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JoAnn Verburg

WTC, 2003
© JoAnn Verburg; courtesy Pace Gallery

JoAnn Verburg’s current exhibit, Aftershocks, can be viewed at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through January 12, 2025. Click here for more info.

JoAnn Verburg received a BA in sociology from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MFA in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. From 1977 to 1979, she served as the research director and photographer for the Rephotographic Survey Project, traveling throughout the American West to replicate the same wilderness views made by 19th-century frontier photographers. While heading Polaroid’s Visiting Artist Program in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Verburg promoted technical innovation in the photographic field by inviting artists Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, and Jim Dine, among others, to experiment with new large format instant cameras.

Distinguished by its extraordinary sensitivity to the energy and sensuality of the natural world, Verburg’s own photographic work combines exquisite color, varied focus, and thoughtful composition to convey the beauty of its subject and setting. Often presented as diptychs and triptychs, her images of olive groves near her home in Spoleto, to which she has returned for over 30 years, envelop the viewer in a serene, dreamlike atmosphere and explore the passage of time both literally and figuratively. Verburg lives and works in Minneapolis and Spoleto, Italy. Visit her website for more info.

James Schuyler: The Absolute of Feeling

James Schuyler, poet, in his room at the Chelsea Hotel, 1983. Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark (© Mary Ellen Mark. All rights reserved)

by Claude Peck 

“Bliss is such a simple thing,” wrote James Schuyler. Also, “the wires in my head / cross: kaboom.” Navigating these opposite shores in a tumultuous life while leaving behind wondrous, one-of-a-kind poems was Schuyler’s mystery and his miracle.

Schuyler, hailed by critic Helen Vendler as “Whitman’s legitimate heir,” was born in 1923 and died in 1991; the decades since have seen publication of his Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), art writings (good), diary (better), letters (best), and a gem-filled volume of uncollected poems—but no full-length biography until now. Informed by research and interviews dating to the mid-1990s, Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35), is packed with detail.

Long may this remarkable “Life” live, and may it lead hordes to discover what David Lehman has called “the best-kept secret in American poetry.”

A Room of His Own

In September 1986, when he was sixty-three, Schuyler lived at the Hotel Chelsea, on the sixth floor, with French doors opening onto a skinny iron balcony above busy 23rd Street. Schuyler had agreed to let me audio-record him at home reading some of his love poems for a gay radio program I hosted in Minneapolis. (Only later did I learn of Schuyler’s stage fright, a phobia so severe that he had never given a public reading.)

Schuyler lived in conditions that seemed scandalous for a Pulitzer Prize winner and leading light of the New York School of poetry. His room at the fabled, shabby Chelsea had a tiny galley kitchen, a single bed, a few dusty houseplants, and a portable typewriter; books, typescripts, and vinyl records were strewn about; on the walls were paintings and drawings by such friends as Joe Brainard, Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, Anne Dunn, and Darragh Park.

As he sat in the room’s sole comfy chair, taking sips from a glass of light-brown iced coffee, Schuyler read slowly and clearly, his “esses” sounding a bit like “eshes.” He read eight poems from the “Loving You” section of The Crystal Lithium (Random House, 1972). I asked for a few more. He said no. Then he agreed to read “A Blue Towel” from Hymn to Life (Random House, 1974)—an ode to happiness about a day at the beach with a lover. It ends with “Quiet / ecstasy and sweet content” and wonders “why are not all days like / you?” The “you” is both day and lover, and the rhetorical question, from a man who survived so much chaos and sour misfortune, is supremely touching.

As I was leaving, we hugged and he called me “sweetie.” It surely was not a day like any other. We subsequently traded a couple of letters, but Schuyler and I never met again. In the five years before he died, his stage fright tamed, Schuyler gave nine public readings, starting in 1988 with a legendary SRO appearance at the Dia Foundation in New York City at which, Schuyler later exulted to a friend, “I was a fucking sensation.”

“No Juvenilia”

Aided by candid autobiographical revelations in the poems, Schuyler fans already know the highs and lows of his adult life. His early life is another matter. Schuyler wrote in his Diary in August, 1985, “Anyone who ever wants to write my biography will have his/her work cut out for her/him, since virtually no documentation or juvenilia exist.”

Given our tendency to sift an artist’s youth for the point where the weather shifted and they diverged from mere mortals on their path to greatness, it is gratifying to glean new details unearthed by Kernan about Schuyler’s early years.

He was born to Marcus James Schuyler and Margaret Daisy Connor in Downers Grove, Illinois, in 1923. His father, of Dutch ancestry, grew up on an Iowa farm until leaving home and becoming a printer and later a journalist with social-justice leanings.

Kernan points out that James worked on his high-school newspaper, perhaps emulating his father, and that “the dated, daily nature of newspapers is reflected in the great many Schuyler poems that bear dates and immortalize particular days.”

The poet’s mother, of English and Irish roots, grew up in Albert Lea, Minnesota. Her mother, Schuyler’s “gentle grandma Ella,” was fondly remembered in several later poems. James’s maternal grandfather committed suicide at twenty-nine by drinking morphine.

Margaret had a college degree and worked in Chicago and later in Washington, D.C., in jobs that aligned her with progressives and early feminists. She got into law school at the University of Chicago, though she never enrolled. Academically at least, James fell far from his mother’s tree. Though bookish in his youth (he memorized big chunks of Wallace Stevens), he was a poor student in high school and flunked out of Bethany College in West Virginia after less than two years. The turbulent 1960s and ’70s were his most productive years as a poet, yet this son of lefties rarely mentioned politics, civil rights, Vietnam, Nixon, or gay liberation.

When James was six, his parents divorced. His mother remarried building contractor Berton Ridenour (“an old book burner” and “a big phony,” per his stepson). By 1937, after a few years in D.C., the family had moved to East Aurora, New York, twenty-five miles from Buffalo. 

The college dropout enlisted in the Navy during World War II but went AWOL eight months later on a sex-and-booze bender in New York City. His “undesirable discharge” for homosexuality came after he spent three weeks at hard labor at a bleak military brig on Hart Island. Schuyler didn’t say or write much in later years about his abortive Navy career, which Kernan asserts was “not only traumatic, but shameful and embarrassing.”

John Ashbery and James Schuyler, Great Spruce Head Island, ca. 1968 (Photographer unknown, James Schuyler Papers, Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Department of Special Collections, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California)

To New York, Italy

The immediate postwar years found Schuyler in New York, working a dull job at the Voice of America and taking up with Spanish Civil War hero Bill Aalto, a strapping Finn with a violent streak. A modest inheritance from Schuyler’s paternal grandmother financed the couple for two years in Europe, mostly in Italy, where they shared a house in Ischia with W.H. Auden and his partner, Chester Kallman. Schuyler typed poems for Auden. He learned enough Italian to tackle some translations of Giacomo Leopardi, whose poems Schuyler loved. Visitors to Ischia included Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Picasso biographer John Richardson (with whom Schuyler had “intense, rough sex” on a terrace).

Schuyler and Aalto split after nearly five years together, and Schuyler returned to New York in 1949. Writer Anatole Broyard, in his vivid memoir Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir  (Crown, 1993), recalls this as a time when rents were cheap and “the streets and bars were full of writers and painters and the kind of young men and women who liked to be around them.”

