chapbooks

Rain Taxi not only provides reviews of thought-provoking literature, it seeks to contribute to the publishing of innovative and original works with two chapbook series, the Brainstorm Series and OHM Editions.

You can purchase Rain Taxi chapbooks with a credit card using the secure portals below, or send check or money order to:

RAIN TAXI
P.O. BOX 3840
MINNEAPOLIS, MN 55403

Walkers in the City

If the pandemic has awakened a peripatetic impulse in you, you’re not alone. Walkers in the City, edited by poet Dennis Barone, invites the reader to do some urban ambling in cities large and small, here and abroad, real and imagined. Featuring poems by Julia Blumenreich, David Cappella, Julie Choffel, James Finnegan, Charles Fort, Eli Goldblatt, Yusef Komunyakaa, Susan Lewis, Sheila E. Murphy, Maureen Owen, V. Penelope Pelizzon, Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi, Clare Rossini, and Jerome Sala. See biographies of the poets below!

To traverse the country digitally, you can watch some of the contributors to Walkers in the City read their poems in this special video event presentation: Watch here.

$10, plus $2 shipping in the US.Published 2021.

Purchase this chapbook via Paypal here.

About the Authors

Dennis Barone is the editor of Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776 (Wesleyan University Press, 2012) and author of Frame Narrative (Blaze Vox, 2018).
Julia Blumenreich received a Milken Educator Award. She is the author of Meeting Tessie (Singing Horse Press, 1994) and The What of Underfoot (Finishing Line Press, 2021).
David Cappella is co-author with Baron Wormser of The Art of Poetry: The Moves (Routledge Press, 1999) and author of Giacomo: A Solitaire’s Opera (Cervena Barva Press, 2021), in Italian translation from Bertoni Editore later this year.
Julie Choffel is the author of The Hello Delay (Fordham University Press, 2012). For the past three years she has been the Poet Laureate of West Hartford, CT.
James Finnegan is the co-editor with Dennis Barone of Visiting Wallace: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens (University of Iowa Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in journals such as Ploughshares and The Virginia Quarterly Review.
Charles Fort is the author of We Did Not Fear the Father: New and Selected Poems (Red Hen Press, 2012) and The Last Black Hippie in Connecticut (a novel, forthcoming from Quale Press).
Eli Goldblatt is the author of Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) and For Instance (Chax Press, 2019).
Yusef Komunyakaa has received the Wallace Stevens Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2021 is coming soon from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Susan Lewis edits Positand is the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom, winner of the Washington Prize (The Word Works, 2018).
Sheila E. Murphy is the author of Golden Milk (Luna Bisonte Productions, 2020). She co-founded and coordinated the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Poetry Series for twelve years.
Maureen Owen is the author of Edges of Water (Chax Press, 2013) and Erosion’s Pull: Poems (Coffee House Press, 2006).
V. Penelope Pellizzon is the author of Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone Is Time: Poems (Waywiser Press, 2014) and Nostos: Poems (Ohio University Press, 2000).
Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi is the author of Love Letter to an Afterlife (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Maryland.
Clare Rossini is co-editor with Benjamin S. Grossberg of The Poetry of Capital: Voices from Twenty-First-Century America (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and author of Lingo (University of Akron Press, 2006).
Jerome Sala’s Corporations Are People Too! was published in 2017 by NYQ Books.

Can't Stop Won't Stop

A chapbook of poems by Black writers in the Twin Cities responding to the murder of George Floyd, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop contains riveting works that, in the words of editor Mary Moore Easter, “call for breath to fill a single set of lungs, and to sustain a whole people.”

Featuring poems by Philip S. Bryant, Mary Moore Easter, keno evol, Sherrie Fernandez-Williams, Bernard James, Douglas Kearney, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Sagirah Shahid, and Maya Washington.


$10 plus $2 S&H in the U.S. Shipping costs added for overseas shipping.
Purchase this chapbook via Paypal here.

Published October 2020.

For a video of the poets reading their works from various locations in South Minneapolis, made especially for the launch at Rain Taxi’s #TCBF, see here.

