and geeks, considered as an ethnic group. The last one seems the most important, for her, and the least theorized: is geek an ethnicity? or is it just like one?

RG: That is a huge question! I wouldn’t call geek an ethnicity, but it’s definitely a culture. I’d put it closer to queerness than to Jewishness simply because of the age when you get that identity and the resources you do or don’t have around you.

I grew up as a Reform Jew from a largely secular Jewish family, but in a very Christian suburb, so that identity of mine stood out starting when I was pretty young. Being Jewish was a weird thing in my friendship circle and elementary school. But at temple, I could see a group of people who shared that identity with me. I knew a place where I belonged.

When I started coming out as lesbian in my early teens, I didn’t know a single other lesbian. I’d never met someone else like me in that way. I’m so grateful that our local library had a few queer-positive books on the shelves—and even with that, the loneliness was crushing at times.

My experience of geek identity was in between those two. In junior high I was reading a lot of science fiction/fantasy and there was a great local community of teen geeks who gamed and partied together. We helped each other grow up geeky.

It’s important to add that this is just my experience. There could be geeks in the world who would say it’s an ethnicity for them, and queer people as well. There are so many different ways to be all these identities. It’s what’s great about the ever increasing diversity in YA fiction these days—you no longer get that one sweet YA lesbian romance that looks nothing like, for example, my train wreck of an early dating life. Readers have so many more opportunities to learn about other cultures and ethnicities, but also to see their experience reflected on the page and know they’re not alone.

Click here to purchase My Year Zero at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Just Girls at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Being Emily at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Sue Klebold
Crown Publishing ($28)

by Jason Zencka

The tension that animates Sue Klebold’s A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, could be conveyed with the simplicity of an elevator pitch: What if the mother of one of the most infamous school shooters in American history were a great mom? What if she were the kind of attentive, well-adjusted parent who knew the names of all the kids on her sons’ soccer teams, who didn’t let her children watch too much TV or eat sugary cereals, who geeked out on classic samurai movies with her sons and then “put them to bed with stories and prayers and hugs”? It’s as if Beowulf finally came face to face with Grendel’s mother, only to find her tearfully watching home movies and rummaging through a box of her son’s art projects.

If A Mother’s Reckoning disabuses a few readers of the notion that Dylan Klebold’s parents were abusive, incompetent, or negligent, it will be in part because it never feels as if this is Klebold’s primary aim. Rather, her book is a careful, sometimes obsessive investigation into the suicidal depression that Dylan hid from almost everyone around him, including his loving parents, until he and his friend, Eric Harris, shot to death twelve students, a teacher, and themselves at Columbine High School. How did Dylan’s mother not see it coming? The question takes her seventeen years and the whole of her book to answer, as she chases the son she thought she knew through her memory, his journals, and years of her own research into suicide and depression. It is a testament to Klebold’s thoroughness that her focus on what she calls Dylan’s “brain illness” feels more like clinical precision than a copout. As an FBI psychologist says late in the book, “Eric went to the school to kill people and didn’t care if he died, while Dylan wanted to die and didn’t care if others died as well.”

The journalist Dave Cullen traced how Harris’s cool psychopathic tendencies and Dylan’s smoldering depression became a tornado of violence in his persuasive 2009 book Columbine. Readers of Cullen’s book will find few revelations here. And yet, the bravery, compassion, and clear-headedness of A Mother’s Reckoning make it required reading. Klebold kicks another few dents in the media-created mythology of Columbine, with its trench coats and goth conspiracies—glib, sensationalist treatment that, many have argued, contributes to more mass shootings. More importantly, Klebold makes the reader want to grab their nearest son, daughter, or sibling, and say, “I love you so much . . . you are such a wonderful person, and [we] are so proud of you.” In fact, Klebold embraced Dylan in their home and said these words less than two weeks before her son became a killer.

Those who want to write off Klebold as self-deluding are free to—it’s probably the path of least resistance, and one she herself has occasionally fallen into in the years since the massacre. But Klebold, who is donating all author profits to mental health research, has worked hard to put such self-flagellation behind her. A Mother’s Reckoning reaches a harder truth: Sue Klebold loved her son totally, sincerely, and well. It was not enough.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Geoffrey Hill
Edited by Kenneth Haynes
Oxford University Press ($39.95)

by Adam Tavel

Having spent much of 2014 savoring Geoffrey Hill’s colossal Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012, I’ve come to accept that any review of it will falter as piecemeal commentary in the shadow of its achievement. At nearly a thousand pages, this stoic hardcover is as imposing as its contents, since it collects twenty-one books the poet composed over six decades. And yet, even a brief consideration of Broken Hierarchies seems worthwhile—particularly for American readers—since the cumulative brilliance and range of Hill’s oeuvre make him unquestionably England’s greatest living poet.

Hill takes all of Western thought—its moral dialogue, its metaphysical yearning, its ceaseless search for metaphor—as his subject, and casts it against the backdrop of an amnesiac world too often corrupted by indifference and too often aflutter with vogues to heed wisdom. One need only read his powerhouse sequence “Funeral Music” or his pastoral elegy “In Memory of Jane Fraser” to feel the force of his talents. Americans must look to Norman Dubie or David Wojahn to find a stateside poet who can wield such expansive diction and historical allusiveness without squandering pathos.

At first blush, Hill’s tautly metered verses about Our Lady of Chartres, or Cromwell, or the Pre-Raphaelites may seem starkly traditional in a literary age that champions irony and hybrid forms. In his essay “Englands of the Mind,” reprinted a decade ago in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001, Seamus Heaney wrote that Hill celebrated “his own indomitable Englishry, casting his mind on other days, singing a clan beaten into the clay and ashes.” But Hill is also the sly, prose-poem modernist who zooms through Mercian Hymns, the agitated citizen who fumes in A Treatise on Power, and the demure, earnest word-lover who attacks advertising’s corrosive influence on literature in his interview with The Paris Review.