Crucially to the future of American letters, Schuyler came to know a lot of people in this free-wheeling creative coterie, but two were of special importance: “James Schuyler’s close friendships with John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, which began in early 1952 and lasted, in O’Hara’s case, for most of the decade, and in Ashbery’s to the end of Schuyler’s life, determined the direction of his life and work.”

Schuyler loved the early works of John and Frank (both Harvard grads); Schuyler wrote that, in turn, they “made me feel that I wasn’t just a poet who was being tested but that I was a poet”—the encouragement was “the most important moment of my life.” The three men—all gay but with varying degrees of openness about it—along with Kenneth Koch and Barbara Guest became known as the New York School of poets.

The “school” was at best a loose alliance, with clear differences among its main writers, but united by friendships, time and place and a shared love of painting, ballet, movies, music, cartoons, collaboration, and a “manner” that was anti-didactic, conversational, miles from the high seriousness of Pound and Eliot, more like “jazz that someone like Prokofiev might write.”

Schuyler’s thrill at meeting Ashbery and O’Hara did not prevent a major setback soon after, when he had a manic episode that led to his first psychiatric hospitalization, a stay that lasted ten weeks. While there he wrote the early short poem, “Salute,” which opens with a statement-question: “Past is past, and if one / remembers what one meant / to do and never did, is / not to have thought to do / enough?”

Kernan argues that A Day Like Any Other is not intended as a critical biography, though the book contains thought-provoking discussions of a handful of key poems (“The Crystal Lithium,” “Dining Out with Doug and Frank”). Of “Salute” Kernan points out the irony of a poem written in a mental hospital with a title that in Italian means “health.” I also can’t help hearing in the line “to do and never did” an echo of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be.”

Schuyler’s 1950s mixed sex, love affairs, and art with prodigious amounts of drinking. He and the charismatic, hyperkinetic O’Hara shared an apartment, jobs at MOMA, and a hectic artistic and social life. Schuyler was gathering the stuff of poems, but not writing many of them.

With his boyfriend, pianist Arthur Gold, Schuyler returned to Europe for several months. He met lifelong friend, Fairfield Porter, as well as other painters, chief among them Grace Hartigan and Freilicher. He wrote the novel Alfred and Guinevere (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1958).

It was an era when poets wrote about painters, and painters painted their poet friends. Collaborations flourished. In 1955, Schuyler began contributing short reviews for Art News magazine. He and Ashbery co-wrote, line by line over many years, the comic novel A Nest of Ninnies (Dutton, 1969).

Instability

In addition to his precarious mental state (variously diagnosed as severe depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia) Schuyler was “precariously housed for much of his life,” a fact reflected in many poems, as noted by perceptive British scholar Rona Cran. Yet he is rightly celebrated as a superb poet of place whose poems often begin with the view out his window, whether urban, suburban, rural, or psych ward. In 1959, for one example, Schuyler fled a Hamptons rental after a breakup, couch-surfed in Hoboken and the East Village, then hacksawed his way into the apartment on E. 49th Street that he once shared with O’Hara, which by then was condemned, padlocked, and roach-infested.

Housing-wise, Schuyler was ostensibly better off when, beginning in the early 1960s, he lived outside New York City: in Southampton with Porter, his wife Anne, and their children, and at the Porter family summer home on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine. Along with a Vermont house owned by friend and writer Kenward Elmslie, these bucolic places fueled the poet’s endlessly inventive, original way of writing about flowers and trees, the ocean, weather, and light. Though remembered as his happiest years, they were also fraught, as Fairfield was in love with Schuyler, creating myriad complications.

After the Porters finally asked him to leave in the early 1970s, Schuyler lived in a succession of crummy New York rooms, including one where he started a fire in bed, burning himself so badly that he required skin grafts.

At a New York bathhouse in 1971 Schuyler met and began an intense affair with Robert Jordan, a Brooks Brothers salesman with a wife and kids in New Jersey. Liked by few of James’s friends, “Bob” nonetheless inspired Schuyler’s tender, vulnerable “Loving You” poems.

Despite chronic poverty, well-documented mental breakdowns, and sketchy housing, Schuyler’s writing flourished in the 1970s, with the novel What’s For Dinner? (Black Sparrow Press, 1978) and four of his five poetry volumes published between 1969 and 1980. This output included the masterful long poems that anchored his final four books.

In his last twelve years, thanks to a network of friends, a trusted shrink, a caring physician and a multiyear stay at the Chelsea, Schuyler experienced more stability—seeing old and new friends, eating out, enjoying New York.

Schuyler mostly narrates his poems from a condition of gratitude. Dark-themed poems are notably rare. How was it that a man “so tormented by demons,” as David Lehman put it, “would be, in his best poems, so skillful at conveying what happiness feels like?”

Kernan’s essential, readable, sensitive biography offers keen fresh insights but doesn’t fully answer this seeming anomaly. For that, we can with robust pleasure return to the poems, as in “Afterward,” where Schuyler gives a disarmingly simple account of the end of two recent hospitalizations:

                               It’s
funny to be free again: to
look out and see 
the gorgeous October day
and know that I
can stroll right out into
it and for as long as
I wish and that’s what I
do. This room needs flowers.

Editor’s Note: The following poems, read by James Schuyler in his room at the Hotel Chelsea, were recorded by Claude Peck on 9/20/1986. They are copyright Claude Peck and used by permission.

“Letter to a Friend: Who is Nancy Daum” from The Crystal Lithium (1972)

“A Blue Towel” from Hymn to Life (1974)

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Ingenious

A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist

Richard Munson
W. W. Norton & Company ($29.99)

by Rasoul Sorkhabi

“Ingenious” is how the famed polymath Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) referred to industrious persons, including those in his own family. In sixteenth-century England, the Francklynes were farmers who owned land (though they were not aristocrats); Benjamin’s grandfather and great uncle were blacksmiths and his father, who sailed to America in 1683 at age twenty-five, ran a business making soaps and candles in Boston, where Benjamin was born in 1706—the fifteenth of seventeen children in the family. According to author Richard Munson, Franklin used the word “ingenious” seventeen times in his own autobiography; Munson has used it as the title of his new biography of the founding father that focuses on Franklin as a scientist.

Munson, whose previous books include biographies of Nikola Tesla and Jacques Cousteau, has reintroduced Franklin to our political discourse at a critical point in U.S. history: 2026 will mark the 250th anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. The political history surrounding this landmark event is of course well known, but people often forget that the founding fathers were supportive of science and technology, believing them crucial to the progress of the nation. Franklin, in fact, was the first American widely celebrated for his science and inventions. As Munson states early in the book, he “faced the world with wonderment and systematic study—offering rich perspectives on the Enlightenment and the American experiment.”

Ingenious opens with Franklin’s iconic kite experiment in 1752; it was the culmination of his work on electricity and lightning. Franklin did not possess the modern understanding of electrons and electromagnetic radiation, though he was the first person to show that electricity is a flux from a “positive” to a “negative” charge. He also coined the term “battery” after building one by using multiple Leyden jars (the first device that could store an electrical charge), and after demonstrating that lightning is a form of electrical discharge, he invented lightning rods to protect high buildings from fires. Franklin’s 1752 book Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America was a pioneering work highly popular in Europe, and arguably inspired others to continue to research electricity and develop the applications we all use today.