Rehearsing the Symptoms

by Rosmarie Waldrop

33 pages, perfect bound.
Limited edition of 150 copies.
Published in March 2019.

"The hand gets ready to write. Could we not call this manual labor? Or a stage in the Great Work of rendering the corporeal cat incorporeal while giving her body to the bodiless word? Even if it's from despairing of my own body?" This riveting suite of poems tackles the big questions that come with existing on this odd, old world. It's worth the trip. Cover collage by Keith Waldrop.

$10 plus $2 S&H in the U.S. Shipping costs added for overseas shipping.


26 copies are lettered and signed by the author. Signed copies are available with a $100 donation to Rain Taxi. You may make your donation via Paypal using a credit card or bank transfer.

Elizabeth Gregory

by Kevin Carollo

Elizabeth Gregory is one of millions currently living with early onset Alzheimer’s dementia (EOAD), often referred to as “the long goodbye.”

Elizabeth Gregory combs the inner space of every mom in search of radical humanity.

Beatlemania is our compass. Dementia is our mothership. We say hello.

42 pp., 7" x 7", perfect bound. Edition of 200 copies.
Published 2018.

$10 plus $2 S&H in the U.S. Shipping costs added for overseas shipping.
Purchase now

Published in March 2018.

You Are A Complete Disappointment: A Triumphant Memoir of Failed Expectations

youareacompletedisappointmentMike Edison
Sterling Publishing ($17.95)

by Bridget Simpson

The title of Mike Edison's newest memoir, You Are A Complete Disappointment: A Triumphant Memoir of Failed Expectations, is taken from some of the last words his father ever said to him; the very last, moments later, being "I can't believe someone as smart as you likes professional wrestling!" Because it is framed as a comedic memoir, at first glance a reader might expect You Are A Complete Disappointment to be little more than a roast of a mean, old, Jewish father. However, Edison's book unfolds into a heart-wrenching narrative of the author’s journey to make peace with his childhood, forgive his father, and find worth within himself.

Edison's resume includes a stint as a porn novelist, a European tour with his punk-rock band, and an earlier memoir entitled I Have Fun Everywhere I Go—all jobs which further fueled his father's ire. This eclectic history bolsters Edison’s humor, while simultaneously adding to his credibility. In frank prose, he admits to those details of his first memoir which were edited or embellished in one of many attempts to win his father's approval. With Edison now uninhibited by the paternal pressure that defined much of his existence up until this point, his readers become privy to the intimate details of the therapy sessions that helped him come to terms with the contents of this book.

Edison admits that in many ways, You Are a Complete Disappointment was created for personal catharsis, but the result extends beyond himself. As he noted when the book began to take form, "The more I tell the story, the more I realize that there are a lot of fathers out there who somehow along the way were stripped of their kindness and their compassion for their children . . . I remember hearing about one guy who started a war in Iraq to impress his old man." Though Edison may be sure that his own father would not be happy with his latest endeavor, his candor and honesty will no doubt connect with many readers who also feel doomed to fail their fathers. Edison's own demonstration of the long, difficult, but sometimes humorous road toward compassion will pave the way for others to follow in his footsteps.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore
indiebound
Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Pieces of Sky

by J. Otis Powell‽

A jazzy mixture of prose and quintets sets this chapbook apart from the rest!< 26 pages, perfect bound

$10 plus $2 S&H in the U.S. Shipping costs added for overseas shipping.
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Pieces of Sky peeks behind the curtain of a novel in progress titled Bottomless Sky by J. Otis Powell‽, a much lauded master of spoken word poetry and performance. "Stories are everafter and it's all about the story,” says the book's heroine Aquanetta, a poet and performance artist who has struggled every inch of the way to arrive at her ultimate accomplishment to date: herself.

Published in October 2014.

CLICK HERE to read the in-depth interview with J. Otis Powell‽ in our Fall 2014 Online Edition!

