Discovering the Citizen
A review by Jessica Knight
It's hard not to like Minè Okubo as we come to know her through this first book-length study of her life and work: feisty, eccentric, and deeply committed to her art. A slim, beautifully produced volume, Minè Okubo: Following Her Own Road is both a tribute to the artist, who died in 2001, and an important step in remedying the dearth of scholarship on her work. The paucity of Okubo criticism may in part be a situation of her own making: best known for her landmark graphic memoir Citizen 13660, which documents her experience as a prisoner in the internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II, she was loathe to part with her work, and she consciously cultivated an enigmatic persona. Even those she counted as close friends thought of her as a sort of trickster figure, wry and mischievous, generous and notoriously cantankerous. Editors Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef were both friends of Okubo's (and, like so many others both famous and unknown, were unaware of their...
|
 |
Previously Reviewed by Rain Taxi
Sort: by date | by title | by author
Flowers of Flame: The Unheard Voices of Iraq by Dan Veach
 Ever since we hung this calendar,
The wall
Has been oozing blood.
These days are a necklace,
Each one pierced through the middle.
How can you expect us to write
For coming generations?
This question, posed by Ali Al-Imarah in this much-needed anthology of contemporary Iraqi poets, haunts...
Swamp Thing #01: Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore
 In Alan Moore's inaugural issue of Swamp Thing, reprinted for the first time in Vertigo's hardcover reissue of the acclaimed mid-'80s fantasy/horror series, the titular creature muses about his place in a world "full of shopping malls and striplights and software" where the "dark corners are being...
Brothers by Yu Hua
 In Ulysses James Joyce brought Leopold Bloom to the toilet; in Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pychon pushed Tyrone Slothrop through it. In Brothers, the new novel by celebrated Chinese author Yu Hua, we find Baldy Li head down in the latrine, gazing up at the peeing posteriors of the women on the other...
The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry
 Looking at the stacks of mystery titles in the airport, a friend of mine said, "I think they’ve solved 'em all." I couldn’t help but think that he was right, in some visceral way; no matter how convoluted the crime, no matter how unlikely the twist, few readers will be genuinely surprised by...
The Lagoon by Lilli Carre
 Lilli Carré's The Lagoon opens as bookish young Zoey listens to her grandfather recall the irresistible song of the creature that lives in the black lagoon near their house. Zoey is immune to the creature's call (she says it sounds like "a cat in a bathtub"), but her uneasily married parents are...
Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi
 In Something to Tell You, Hanif Kureishi sets up interesting cultural and structural tensions that unfortunately fail to deliver, resulting in an estranging narrative. Initially, the book holds great promise, as Jamal Khan -- a successful middle-aged psychotherapist living and working in London...
Well-Built City Trilogy #01: The Physiognomy by Jeffrey Ford
 Thoughts are things. Thoughts create things. Quantum physics proves the power the observer has over what he or she observes, how just witnessing an event helps to create that event. And it is hard to distinguish reality from how we perceive reality, a dizzying rabbit-hole adventure we must shrug...
The Cosmopolitan by Donna Stonecipher
 In Donna Stonecipher’s new collection of prose poetry, one will find lockets, thimbles, French daguerreotypes, cyanometers, peacock feathers, a child’s stamp collection, architectural drawings, snow globes, spiraled seashells, ivory miniatures, stained glass pictures, and a replica pinhole...
On Purpose by Nick Laird
 Nick Laird is the patron poet of bachelorism. This at first may seem counterintuitive, as he is the husband of bestselling literary novelist Zadie Smith. But upon reading either of his collections, one quickly gets a sense of man's inherent desire to be on his own. "Go home. I haven't slept alone / ...
The Reverend's Apprentice by David N. Odhiambo
 While one prophetic mode is surely that of outrage, roaring against the wrongness of the now, another mode gives voice to confusion, speaking a stuttering, even spasmodic, telegraphy of the moment's fractured condition. One prophet calls for walls to tumble; the other channels the myriad whispers...
Anathem
by Neal Stephenson
Alan's War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope
by Emmanuel Guibert
Apocalypse Nerd
by Peter Bagge
Say You're One of Them
by Uwem Akpan
What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction
by Toni Morrison
The Ghost Soldiers: Poems
by James Tate
Tonoharu: Part One
by Lars Martinson
Rex Libris
by James Turner
The Fortieth Day (American Poets Continuum)
by Kazim Ali
Dictation: A Quartet
by Cynthia Ozick
All Souls
by Christine Schutt
A Curious Earth
by Gerard Woodward
Omega Minor
by Paul Verhaeghen
Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound
by Paul Drummond
The Stone Keeper: Amulet, Book One (Amulet #01)
by Kazu Kibuishi
American Music
by Chris Martin
Existentialism Is a Humanism
by Jean Paul Sartre
What's the Use of Truth?
by Richard Rorty
Shining at the Bottom of the Sea
by Stephen Marche
Laura Warholic: Or the Sexual Intellectual
by Alexander Theroux
The Entire Predicament
by Lucy Corin
Fourth Realm Trilogy #02: The Dark River
by John Twelve Hawks
Brave Story
by Miyuki Miyabe
Regards from Serbia
by Aleksandar Zograf
8: A Memoir
by Amy Fusselman
Varieties of Disturbance: Stories
by Lydia Davis
The Salon
by Nick Bertozzi
John Peel: Margrave of the Marshes
by John Peel
Allah Is Not Obliged
by Ahmadou Kourouma
The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization
by Daniel Manus Pinkwater
The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug Culture
by Richard J. Degrandpre
Fangland: A Novel
by John Marks
Trial of Flowers
by Jay Lake
Glacial Period
by Nicolas De Crecy
The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination and Spirit
by Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna
The Uncomfortable Dead: A Novel of Four Hands
by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos
Academic Freedom After September 11 (06 Edition)
by Beshara (ed.) Doumani
The Flowers of Evil (Wesleyan Poetry)
by Charles Baudelaire
The Mystery Guest: An Account
by Gregoire Bouillier
Get a year of Rain Taxi for only $15!
Rain Taxi, a winner of the Alternative Press Award for Best Arts & Literature Coverage, is a quarterly publication that publishes reviews of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction with an emphasis on works that push the boundaries of language, narrative, and genre. Essays, interviews, and in-depth reviews reflect Rain Taxi's commitment to innovative publishing.
Click here to subscribe to Rain Taxi, ride of choice for the Lit Fiend!
.
| 
Don't Miss