Coming from a poor family, Franklin did not have a full school education. He was, however, a voracious reader (his home library shelved 4,000 books) and a clever experimenter; Franklin’s first invention, according to Munson, was swimming flippers to speed up his favorite sport. After fleeing from Boston to Philadelphia at age seventeen, Franklin established himself as an innovative printer and a popular publisher (of the Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanack). His social inventions in Philadelphia blended the public good with his private gain; his Leather Apron Club and subscription library service were valuable contributions to the area’s intellectual life but also placed him at the cultural heart of the city. Theologically Franklin was a Deist, but he mingled freely with various religious denominations from Quakers to Freemasons. His appointment (with a trivial salary) as Postmaster of Philadelphia enabled him to sell his newspaper across the colonies and to source varied content. Franklin had a salesman’s sense for people’s needs and tastes; in Poor Richard’s Almanack he included catchy maxims (e.g., “Haste makes waste” and “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”) to turn a yearly informational resource into a publishing phenomenon.

Franklin conducted his kite experiment at age forty-two, exactly halfway through his life; by then he was a wealthy man and could retire to devote the rest of his life to science and diplomacy. The middle chapters of Ingenious cover the second half of Franklin’s life and depict a man in his full glory—as a world-famed scientist and inventor, as well as a first-rank American diplomat who played a leading role in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, an alliance with France in 1778 (which Franklin’s popularity as a scientist in France helped cement), a peace treaty with Great Britain in 1783, and last but not least, the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Franklin’s life spanned almost the entire eighteenth century. Ingenious reveals his paradoxical but good-spirited personality: He loved celebrity, and yet in his last will, he declared himself simply as “Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, printer.” He refused to seek patents on his inventions because, in his own words: “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.”

Franklin’s death in 1790 in Philadelphia at the age of eighty-four was mourned in the U.S. as well as Europe. Munson remarks that perhaps the most symbolic tribute was given by the French printmaker Marguerite Gérard, who created an etching (“To the Genius of Franklin”) which portrayed old Ben as a Zeus-like figure and bears a Latin caption that can be translated as follows: “He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”

Ingenious ends by discussing how perceptions and writings about Franklin’s life and legacy have changed over time. Many have criticized Franklin because he owned slaves, was a womanizer, and fathered a son out of wedlock. Generations facing economic depressions have cherished Franklin’s virtues of industry and frugality. Political historians have highlighted Franklin’s key role as a founding father, and historians of science have focused on his scientific achievements. Readers interested in learning more about the latter may also find Benjamin Franklin’s Science (Harvard University Press, 1990) by I. Bernard Cohen and The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (Basic Books, 2006) by Joyce Chaplin highly informative. Even (or perhaps especially) after 250 years, Franklin’s is a great life story to read.

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As Necessary as Cupcakes: An Interview with Rachel Trousdale

Photo by Nick Beauchamp

by Stephanie Burt

Rachel Trousdale is a poet and scholar; her critical studies to date include Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination (Palgrave, 2010), as well as the essay anthology Humor in Modern American Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2017). Her debut full-length collection of poems, Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem (Wesleyan University Press, $15.95), was selected by Robert Pinsky for Wesleyan University Press’s inaugural Cardinal Poetry Prize. Inhabited by crows, yetis, coral reefs, and aliens, these poems playfully examine the intensity and conflict of romantic love, the entropic joys of parenthood, illness and grief, and the ways our physical loves and intangible losses teach us responsibility to the world around us and illuminate our most important relationships—whether with other humans, wild spaces, or works of art. 

Stephanie Burt: Often your poems make me smile, or grin, or laugh; they make unserious, loving requests, or playful allusions, or absurd leaps. You’re known as a scholar and critic of humor in modern poetry. How does your scholarship on the topic speak to your poems that embody it?

Rachel Trousdale: My scholarship focuses on laughter that comes from fellow-feeling. While we can laugh for a thousand reasons—embarrassment, confusion, aggression—the laughter I’m most interested in comes when you suddenly recognize part of yourself in someone else. I’m also a big fan of the improvisational comic riff, which gains its humor from surprising variations on a theme; when this works, it can make a whole new pattern snap into shape. When my poems are funny, I hope it’s because they’re doing one of those things—not so much playing with comic incongruity as finding surprising congruences.

SB: In “Optics Lab,” you write, “That’s how you make sestinas—with a laser.” When and how do you see your own poems as made things, as craft objects? When and how do you see them as kinds of speech, as communication in time between persons, instead? Is there even a difference?

RT: I like to make things with my hands. I bake bread; I used to make pottery; I’ve recently started sewing. The purpose of baking bread is to nourish and to give pleasure, and even if I eat the whole loaf myself, the bread can achieve this goal—but it’s better when it’s shared, because if I give slices of bread to my kids and they slather them with butter and eat them, I get the additional pleasure of watching people I love enjoy the food, and the nourishment takes more forms.

It’s the same with poems. If I write a poem and am satisfied with it, that is probably because I’m happy with it as a made object: its parts fit together in a way I find pleasing. So in that sense, I think all my poems are craft objects, even if the “craft” elements are not always the kind of thing you’d talk about in, say, a craft class. But I’m happiest when the poem is also talking to someone who is not myself, whether that someone is a real-world reader or the ghosts reading over my shoulder. Of course, the best of all is when you get a response.

SB: Your life has led you to many places, and to more countries than most of us get to visit. How have those travels informed your approach to writing poems?

RT: One of the things travel teaches you is to question your premises. When you’re in an unfamiliar place, especially somewhere you don’t speak the language, questions as simple as “Where is the coffee?” and “How do I get a ride to this address?” can turn into research projects or philosophical enquiries. Did you know that building numbers in Tokyo are assigned by the order in which they were constructed within a given block, rather than by their relative locations? So the simple task of trying to get across town turns out to be a challenge to your sense of order and structure. I hope some of my poems do something similar.

SB: Your lovely and gentle“Self-Portrait as Noble Pen Shell” constitutes a response to which of the following: a. Keats’s “To Autumn”; b. Marianne Moore’s “The Paper Nautilus”; c. Marianne Moore’s “The Fish”; d. William Carlos Williams’s “By the road to the contagious hospital”; e. Come off it, Stephanie! Please select one and only one answer. Explain the reasons for your choice.

RT: The answer is absolutely B, which stands for Bizarre, because it is bizarre to write a response to “The Paper Nautilus” that (on the surface) lacks mothers and children. But they’re both about protecting something fragile, and the threat of starvation, and hope.

SB: Works for me. What’s the difference between writing (and revising) a prose poem and a lineated poem? Do their shapes work, for you, in different ways? How do you know when a prose poem is finished?

RT: There’s no room for talkiness in a prose poem, because if you let extra words in, it starts behaving like regular prose. And you don’t have the luxury of line breaks as a way to build in surprises and double meanings, so you have to make the most of other opportunities for multiplicity. I find prose poems much harder to write and am somewhat surprised to discover how many I’ve written, because you can’t depend on the form to keep your focus.

