{"id":5348,"date":"2020-07-08T20:40:39","date_gmt":"2020-07-08T20:40:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridareview.cah.ucf.edu\/?post_type=article&p=5348"},"modified":"2020-07-08T20:40:39","modified_gmt":"2020-07-08T20:40:39","slug":"her-affective-labor","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/her-affective-labor\/","title":{"rendered":"Her Affective Labor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles<\/em> by Diane Raptosh<\/strong><\/p>\n

Etruscan Press, 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n

Paperback, 116 pp., $17.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Diane Raptosh is the poet of the unlikely.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Of course, any creative act in itself is rather unlikely, whether it is the cosmic creation ex nihilo<\/em> in which the universe is manifested out of an accident of strong and weak forces converging and dissipating, leaving some errant subatomic particles behind to crash together for the big bang, or the simple clapping of hands, a rhythm, a disruption, a repetition. A creative act is the convergence of everything, an impossibility, which only has to happen once, and there it is: the dreamy reverb by David Roback, the breath between H. D.\u2019s lines, the abdominal contraction before Bill T. Jones\u2019s turns.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Over her thirty-year career, Raptosh has produced wicked, loopy, political, surrealistic, and unforgettable poetry: experimental and wild, a free-roaming poet of the Idaho sagelands. Her work leaps madly into the mud-pools of language with a child\u2019s abandon, but with an intelligence that is hard, uncompromising, and disturbing in its own playfulness.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles<\/em> completes Raptosh\u2019s verse trilogy, a project nobly supported by Etruscan Press. The first in the series is American Amnesiac<\/em> (2013), a book-length, ghazal-sequenced monologue spoken by a former Goldman Sachs exec, who seeks to recover his identity, to reconstitute himself as an improbable and decent citizen. In the second book, Human Directional<\/em> (2016), Raptosh leaves the individual to explore the collective and atomized human consciousness via a slapdash of prose poems, exploded catalogues, and single-line jokes. In her trilogy, we are stuck in the hell-scape of an American post-capitalistic society: racist, punitive, commodified, cruel, and degrading. Yet, multi-vocal and therefore hopeful, precisely because of the fissures and fractures that occur amid all the digital noise.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

With Dear Z<\/em>, Raptosh brilliantly answers this world with a set of letters addressed to our pre-embryotic, single-cell existence: a single fertilized ovum, a \u201clove speck,\u201d which drifts down the fallopian tubes. Perhaps finding purchase on the uterine wall and becoming, and perhaps just being flushed out of the system entirely and not becoming. We will find that in Raptosh\u2019s poems this difference matters perhaps less than we\u2019d think.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The voice is materternal<\/em>, not that of the mother but of the aunt: intimate, loving, world-weary, and transgressive. It is a voice that is fully queered and unmoored, wholly original:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Dear Zero,<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Most humans evolved only once\u2014in what\u2019s likely<\/p>\n

East Africa, 200,000 years ago. So don\u2019t freak<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

when I shout out We share the same mama:<\/em><\/p>\n

Mitochondrial Eve. Unlike the one in the Garden<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

of Eden, mtEve was not the sole woman on Earth,<\/p>\n

but the one who made her descent into everyone.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So pray tell, teeny homunculus, as the line<\/p>\n

from \u201cTime of the Season\u201d by the Zombies,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

that British Invasion band, goes: Who\u2019s your daddy?<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Please know that should you come be, Big Data<\/p>\n

will quickly conceive you as processing stream,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

a more or less numeral entity\u2014lacking internal lyric:<\/p>\n

that giddiest hymnal. That solemn bee. The think feeling<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

fist that is inwit<\/em>. Queerest iota, does this kind of talk<\/p>\n

smack of hokum-humanist seething on my part?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Our shared mother mtEve was mostly a kink of statistics,<\/p>\n

a ringing quark of a person: a true lovely, who probably<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

knew to venerate horses.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here is a whirlwind of what Raptosh does so singularly well: the careening slant rhymes and punning, the clack of assonant syllables against sharp end consonants, and the driving free associations that make perfect sense. But amid all this dazzle, Raptosh is in impressive control of her material.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In this passage, she isolates \u201cinwit,\u201d a word she introduces in Human Directional, <\/em>and a word she parses out in her essay, \u201cPoetry is Where the Action Is\u201d:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

. . . inwit suggests the inner senses and interior sensibility: that collection of inner faculties the poet sets store by. Inwit is, by my reckoning, the very womb in which the poet thrives.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It seems to me that the entirety of Dear Z<\/em> is an exceptionally crafted articulation and enactment of inwit. Indeed, one suspects it is a quality deep in our mitochondrial DNA, somewhere in our circuitry, we just know we must somehow \u201cvenerate horses.\u201d Our capacity to engage in affective labor\u2014to love, to imagine, to be awed, to empathize, to connect\u2014surely comes from that first \u201cmama\u201d that Raptosh names.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Throughout these letters to the zygote, the speaker faithfully accepts the binary of becoming and not becoming, and she celebrates this suspended (and free-falling) state. After all, even the zygote that does \u201cnot become\u201d has \u201cbeen,\u201d a sack of genetic coding as ancient as the first evolution.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Z,<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

in the presence<\/p>\n

of your latency\u2014<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

that vacant shoe,<\/p>\n

those shades<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

of facelessness\u2014<\/p>\n

let\u2019s say<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I think I feel<\/p>\n

the sound of dots moving.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Our ancestral connections, both to the past and future generations, are but Morse code taps on our own genetic coding. We have the same mother running through us, the sound of dots moving. An un-extraordinary miracle-mirror. A tapping. Let.us.be.k.i.n.d.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Diane Raptosh gives us a speaker who possesses that womb-wisdom, who is generous and critical in her advice, especially when the news is harrowing. We have a great poet among us with commitment and daring and craft, who teases us and indulges us with her unconditioned and unconditional wisdom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Diane Raptosh is the poet of the unlikely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":5353,"template":"","categories":[9,139,1569],"tags":[6,1566,1567,1568,1301],"class_list":["post-5348","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review","category-reviews","tag-aquifer-the-florida-review-online","tag-dear-z-the-zygote-epistles","tag-diane-raptosh","tag-etruscan-press","tag-james-brock"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHer Affective Labor - The Florida Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/her-affective-labor\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Her Affective Labor - The Florida Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Diane Raptosh is the poet of the unlikely.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/her-affective-labor\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Florida Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/43\/2020\/07\/5efcd-dear-z-detail.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"275\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"153\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cah.ucf.edu\\\/floridareview\\\/article\\\/her-affective-labor\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cah.ucf.edu\\\/floridareview\\\/article\\\/her-affective-labor\\\/\",\"name\":\"Her Affective Labor - 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