Reviewed by Melissa Kwasny<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Etruscan Press, 2020. Paperback, 116 pages. $17.00.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conceive<\/em>: to plan or devise a plan in the mind, or, in biological terms, to become pregnant, as with a child. But what does it mean to\u00a0be conceived<\/em>, and a larger question, to be conceived 200,000 years ago as a separate species\u2014with an astonishingly disruptive mind\u2014as a human and a human community? These are questions Diane Raptosh explores and expands in her dazzling and far-reaching\u00a0Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles<\/em>. Presented as a series of verse-letters to a newly fertilized egg\u2014not yet gendered, not yet viable\u2014the poems convey the anxiety and complex hope inherent in any talk of a new child (“You are one glad-ass act of insurrection. Of joy\u2019s terrorism.”) or talk of a future at all, in the face of cutthroat capitalism, species extinction, climate crisis, pandemics, and the threat of war, a time, as she says in a recent essay, of \u201cpatriarchy gone amuck.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Zygote Epistles<\/em> is the last volume of a trilogy, which includes American Amnesiac<\/em>, long-listed for the National Book Award, a dramatic monologue in the voice of an imaginary former Goldman Sachs executive who is found unconscious (in both senses of the term) on a bench in a park; and Human Directional<\/em>. All three books are a response to the harrowing moment, and country, in which we find ourselves, and bring to that task the author\u2019s signature toolbox of quicksilver language play, superhero intelligence, and sophisticated political understanding. Dear Z, Dear Zygote, Dear Life Speck<\/em>: Raptosh has many endearing names for this not-yet-entity, including Zed, last of the alphabet; Zero; Mammalian I; and Butter Nugget, AKA Rich Jam<\/em> (generated by submitting zygote <\/em>to MyRapName.com.) \u201cToday I will call you Conceptus,\u201d she writes, posing as a cynic Cassandra, the zeitgeist\u2019s speed-talking great-aunt, a smartass and witchy god-mother whose verbosity is an intent \u201cto other <\/em>Aunt Auto-fill.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n I first encountered a few of these poems when I published them as guest editor of Dark Matter: Women Witnessing<\/em>, an online journal focusing on writing and artwork created in response to an age of massive species loss and ecological collapse. Raptosh\u2019s mission here\u2014introducing the zygote to the zeitgeist\u2014is rife with warnings (\u201cThe public hip has heart dysplasia\u201d), analysis (\u201cevery Ahab \/ must locate the beings \/ on whom he can offload the whale \/ of his torment\u201d), and advice (\u201cTo counter this means \/ everyone must come to see \/\/ all residents as members of my group\u2014 <\/em>\/ the pain of others, \/\/ our severest strand of anguish.\u201d). An entire section focuses on the damage that technological oversell has done to our consciousness, in particular in our addiction to cell phones:<\/p>\n\n\n\n this eon\u2019s gizmos<\/p>\n\n\n\n frack the peak mammalian<\/p>\n\n\n\n ministry of\u00a0presence<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The poet types the word fertile<\/em> into her phone, \u201cafter which word \/ AutoFill Tarzan-types Earth Land Woman<\/em>,\u201d restricting her own thoughts and replacing them with patriarchy\u2019s pre-formed, stereotypical choices, \u201cas if in caveperson bass.\u201d What can counter these interruptions of presence, these technological deep state assaults on resistance so a woman\u2019s voice can come through? Awareness, for one, Raptosh seems to be saying, and irreverent humor, the laugh of the Medusa. Whole stanzas hold up for us the possible revelations inherent in this kind of scrutiny of language: \u201cAutofill<\/em> \/\/ Autocrat<\/em>.\u201d The first three suggestions on the blank keypad, she notes, are \u201cI Yes You.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Raptosh is a seditious sprite, a trickster. Other poets have compared her voice to Whitman\u2019s in the wide sweep of her, albeit darker, vision of America, but I see her as more akin to the Joyce of Finnegans Wake<\/em>: \u201cTonight I\u2019m feeling like \/ forming ex-expletives, \/\/ something like apeshit\u2019s<\/em> \/ shapeshift of lippy blub happiness.\u201d Her neologisms and puns, portmanteaus, and Auto-Fill rhymes are hilarious, yet they are also in service to something larger. The word comedy<\/em>comes from Comus<\/em>, a Greek fertility god, and also, according to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, <\/em>the name of <\/em>a ritual springtime procession, which was \u201ca celebration of life in face of an incomprehensible world or repressive socio-economic order. . . marking some ready acceptance of human participation in the chaotic forces needed to produce Life.\u201d Raptosh, like Coyote, like a court jester, wants us to laugh and also to see: \u201cWhat \/ might be the animal-word for No not some nutso \/ warrior system<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lots of card tricks here: high jinx puns (\u201cWould you rather real-life swim or live-stream?\u201d) allusions, syntactic juxtapositions (she sets herself \u201copposite meanness exceedingly\u201d), internet mistranslations, the concepts rhyming and multiplying their rhymes continually in order to offer her addressee, as a fairy godmother might, a gift, in this case, a door into the revolutionary power of language: \u201cLet us become oblong \/ sans<\/em>-nation transitionals.\u201d A self-identified \u201cword nun-cum<\/em>-rapper\u201d like this would naturally be in love with anagrams, with what the shared letters might point out, and there are lots of them here: prenatal\/parental; being\/begin\/ and binge; verse\/serve; the \u201cO her\u201d in the word mother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Zygote Epistles<\/em>, in other words, is a book that rewards rereading, not because it\u2019s difficult but because it\u2019s overfilled with insights and lightning-quick connections that the poet\u2019s intense and obsessive play with language has wrought. And yes, because Raptosh is very entertaining\u2014funny, joyful, and unafraid to admit of doomsday dread, yet still excitable about the not-yet-formed in human consciousness. Dear Zygote<\/em>. Dear Life Speck. Dear Z.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reviewed by Melissa Kwasny Etruscan Press, 2020. Paperback, 116 pages. $17.00. Conceive: to plan or devise a plan in the mind, or, in biological terms, to become pregnant, as with a child. But what does it mean to\u00a0be conceived, and a larger question, to be conceived 200,000 years ago as a separate species\u2014with an astonishingly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":507,"featured_media":1399,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9],"tags":[227,214,228],"class_list":["post-1397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-articles","category-reviews","tag-diane-raptosh","tag-melissa-kwasny","tag-the-zygote-epistles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/507"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1397"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1403,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions\/1403"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}