SB: Some humor sounds Jewish. Some Jews sound humorous. Almost all Jews have a humerus. You and I identify as Jewish. Does some of your humor, to you, sound Jewish? Or Jewish American?

RT: My sense of humor is probably the most Jewish thing about me. I learned to love puns, irony, comic critique, and playful rhyme from family members like my songwriter uncle John Meyer, from Sondheim and Gershwin lyrics, and from the inspired, anti-authoritarian nonsense of the Marx Brothers. “Old Joke” in particular isn’t just a Jewish poem, it’s a New York Jewish poem. But as with the Marx Brothers, you don’t have to be Jewish to get the jokes; what I think of as the Jewishness of my humor isn’t a set of references so much as a set of comic techniques—particularly the ironic deflation of pretense and the free-associative crescendo.

SB: Your astonishing and generous “Syllabus” constitutes a response to which of the following: a. The dearth of poems about raising and caring for more than one child; b. Robert Frost’s “Directive”; c. Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”; d. The emotional challenge of raising children during the reign of our current Mad King; e. That Robert Hass poem with the blackberries that absolutely everyone used to read until we got tired of it (complimentary);  f. Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt’s “The Palace-Burner.” Please select only one answer, and please justify your choice.

RT: The letters b and d are mirror images of each other, so if I choose one, the other is implied. When “Directive” walks you up the mountainside, it’s walking you backwards, past all those slowly closing cellar-holes, to a lost play house. In “Syllabus,” my little family of four is all walking together away from the house, the rest of the way up the hill, to learn the names of things and what you can eat. “Directive” is about nostalgia, looking back to the children; “Syllabus” is—I hope—about looking forward, with the children, toward a future where we will have to know far too much about Mad Kings but where there will also be blackberries.

SB: Well now I’m alarmed, since Robert Frost’s “Directive” is the scariest poem in the American language: dude wants to kill us. You, however, can save some of us! No, really, you can. Please don’t feel you should have to justify anything in the following answer, but can you talk about justifications, defenses of poetry, and the moral charge (or lack of it) underlying your delightful verse and prose?

RT: Some time in the fall of 2020, after the summer of shutdowns, the small bakery near our house reopened, and we were able to go in again and buy cupcakes. It completely changed my relationship with art and what art is for. My spouse and I had spent the previous few months holding on by our teeth, working full-time jobs from home with no childcare for our preschool-aged children and worrying about our elderly parents. And now here was a tiny transaction we could make, in person, that resulted in pure, unambiguous pleasure. It was the best thing to happen to us for months. And I thought: I want my poems to do this for people—I want to make moments of definite happiness. Because joy isn’t trivial, even if the things that make it can seem silly. Good poems aren’t all cheerful, and they mostly don’t have rainbow sprinkles on top, but they are just as necessary and important as cupcakes.

SB: Most of your references in Five-Paragraph Essay speak to the sort of literature you might expect an English department to teach, from King Lear to Robert Frost and WCW. You’ve also read a great deal of non-realist fiction, including work in (or else adapted from) Russian literature as well as folk and fairy tales. Do any of those kinds of writing and storytelling influence these poems in ways that we might not see?

RT: It’s funny—when you asked about Moore earlier, it made me realize that many of the overt Norton Anthology-style references in this book are to poets I want to argue with. I’ve been tempted to offer a prize to the first student who correctly identifies the three obvious Shelley references in the book. (The prize is homemade brownies. Email me. Undergraduates only.) But Shelley isn’t one of the poets whose books I open when I read for pleasure or company—he’s part of the Big Intellectual History that goes into the classes I teach—whereas Keats is much harder to find in my book, although his poems are the ones I actually recite to myself for comfort at the dentist. No one has influenced my work more than Moore, but her presence is less obvious.  

And yes, I read non-realist fiction of many stripes, including Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Andrew Lang’s rainbow of fairy books. Rushdie and Bulgakov, for me, perform some of the same transformative associative leaps I admire in the Marx Brothers, or in the poetry of Harryette Mullen—creating patterns which combine long-established meanings and references on the one hand with the fruits of coincidence on the other. And, as a counterweight, a fair amount of science writing: Oliver Sacks, or Einstein’s general-audience book on relativity, which, despite their totally different content, sometimes follow a similar process of discovery.

SB: What’s the best Andrew Lang fairy book? Or the right first one for people who never got given Girls’ Books when we were girls? Your magnificent and open-ended “Narrative of the Tribal Bard” responds to which of the following: a. Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”; b. Kenneth Koch’s “Mending Sump”; c. Recent scholarship on the high intelligence and social behavior of crows; d. Watership Down; e. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls”; f. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Five Ways to Forgiveness. Please do NOT try to justify your choice.

RT: None of the above: “Narrative of the Tribal Bard” is a direct translation from the cawing of the crows in my yard. I should probably have disclosed in the notes that I don’t actually speak Caw and am working entirely from Corvo’s New Standard Caw-English Dictionary, but I think I’ve captured the essence.

SB: I’m not going to trust any dictionary compiled by Baron Corvo, but OK. Your pentameters and your Sapphics sound fluently conversational, and your free verse (like Bishop’s, Hayes’s, MacNeice’s) plays off against the background of the pentameter. Can you tell us something about your metrics, or about your relationship to received metres?

RT: The first poems I wrote were all strictly metrical, and like a lot of us, I find meter useful in part because it reminds me to find the right word. I’m glad I didn’t start by writing free verse, because the years I spent writing only in meter helped me learn to concentrate. But that’s an answer about meter as method of composition, as opposed to meter as a formal element of poetry.

SB: You get to spend the next six months anywhere on Earth, so you can write your next book of poems there. You can’t take your kids or loved ones, but they will not know you’re gone, due to faerie time distortion; you’ll get back home, from their perspective, just two days after you left, so it’s not irresponsible to go, and you don’t have to pick your location with their welfare in mind. Where do you go, and why? How does the site affect the poems you write next?

RT: Fortunately, faerie time distortion also distorts space, which means I can find an isolated mountain cabin within twenty minutes’ walk of a major research library. I would like to go there, please. I will arrive with a clear proposal for a manuscript about the local birds’ foraging behavior, but when the six months are up I’ll discover that instead I’ve written a series of love poems to my absent family in the form of a medieval recipe book featuring ingredients I was able to raise in the little garden behind the cabin.

SB: Sometimes I think you and I share tastes and preferences and then I run into an answer like that, which reminds me that even our close friends contain Bizarre Hidden Depths. Watch out for Robert Frost, who might be hiding in the sugar bushes. What’s in the recipe book? More seriously, or perhaps less seriously: What’s next for your poetry?

RT: I’ve been working on a sequence of poems giving the answers to questions asked of an imaginary advice column. Just the answers, not the questions. Galileo writes in for help, and several characters from fairy tales. One of the poems, “Dear Ilsabil,” made it into Five-Paragraph Essay, but I think the rest may want to be a chapbook, or the skeletal system of a longer manuscript. But more generally, I want to write things I haven’t read yet.

