Tag Archives: Spring 2015

Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin

Art, Sex, and Magick in the Weimar Republic Tobias Churton Inner Traditions ($29.95) by Spencer Dew In this volume exploring Aleister Crowley’s two years in Weimar Berlin, Tobias Churton offers us a glimpse of a society in denial, gnashing at any possible distraction. Keg, thigh, drum, dance, makeup, androgyny: all the usual Weimar quirks are […]

Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

Laura Ingalls Wilder Edited by Pamela Smith Hill South Dakota Historical Society Press ($39.95) by Wayne Scott Just tell it in your own words as you would tell about those times if only you could talk to me. —Rose Wilder Lane, Letter to Laura Ingalls Wilder My grandmother gave me a copy of Laura Ingalls […]

Tapping into a Rural Religion: an Interview with Nick McRae

Interviewed by Connor Bjotvedt In Mountain Redemption (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), which won the Fall 2011 Black River chapbook competition, poet Nick McRae focuses on the role of tradition and the emergence of Christian religions in mountain towns. Elegiac in tone and narrative in structure, the book explores life and death in these mountain communities […]

Of Film and Smoke: An Interview with Iain Sinclair

Interview by Paul McRandle Few writers trawl their territory the way Iain Sinclair has London—footsore and picking over secret histories, missed encounters, and enigmatic detritus all the way out to the 125-mile ring of the London Orbital. From the occult forensics of his 1970s poems to 2012’s Ghost Milk, his dissident swansong for a city […]

Sketches from AWP

by Anita White Below are some impressions, moments, glimpses of genius and humor at the 2015 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference held in Minneapolis April 9 through April 11. Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

Naomi Klein Simon & Schuster ($30) by Eliza Murphy The heat is on. If not the hottest year ever recorded, 2014 sizzled to one of the hottest in the past decade, the result of global warming trends that scientists attribute to human activity. How economic lust and a broken political system have precipitated this climate […]

Seascape

Heimrad Bäcker translated by Patrick Greaney Ugly Duckling Presse ($18) by Rebecca Hart Olander The spare white cover of Seascape, with its gray letterpress-font title, recalls the bleached-out, wide expanse of the sea. There is something slightly menacing about this oppressive whiteness that blots out almost all else; the effect of looking at it is […]

Reckless Lovely

Martha Silano Saturnalia Books ($15) by Janet McCann Martha Silano’s fourth collection Reckless Lovely is a rapid trip that seems to start in the middle of a breath. Its first poem plunges right into the middle of the Big Bang, which is presented as the product of a mad chef: begins with a dash of […]

Post Subject: A Fable

Oliver de la Paz University of Akron Press ($14.95) by John Bradley “Dear Empire,” opens each of this book’s ninety-five epistolary prose poems. This is followed with a declarative sentence beginning “This is” or “These are,” yet questions soon swarm the reader. Just who is being addressed here? And why? The letters quickly establish a […]