This deeper examination of Broken Hierarchies reveals worldliness and visionary imagination. As his book’s title suggests, Geoffrey Hill’s best poems catechize hallowed themes and verities to see, as he once wrote, “how each fragment kindles as we turn it, / At the end, into the light of appraisal.”

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Edited by Gavin Parkinson
Liverpool University Press

by Laura Winton

Gavin Parkinson is a man on a mission, and not just a mission to Mars. His mission is to establish academic scholarship on Surrealism’s link to science fiction and to comics, a line that many fans of science fiction and/or surrealism have known about for years. Even the most casual observer of Surrealist art will note its fantastic nature of the art, the blurring of lines between machine and man; Surrealist films too are definitely science fiction, if retrospectively clumsy and hilarious in the effort (which may have been intentional). If anything, the connection between Surrealism and science fiction seems almost too obvious.

Nonetheless, Parkinson does an excellent job in the book’s introduction setting up the debate. He cites art critic Clement Greenberg, that arbiter and simultaneous villain of modernist and abstract art, as making the case in the 1950s that Surrealism couldn’t really be considered “high art” because it was too tied to popular media, therefore putting it in the category of “kitsch” instead. So anxious were academics to recover the good name of Surrealism and its place in the pantheon of high art that they rejected Surrealism’s link to popular forms such as science fiction. And apparently it was never spoken of again in academic circles, with the exception of a few oblique references here and there.

After laying the groundwork for his argument, Parkinson then gives others the opportunity to weigh in. The collection includes a mix of scholars from the U.K., the U.S., and Canada, including Joanna Pawlik, Julia Pine, and Jonathan Eburne, among others; each offers a chapter on, say, Magritte’s drawings and paintings, Salvador Dalí’s artwork and influence, or the Chicago Surrealists, who have always been interested in comics and pop culture as well as works of “high art” and literature.

Parkinson himself writes the first chapter, which explores Jules Verne and his influence on not only subsequent science fiction, but on Surrealist authors as well. Parkinson discusses how often Surrealist writers pay homage to Verne, pointing out that growing up in the late 19th century, the Surrealists would have encountered Verne’s books as children and been influenced by them at an early age. Again, it’s somewhat baffling to think there is any controversy over Verne’s contribution to the history of SF, but apparently there are “ongoing debates between SF scholars about this genre’s identity [due to] questions about whether SF is a specifically twentieth-century phenomenon.” Outside of academia, most people accept that there were a number of 19th century writers, including Verne, H.G. Wells, and Mary Shelley, whose writing prefigured, influenced, or was considered science fiction.

Importantly, these critical anxieties were rarely felt by the Surrealists themselves. Julia Pine’s chapter on Salvador Dalí, entitled “A Fantastic Voyage: Mapping Salvador Dalí’s Science Fiction World of Tomorrow” begins with a passage from Dalí’s book, Dalí on Dalí:

Dalí the Futurist is the most percussive and the most outstanding antiromantic, synthetic image ever applied to the demiurgic strabismus, Op Pop, and Pompier Art. (194)

Dalí, a relentless self-promoter, was obviously more concerned with his place in the popular imagination of his time than with whether or not Clement Greenberg considered his work to be “high art.” He is further quoted as saying that “art and science will have merged by 2001” and clearly, he sought to be a part of that movement. Pine goes on to discuss Dalí’s interest in all things “scientific” (although sometimes his version of science is a bit specious), including his space age wardrobe; she describes Dalí wearing a “gold leather space suit” that he wore while “posing inside his latest brainchild, an ‘ovocipede,’ a transparent plastic sphere that rolls merrily along while its operator sits comfortably (says Dalí) encapsulated.” The accompanying photo on the next page, courtesy of Time magazine, 1960, is, as they say, worth the price of admission.

In fact, all of the photo plates in this book are stunning, despite the fact—or maybe even because of it—that they are in black and white. Black and white photographs and drawings are often used in academic books because they are less expensive to reproduce, but in Surrealism, Science Fiction, and Comics they also give the book a pleasurable retro feeling, one that evokes looking at old comic books or science fiction movies from the 1950s and ’60s. There is a great mix here of classic Surrealist paintings, rarely seen drawings, comic art, and science fiction movie stills and drawings.

The key element that makes this book worthwhile is not the tired high art vs. kitsch argument, but the fact that it makes Surrealism relevant beyond the interwar years. For many people, Surrealism is seen as having existed for only a short time in Europe, petering out after World War II began—a belief which is decidedly untrue. André Breton was an ambassador for a living Surrealism until the day he died in 1966; this book brings Surrealism even further past Breton’s Surrealist Manifestos of the 1920s, and includes a number of “second generation” Surrealists as well as fellow travelers. The sharp attention to the contributions of the Chicago Surrealists, headed up by Franklin and Penelope Rosemount, also shows Surrealism as an active practice today. These, again, are narratives that practitioners already know but academics tend to overlook, making the effort here an important addition to art and literary history.

As Surrealism, Science Fiction, and Comics is an academic book, some of the language can occasionally be opaque, and there are moments when the argument being made seems much ado about nothing. But this book is generally a good and interesting read that anyone with an interest in Surrealism vis-à-vis the history of science fiction and comics will find useful; it has a wealth of references, with interesting footnotes and an extensive bibliography and index. Parkinson has done an admirable job adding details and signposts to the endless journey of Surrealism.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016