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

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Not Even the Sound of a River

Hélène Dorion
Translated by Jonathan Kaplansky
Book*hug Press ($20)

by Alice-Catherine Carls

The St. Lawrence River has shaped the history of Québec from the end of the ice age. Its banks are places of solitude, solace, and remembrance; it feeds, nurtures, loves, kills, buries, and memorializes, reducing human time to surface glimmers. A river of immigrants’ arrivals and soldiers’ departures, the majestic waterway dominates Hélène Dorion’s 2020 novel Pas même le bruit d’un fleuve, whose title she borrowed from a poem by Yves Bonnefoy to highlight the river’s impact on one family.

In Dorion’s multigenerational tale, the river first takes away Eva’s fiancé, who dies in 1916. Her daughter Simone’s fiancé, Antoine, having lost his Irish immigrant parents in the sinking of the Empress of Ireland in 1914, subsequently drowns in the St. Lawrence while sailing in 1949. Simone’s life seemingly belongs to the river—and her daughter Hanna inherits the proverbial fog of grief perpetuated by family secrets when Simone passes away. Just as Simone wrote poems to assuage her grief, Hanna embarks on a journey to reconstruct her mother’s emotional survival, swimming against tide and time to piece together a story laden with lilt and gravitas.

Dorion cites numerous European poets, including Rilke, Baudelaire, and Kathleen Raine, to get at the profound currents connecting these three generations of women. A poem by Hector de St. Denys Garneau, a poet and painter who died in 1943 at age twenty-one and is credited with sparking the Quebécois literary renaissance of the 1950s, similarly echoes a quatrain by Dante in which the Italian Renaissance poet compares the renewal of life to the rebirth of a tree in spring. And what is life if not a series of renewals, some happier than others? Dorion’s previous novel translated into English by Jonathan Kaplansky, the autobiographical Days of Sand (Cormorant Books, 2008), offers a clue about the rootedness of this remarkable feminine solidarity: “My mother’s footsteps, my grandmother’s footsteps—from the lake to the ocean, by way of the river separating them, how many of these traces does my memory carry?”

Kaplansky’s translation is as fluid and majestic as le fleuve St. Laurent or as the musical pieces Dorion recommends in a note at the end as companions to Not Even the Sound of a River. Besides faithfully rendering the rhythms, sounds, and meanings of Dorion’s sentences, Kaplansky’s word and phrase choices sharpen details and images, making them resonate further. This “found in translation” effect confirms Kaplansky’s deep affinity for Dorion’s smooth transitions from nature to emotions to philosophy and back, a style that has earned her wide recognition and readership in the Francophone world. Anglophone readers now have an excellent opportunity to catch up with Not Even the Sound of a River.

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

The Ocean in the Next Room

Sarah V. Schweig
Milkweed Editions ($18)

by Walter Holland

In The Ocean in the Next Room, Sarah V. Schweig captures the flat affect of our digital lives by using a brand of oddly understated language to reflect uncertainty and dissociation. Drifting through mindless work routines and instances of first-world guilt, the collection moves through social notions of packaged enjoyment and family relations with an estranged viewpoint. Distracted, preoccupied, and ruminative, the speaker of these poems hovers in a twilight state between her laptop screen and the daily realities of social and environmental collapse.

A quiet observer, the speaker watches her daily performance of gender and transactional relations with her husband, a man who is paradoxically intimate and unintimate. Her deadpan narration about their relationship in the long poem at the heart of the book, “Unaccompanied Human Voice,” suggests a destabilized America:

When he lies down and blindly reaches for me,
I think of the economy of time. It’s thought

we’re grateful to lease our lives away, or should be.
Into our work-issued computers, we empty out

our minds. My husband and I pour our work
into our work-issued computers, connecting

and verifying through a virtual private network
neglecting to look up and at anything for hours.

Happy to be here! Happy to help! No problemo!
Just wanted to circle back on this! Can you circle

back on this? Can you approve my PTO?
Thanks!

Masterfully repetitious, the poem’s technologic think-speak and snatches of social banalities reflect a kind of human communication on autofill. But Schweig isn’t dependent on technology to power her ironic look at our blunted senses and civic malaise; “Waves,” for example, is another kind of treatise on the behavior of American privilege, alienation, and neurotic self-examination. In it, Schweig describes an ethically grotesque Caribbean vacation:

Here we are, in Barbados, at Waves Hotel and Spa.
We are three, now, with an infant son.
Every other guest is British, burnt pink and smoking.

The literal is all that’s left.
Our son cries, and for a few long seconds
I do nothing, keep writing.

Everyone has a penchant for cruelty, given opportunity.
Between feeds, I order a “mango breeze colada.”
By the highway men selling coconuts wield machetes.

The poem’s refrain, “The literal is all that’s left,” drives home the way our algorithmic culture has destroyed the mythic and the romantic, the analog and the figurative. As we enter the dawn of the AI era and its potential dehumanizing effects, The Ocean in the Next Room sounds the age-old warning about solipsism in the language of our times.

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Thank You for Staying with Me

Bailey Gaylin Moore
University of Nebraska Press ($21.95)

by Nick Hilbourn

An essay collection both poignant and plainspoken, Bailey Gaylin Moore’s Thank You for Staying with Me is concerned with forgetfulness: how she is pushed to forget and re-remember traumatic events in her past.  As Moore writes in a foreword: “For a long time, I wished I had possessed some kind of step-by-step how-to guide for Being and navigating this world, but I guess the point of all this existential dogshit is to make our own blueprints.” This “blueprint” motif carries over into several chapters with titles drawn from instruction manuals (“How to Hold a Baby,” “How to Be a Daughter,” etc.), however Moore’s instructions are not guidance for the reader but rather a record of her method of detangling, bit-by-bit, a discombobulated knot of time—one that opens to reveal the absence at its center, which the author claims and renames on her own terms.

“Count The Beats” elaborates how absence haunts the Missouri countryside where Moore grew up: “The back roads here smell like forgotten slaughterhouses, where piglets cry for their long-gone mother and a father they never knew.” Hushed tones and cryptic language disguise the violence Moore witnessed. Ashamed of the attention that her own developing body could draw, she wants to become invisible in middle school: “I’d play the role of a jock, hiding underneath loose T-shirts as I inevitably became the woman I always thought I wanted to be.”

Later, as teenagers in a church youth group confess to sins such as smoking or drinking, Moore will say, “I lost my virginity, but I didn’t mean to,” unaware of how to communicate the starker truth: “A man raped me.” She wraps the trauma of rape in the facade of “sin,” something digestible to those around her with a fully understood “center”—and something resolvable by way of forgiveness. However, she is missing from her “confession,” both figuratively and literally: “I wasn’t there for my own testimony. I couldn’t stand to hear those words spoken by a pastor who, days prior, had edited my version to look like a call for forgiveness, a lesson of obedience and chastity.”

For Moore, being a woman often meant erasing herself and putting a self already prepared for her in its place: “I don’t remember much from this time, so there’s a hole in the narrative—a noticeable jump in time. Even in my thirties, I will still be working on forgiving this past self, trying to fill in the gaps.” These gaps may result from a societal assumption that a woman’s story belongs not to her but to the misogynistic forces which determine the dominant narrative (for example, the idea that her rapist was “just being a boy”).  The incomplete narrative of self that results is characterized by, as Marcel Proust writes in The Fugitive (as translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff), a “fragmentary, irregular interpolation in my memory—like a thick fog at sea which obliterates all landmarks.” Yet as this fog forces its way in and tries to occlude certain details of her life, Moore pushes back:

When I wrote about being assaulted at fourteen, I imagined it was more uncomfortable for the reader because of my inclination toward impassivity. Or: I thought it was more uncomfortable for the reader until an essay about my rape was published. The overwhelming accessibility of what happened to me at fourteen forced me to tear down a partition I constructed between myself and the world, as well as the wall I built between myself and self.

