
Rebekah Rutkoff
“In Russia, the inability to live up to one’s dreams of self . . . seems to have released a particular form of male sadness, traced with disappointment and violence, humming under everything, blooming like radon from the dusty ground.” In Nicholas Muellner’s hefty and sumptuous picture book In Most Tides an Island (Self Publish, Be Happy Editions), moving narratives of the author’s encounters with closeted gay men in the remote provinces of Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea are intercut with a fictional vision of vivid-dreamer Isabel, who lives on an unnamed Caribbean island. Muellner, a