I Eric America

Diane Raptosh offers us her cultural confessional taking the topical of our times and personal loss and grief and putting it all through her poetic viewfinder. She delivers brilliant, lyrical, challenging sonnets written with precision and acute imagination. There is a wise oracle speaking in I Eric America. The reader is soothed and flattened, absorbed and seen, roiled and substantiated, excavated and understood. Knee-deep in the mishaps of this country she says, I have no one to world this to but poetry, and we are grateful for her unflinching listings of it all and her hope to find ways to deputize mercy in spite of it. --Diane Jarvenpa, Shy Lands Few American poets these days evade being packaged, labeled, and hawked off by Late Empire's simulacra of culture. And if the Homefront Overlord of these environs is the Techno-Feudalist granite reality we bang our heads on--continuously, then Diane Raptosh's poetics is the slink of slinks around those Wall Aesthetics. I Eric America is an astonishingly innovative book that brilliantly detects the sparks between pre-social stirrings and post-social debris. The sonnets (44!) are not just malabsorptive to Wall, Gadget, and Master Algorithms, but they passionately express Raptosh's profound kinship with hominids, animals, and plants. I Eric America stands as a testament that a maxed-out experimentalism can indeed transform agape to endure the most challenging junctures of epochal change.--Rodrigo Toscano, The Cut Point Diane Raptosh's version of the sonnet explodes the traditional notion of the form as "containing: " Raptosh's 14-line (or in the case of her "sixteenets," 16-line) strophes propel. These are high velocity poems--doe-footed and leaping--they flirt with form while glissading on sound. I Eric America is a tour de force of legerdemain with language, not least of which is the title where the poet has made a verb of her brother's name. In 2018 Eric Raptosh was the sole survivor of an aircraft crash that left him with life-altering injuries to brain and body. The fortitude and creativity with which Eric faced/ is facing the losses and changes in his life--his will to metamorphose--awed his medical team, his family, his strong circle of friends. The invalid who refuses to be in-valid. Diane Raptosh "erics America" both because "America is the nation-expression of/a severely traumatized person" and, it seems to me, because she has challenged herself, and her readers, to encounter what she knows of America (and Western Civilization more deeply), from capitalism to global warming to COVID to Trump and beyond--"a place where the horror's normal"--with the resolve and openness to reinvention her brother's example has provided. "Can you love in a country that slaughters its children" the book asks. The poems that result are mythic (re-mythic), bodily, seeking, agile, generous and capacious, and for all that the poet vows to "crowdsource/ a term that kneecaps certitude," ultimately hopeful in their will to go on. --Christine Gelineau, Appetite for the DivineNearly two hundred years after Whitman heard America singing, Diane Raptosh hears it clanging-- and her instinct, rather than to mourn the cacophony, is to pick apart the notes that create it. Despite one of the more memorable lines here, these are not poems of "fateful steps in a clear-cut direction;" Raptosh's approach is to assault the foundations of language as well as those of her country, twisting America into a near-rhyme and wondering if the nation will reduce the lack of her to a catchphrase. Through fragments of Leonard Bernstein, precarious family members and the apathetic loom of corporations, these poems form a sketch of an author who views her art as incitement--maybe the key to a new origin story, even if it requires rewriting the pen to tell it. --Michael Miller, Tea and Subtitles