Here Moore gets at a key struggle in these essays: whether to allow herself to be defined by the exterior world or to engage her interiority in a dialectic with it. The latter choice requires that “uncomfortable” details be shared when discussing traumatic events, and generally, people want to feel comfortable, accepted, at home; however, rather than defining home as the tautological end of a journey, Moore imagines home in terms of moving toward something—not a topographical destination but an opening onto an already existing reality, or the untying of a knot to reveal an absence. While attempting to escape from trauma is understandable, Moore implies we should consider moving toward the past as a way to eventually overcome it:

“Hegel doesn’t want to reject or forget the past,” your philosophy professor said. . . . “We’re only capable of growth if we know what we are growing from.”

This looks like a spiral, this preservation being raised, inflated, and he drew a long seashell on the board, the lines twisting together as he reached the top.

One could visualize Thank You for Staying with Me in the shape of a seashell, too, moving simultaneously toward and away from a center while Moore transforms the gaps in her memory from nodes of panic to active spaces of re-creation. As Moore’s son says to her at one point, “We’re not dead, Mom. We’re just lost.” Her essays, which rawly address subjects like motherhood, assault, and sexism but also include reveries on the cosmos, vignettes on nature, and appreciative moments of common humanity, encourage readers to spend less time trying to bring everything to a center and pay attention instead to life’s continuous surprises.

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

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

Rain Taxi 30th Anniversary Exhibit
and Opening Night Reception

Please join us to celebrate 30 years of Rain Taxi with a stunning exhibit that will take you behind the covers!

Open Book
1011 Washington Avenue, Minneapolis
October 3 through November 16

Free and open to the public!

Exhibit Opening Party: Tuesday, October 7, 6:00 – 9:00 pm

Back in March 2020, Rain Taxi set up an exhibit to celebrate our 25th anniversary, but the pandemic had other ideas. As this year marks 30 years of Rain Taxi championing aesthetically adventurous literature, we’re doing it again, only 20% bigger! Our 30th Anniversary Exhibit is a visual cornucopia culled from our three decades of existence—covers and other artwork, chapbooks and broadsides, posters and photographs, and even author letters and other ephemera that give a sneak peek at our behind-the-scenes action. Save the date for the exhibit's Opening Reception on Tuesday, October 7, with drinks, toasts, special guests, and more—free to attend, register below!  

Rain Taxi 30th Anniversary Opening Night Party

Join us on Tuesday, October 7 for a fun-filled evening of celebrating Rain Taxi's 30th year of championing aesthetically adventurous literature!

RSVP Here

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Robert Bly letter among the fun ephemera from the 25th anniversary exhibit in 2020.

One Dreams of Place: An Interview with Esther Lin

Photo by Antonius-Tín Bui

by Tiffany Troy

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for twenty-one years. Her debut collection Cold Thief Place (Alice James Books, $24.95) is the winner of the 2023 Alice James Award. She is also author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, and her poem “French Sentence” was selected for the 2024 Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has been selected for numerous prizes, anthologies, and fellowships; most recently, she was an artist-resident at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester and Cité internationale, Paris. With Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and Janine Joseph, she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.

Cold Thief Place begins in the dark of night, where the threat of deportation is existential for a child-speaker who is both beguiled by and terrified of the Prophet. Through tales historical and fantastical (from sources as variegated as the Chinese Revolution on one side of the speaker’s family and migration from Taiwan first to Brazil and then to the United States on the other), and drawing insight from texts ranging from Madame Bovary to “a book about dragons,” Lin shows her readers how humanity isn’t defined by what documents a person carries or the status they signify. Instead, in the chiaroscuro of the three-train transfer to the Met Cloisters, we find “a more perfect whole / enclosing // gardens laid by scholars of tapestry / and stained glass and the poetry of flowers // and inside one of these / a tree.” Cold Thief Place teaches us that place isn’t what we own but an emotional sphere that we dream to obtain.

Tiffany Troy: The opening poem, which is also the title poem, begins by comparing knowledge of imminent deportation to a kind of religious damnation (“he said my soul as well / as my body could suffer”). There is unknowing and mystery—the fragment “Offering me what I love best” lacks a subject—before the final movement towards the bureaucratic precision of a name and date of birth. How does this poem set up the rest of the collection?

Esther Lin: “Cold Thief Place” showcases the book’s central themes of fear and instability—both bodily, in the fear of deportation, and metaphysical, in fear of the Christian hell. But I should clarify that the metaphysical fear was not metaphorical; it felt real. Now that I’ve had some time away from the book, I see that the characters of the speaker and her family (not uncoincidentally, me and my family) lived in multiple rings of fire, some of their own making. No one demanded that my mother convert to a fundamentalist evangelical Christian, which increased the danger I felt as an undocumented child far more than it created any sense of community. I think “Cold Thief Place” speaks to that vulnerability a child experiences, when no adult seems entirely reliable.

TT: Poems like “The Ghost Wife” or “Attachment Theory” challenge the child’s belief in her own worthlessness (or worthiness by lineage) and the age-old wisdom that before marriage “you are simply / one without a story” in the richness of hell, which is conflated with a sense of statelessness. Place, then, becomes an emotional state, reflecting hunger, non-belonging, and silencing. Can you speak to the organizational principle in the overall structure of the collection, particularly how time functions in developing the family at the heart of the collection?

EL: I wish my answer would reveal the beautiful orchestration I devoted to this book, how I composed a symphony in three movements. But my decisions were practical. Because the same characters appear throughout the book, I wanted to introduce them as a novelist or playwright would their characters. The poem “The Ghost Wife” was handy in presenting the father, the sister, and the death of the mother, so it came early in the collection. I wanted to bring in the husband early to draw parallels between the speaker’s and mother’s lives, since they both use marriage to claim nationhood—one in the U.S. and the other in Brazil.

I’m a restless reader, so even when I dwell happily in a poem, a part of me is already looking for a shift of some kind: a new dimension that heralds what else the poet can show me. After a handful of poems, I want to disrupt what that handful has established—a short lyric poem if the previous were lengthy; a different tone; another perspective. This way, the reading experience feels alive and dynamic, I hope.

The one intentional bit of orchestration was to not break the book in sections. There are so many elements to my complicated life, moving in tandem, that to separate poems by a restful white page seemed disingenuous. The white page is a place of pleasant nothing. Place is very difficult for an undocumented immigrant. One dreams of place as a solid, immutable thing, although it’s simply not true. Place is emotional. And when the place called home doesn’t feel like home, or the place that feels like home is not acknowledged as home, one lives with a fundamental disconnect.

TT: In thinking about my favorite writers from a place, I found that really what I’m drawn to is writers writing from a particular sensibility, one drawn from their struggles being from nowhere, whether that’s an ethnic enclave or not. In Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang, for instance, you’ll find this concentrated dose of energy in a mantou or in the Chinatown sweatshop. How do you feel this desire to concurrently escape and belong finds its place in your work, and how do you root your readers (or your characters) in place?