Online-Powell-sponsors

Rain Taxi, in partnership with J. Otis Powell‽, is a fiscal year 2013 recipient of a Cultural Community Partnership grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Clatters

Henri Droguet
Translated from the French by Alexander Dickow

Clatters is the first translation of Henri Droguet's poetry published in the United States. Here the original text appears alongside Alexander Dickow's exquisite translation, in a collection that is at once wonderfully cluttered and strikingly barren. As Dickow puts it in his Afterword, “Never, perhaps, has so pure a litany of despair, vanity, destruction and decay given rise to such vibrant language.”

"In Clatters, Alexander Dickow has beautifully translated the eminent and singular French poet Henri Droguet. Dickow has a lovely feel for idiom and sonic texture, and his poetic intelligence matches Droguet's subtlety. His introductory essay illuminates Droguet's place in French poetry, and meditates more generally about "loner" poetry and the principled refusal to traffic in the literary marketplace. It's a little book, but large, spiritually."
—Rosanna Warren

48 pp., perfect bound

$10 plus $2 S&H in the U.S. Shipping costs added for overseas shipping.
Purchase now

Click Here to download a free PDF of four bonus poems!

Published in February 2014


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Henri Droguet's Clatters is a series of textual 'bricolages,' the poet's accurate description of his own work, appearing in translation here for the first time. At once wonderfully cluttered and strikingly barren; meaning and sound, man and landscape, interiority and exteriority merge together in this collection, as overcast as the landscape of the poet's home of Northern Brittany.

Droguet's characters are unfortunate phantoms, existing outside of time but anchored to a desperately isolated world by crunchy phrases evoking the haggard, the weary and the rusty. Clamorous and unruly textual fragments, disjointed syntax and sonic textures are framed in an atmosphere of playfulness. Wordplay, inversions, 'ellipses, anacolutha, paranomatha, parataxis.' Language unmakes itself, serving as another inconstant in an enchanting and terrifying world. Clatters is a telling title, the eponymous verb indicative of a sonorous contact, friction or conflict, of the mechanical vocabulary and the physicality of the poems.

The work is full of binaries -of editorial production, of the poet's equivocal fame, of the double valence of Droguet's world. As such, Clatters is particularly effective as a bilingual publication. As puppets and phantoms wrestle with new ways of inhabit the stark landscape, “as the paving stone resounds in time with that human stump pummeled lacking forward marching” (Littéralement/Literally,) the translation contributes to new ways of inhabiting the literary landscape. Although Droguet's work is filled with figures that produce crisis, this is certainly not the case with Alexander Dickow's exquisite translation, the result of a highly collaborative process and exceptional relationship between translator and poet.

Both translation and poetry are language-led means of approaching a truth. In this instance, Dickow was faced with the challenge of using his own words to redo the author's work of undoing, to retell the cyclical story mapped onto the pages; of the rise and fall of tides, of desolation and regrowth, of splendor and desolation; to wonder at ruin.

—Aoife Roberts, for Rain Taxi

Bridge: A Gathering

Poems by Steve Healey, Deborah Keenan, Jim Moore, Jude Nutter, Matt Rasmussen, Joyce Sutphen, and Katrina Vandenberg. Cover photo and internal photos by Vance Gellert.

Bridge: A Gathering is published by Rain Taxi Review of Books in an edition of 500 copies on the fifth anniversary of the 35W Bridge collapse to accompany the commemorative event held on August 1, 2012, the fifth anniversary of the I-35W bridge collapse, at the Mill City Museum.

24 pp., perfect bound. Edition of 500 copies.

$10 plus $2 S&H in the U.S. Shipping costs added for overseas shipping.  Purchase now

Published in August 2012
This chapbook is funded through a partnership grant from the Minnesota Historical Society through support provided by the Legacy Amendment.

Police Story

by James Tate

Twenty-one poems of small town life gone berserk from the Pulitzer-prize winning poet.

32 pp., saddle-stitched: Sorry, this chapbook is SOLD OUT.

26 copies were lettered and signed by the author and were accompanied by a handset broadside of an additional poem, "Torture." This special edition is SOLD OUT.

Published in December 1999.