EL: The most significant geographical place for me is not my birth country, Brazil, or China, which my parents defected from. It’s the New York City borough of Queens. My feelings remain complicated about the sanctuary Queens has been for many undocumented New Yorkers because it’s also where my most difficult memories reside. In my second book, I probably write more about place as an entity—Queens and parts of France. Leaving the U.S. on my own for the first time gave me the fresh perspective I desperately needed. In Cold Thief Place, Queens is perhaps less visible because it is so up close, but my speaker is still very much bound to it, like a ghost.

Place is tricky. I’m not sure I’ve cracked the code on it.

TT: The speaker in Cold Thief Place turns to various texts, such as science fiction novels and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, as a counterpart to her mother’s almost austere but simultaneously expressive form of evangelical devotion. How does fiction operate in the protagonist’s mind, and how do you as the poet complicate the world where the archvillain is grander but also so much bigger than the speaker?

EL: I love this question because I love the novel. A year after my mother died, I read Madame Bovary, and I experienced for the first time some empathy for her in the character of Emma. Emma was trapped in her marriage, station, and little town, and she struggled wildly for more than was her due. Empathy! Such a difficult imaginative leap between a daughter and mother. It allowed me to write “Up the Mountains Down the Fields” and “Wuping, 1969,” wherein my mother was the heroine of her own story. I felt closer to her, yet perversely, the closer I felt, the more unknowable she grew. Having written these poems of her youth, I was at greater ease writing poems in which she appears as a force of pure violence, striking children and destroying books. I hope Cold Thief Place provides a complicated portrait, one that neither demonizes nor absolves.

TT: What you said recalls these lines from “Attachment Theory”:

                           How to

hurt a person in the way
they allow. Every person allows
for it, sooner or later. My mother

was my first.

How does the paradox of closeness and unknowability pan out in the collection as you reimagine other family members in their historical contexts and/or as they approach old age?

EL: It seems to me that one of the tragedies of our existence is that our life spans are long enough—if you’re lucky—to see the tail end of your grandparents’ lives and for them to see you as a baby. It is truly rare for someone to get to know their grandparents as people. As for parents, I wish I could see mine now that I understand them better emotionally. That the people closest to you, like your parents, are unlikely to be in more than half your life. What can I do besides acknowledge that paradox? Yes, we need time away from our parents to understand them better within the historical moment they came of age. I suppose this is why I write the poems; I can talk to them in some way.

TT: I’d like to talk about how your poems work on a micro level, on the level of craft. It seems to me you really work the syntax of your sentences carefully to create particular modes of thought: paranoia, shame, fear, ambivalence, and attachment, to name a few. Break it down for us: How might you encourage other poets to use syntax in this way?

EL: Regarding syntax in poetry, I suppose I would encourage syntactically complex sentences on drafting, and then as one begins wrapping those sentences around lines—I’m thinking of how one wraps a large room in wallpaper—to simplify, simplify that syntax. Poetry enjoys but does not demand pyrotechnic sentence structures, because the line break adds nuance, emotion, direction, and music to each phrase. Probably the longest sentence in Cold Thief Place is from “Winter”:

In order to see my first
pear tree

I took three trains

to a cloister shipped stone by stone
from Spain to Washington Heights,

then reconstructed to a more perfect whole
enclosing

gardens laid by scholars of tapestry
and stained glass and the poetry of flowers,

and inside one of these
a tree. 

This sentence’s task was simple—to compel the reader to forget about the pear tree after the first couplet until it returns in the final line. It’s by no means a complicated sentence, but with white space, I think it achieves this small goal. The sentence travels away from the natural world to list human-made objects: trains, industry, scholarship, stained glass, and the meanings we imbue on the natural world via language. Similarly, the regularity of the (mostly) couplets encourages a sense of order, an embroidering of beauty.

Repetition, on the other hand, can heighten all those dark things you name—paranoia, shame, fear—and I try to use it toward that end. I closed “Done Right,” for example, with the lines “A note has been made. / A note has been made.” I think the repetition there increases the paranoia of a surprise visitation from Homeland Security. It also alludes to the repetitiveness of the immigration process in the U.S., a bureaucratic Gordian knot that requires many forms bearing the same questions over and over, which must be received by various agencies at precisely the right times. Repetition is one of my favorite devices.

TT: There are registers of language and forms of language, and then there are the differences between or among languages. How does the presence of languages inform your collection?

EL: I don’t think about their presence much; languages besides English should be a given in any poetry, and not just poetry by immigrants. Ezra Pound, Amiri Baraka, Paisley Rekdal. Why not? A non-English verse that suddenly springs up in the field of an English poem adds texture and vitality, and Chinese characters do a lovely job of resonating against all these Roman letters. I’m worried someone will accuse me of using Chinese as decoration in my poetry, but I speak with the might of the one language that may eclipse American English soon. In any case, one Chinese character in a sea of English—as it appears in one of my poems—is a pretty good image of my own language skills.

TT: The code-switching felt authentic to me, having grown up in an ethnic enclave as you did, especially as conversational Chinese often differs from reading Chinese characters. I wanted to turn next what you told me once, which was that best poems hurt—and your poems really touched me in articulating what is typically brushed beneath the carpet as the “norm.” How did your vision for Cold Thief Place begin to take root, and what was the writing process like for you? Do you have any tips for aspiring writers who are approaching their family stories in lyric form?

EL: I struggled with the fact that there is so much event in the book: my mother’s life during the Cultural Revolution, my father’s journey to the West, their deaths, my being undocumented, my marriage . . . It seems like a soap opera. But if I could live it, then surely I could harness the energy around these events to make a shapely book, right? Forgive this platitude: as I wrote, I listened. I noticed that the more direct and plainspoken my language, the stronger the poem. I learned not to rest on metaphor or surrealism; they seemed to evoke too much the comfort of beauty, and the poems were stronger if they comforted no one. Ultimately an aesthetic of severity and starkness guided me through to the end of the book.

TT: In a similar vein, what was the research process like in piecing together the lives of your parents? How did you compress or select the highlights from events and harness their energy?

EL: Most of the stories in Cold Thief Place were what my father shared with me. He was a twinkle-eyed storyteller who specialized in monologues that swept from the T’ang Dynasty to the American occupation of Afghanistan, connecting them by folklore of the Silk Road. You needed some stamina to listen to all two hours of it, but it was marvelous. He gave me so many poems. “For My Father the West Begins in Africa” is an almost direct lift of a conversation I had the foresight to record. All the poems I wrote about my mother’s experience in the Cultural Revolution were what he shared with me—my mother rarely talked about her past. Besides my father, I am lucky that my mother’s niece is close with me and my siblings, and that she was willing to give me some dirt!

I like to think of these poems as a continuation of that oral history—my father’s stories, my cousin’s stories—with the energy of confidence, of sharing of secrets. Very helpful for a lyric poem, which demands an editorial point of view.

TT: Who are some poets who inspired you in the writing of Cold Thief Place? How do you pay it forward as a co-founder of Undocupoets, which recently helped spearhead Here to Stay (Harper Perennial, 2024), an anthology of current and former undocumented poets?

EL: I just wrote an essay about how sitting in a workshop with another undocumented poet liberated me to write openly about my status. A lot of the poems in the book arose from the happy coincidence that Eavan Boland invited Javier Zamora and me into the Stegner Fellowship in overlapping years. I don’t think she knew I was undocumented, so it was a pure coincidence! I had just met Janine Joseph and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, too, so my world seemed suddenly more generous, more peopled, less lonely. My art transformed.

I hope that the anthology does the same for other undocumented writers—that we can act as a lightning rod for the attention that they are perhaps nervous about. So that they know there is community waiting for them.

TT: What are you working on now?

EL: I’m trying my hand at ambivalent love poems. Because I’m ambivalent, I don’t know if any of them are worthwhile. I am impatient with love poems—the evocations of rapture, betrayal, and sorrow don’t move me much. Lately what I want is the sort of perversity that Plath, Bidart, and Henri Cole are masters of. I suffer; I hate; I want to humiliate—why not remind my reader what a thrill those emotions are?

TT: We the readers stand ready to be enthralled by your next collection. Do you have any closing thoughts to share with readers?

EL: Lately I’ve been thinking about how New Criticism may have quashed the love of poetry in high school English classes—when I was a student and probably for generations before. When I talk to non-poetry readers about poetry, they reflect on how they despised seeking symbolism or hallmarks of formal unity in the poems they were assigned. A poem presented a scavenger hunt so esoteric that readers walked away feeling stupid, rather than enlivened or curious. How devastating. Perhaps creative writing’s last few decades of popularity have come about due to students trying to find their way back into poetry—if not to write it professionally, then to take pleasure in it.

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

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

Major Arcana

John Pistelli
Belt Publishing ($24.95)

by Andy Hartzell

It starts with a bang: A gunshot to the head, on a university campus, in Middle America, live-streamed. This action sets up Major Arcana as a story about “today,” the kind that would come with the tagline “ripped from the tabloids” if tabloids were still a thing. But as author John Pistelli plunges into the novel’s root question—why would an intelligent and seemingly happy college boy take his own life in such a public fashion?—its tendrils spread to encompass more characters, more mysteries, and more decades, until the story becomes a sort of secret history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. “Today” is gradually revealed to be weirder than we thought it was.

The various plot trajectories revolve around a common center of gravity called Overman 3000, “Overman” being a thinly-veiled analog of Superman. It’s an artifact of the ’90s, when DC Comics editors boldly greenlit “transgressive” reboots of beloved golden-age franchises and magazine editors breathlessly declared comics not just for kids anymore. The fictional comic is written by Simon Magnus, an anarchic visionary with occult leanings who, while not quite a thinly-veiled analog of Alan Moore, borrows from that writer’s stock of colorful attributes.

Overman 3000 takes the familiar tropes of the Man of Steel myth—alien origin, secret identity, girl reporter love interest, bald billionaire nemesis—and pushes them to their limit and beyond, to the literal end of time. Its grand climax, which pits the superhero as the avatar of pure spirit against a villain transmogrified into the personification of meatspace, is a kind of latter-day gnostic scripture, a lurid orgy of cosmic destruction and rebirth. This story-within-a-story both reflects and influences the slightly-less melodramatic character arcs of the “real” characters in the novel.

In its mixture of literary ambition and old-fashioned showmanship, Major Arcana is a throwback to the efflorescence of popular literary fiction in the mid-late 20th century. It bears some superficial similarities to one of the hallmark works of that period, Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy. That saga also starts with the seemingly inexplicable suicide of a Golden Boy, then spirals outward to follow a cast of eccentric characters, whose various destinies diverge wildly before converging again at the finale. Like Pistelli, Davies was a student of hermetic lore; both works are studded with esoteric references. But Davies’s work now reads like a relic from a lost world, a storybook world; a single history connects his novels back to those of Dickens and Hugo. Pistelli is writing after the end of history, and he knows it.

Life in the digital age is fragmented, discontinuous. How do you tell a coherent story in an incoherent age? It’s no wonder that many new novels forego the epic in favor of the miniature: the precision portrait of a particular subgroup, or the shifting lens of the author’s own subjective awareness. But Pistelli is out to prove that it’s still possible to paint on a big canvas. Major Arcana’s nine major characters represent a diverse set of identities, encompassing three generations and an unspecified number of genders. They share in common the experience of growing up after all the rules and expectations about growing up have been discarded. These are characters who must construct themselves out of the materials at hand: books, chance encounters, and various bits of cultural detritus. The personalities that emerge are complex, unstable, and a bit artificial, heightened-for-effect.

This operatic quality comes through especially in the book’s climactic sequences. Here, Pistelli piles on the sturm-und-drang without restraint—lightning even crackles on the horizon as characters launch into their aria-like monologues and fates are sealed. Though it begins in the neighborhood of realism, the novel ultimately lands somewhere in the realm of fantasy, though the segue is so subtle that one might not realize it until well after-the-fact, if at all.

Does each character represent a figure in the titular Arcana? It’s easy enough to identify Simon Magnus, the comic book writer, as “The Magician.” This is the arcana of action-without-effort, and Magnus refuses to be pinned down. “The Empress,” which is the arcana of sacred magic, might equate to the young manifestation coach Ash Del Greco. And the elusive Jacob Morrow, whose death kicks off the plot, is surely “The Fool.”

These three characters are in desperate search of transcendence, impatient to shake off all forms of constraint—not just the authority of parents, bosses, and priests, but that of nature: the body, and time itself. Other characters serve as counterweights, making the argument for living and dealing with the world as it is. The most eloquent case for fleshly existence is realized in the character of Diane del Greco, Ash’s mother, a woman of artistic and intellectual talents who consciously embraces the life of a suburban vulgarian and un-lapsed Catholic. Every major character is rendered empathetically, and we get a window into every point of view. But Pistelli’s sympathy seems to lie with the Devils, if only because he gives them the best speeches.

The book’s perspective on gender avoids collapsing into any predictable political take. Its two pivotal characters are both transgender, but what they’re ultimately seeking to trans isn’t merely gender, but materiality. Whether this is good or bad is left for the reader to decide. While it’s possible to read both characters as monsters, it’s equally possible to see them as heroes. Pistelli reserves his satirical judgment for those more minor characters who seek to put the rebel angels into politically conventional boxes; placing the transhumanist enterprise within the centuries-long context of Western expressive individualism, he lets us see them in a cosmic frame, as they see themselves.

The novel is liberally seasoned with allusions to writers of transcendental yearning: Dostoyevsky, Melville, and especially that great-granddaddy of the graphic novel, William Blake. More than two hundred years ago, at a time when Enlightenment rationalism claimed to have settled all the great questions, Blake proclaimed the idea that human nature could never be defined—that human beings would always strain toward the infinite. His prophetic works ultimately helped usher in the Romantic counterrevolution. Major Arcana hints that we might be living through a similar moment: The metanarratives may have all been deconstructed, but metaphysical desire lives on. The kids will pick up the pieces and make something mind-blowing. Might the lockdown generation, algorithmically sorted and managed as it is, even now be gearing up to risk everything for love? Stranger things have happened.

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