Dear Z

Dear Z is a book of dynamite. Or rather, “a hot load of humanity ammo.” What kind of world will a forming zygote be born into? Should we form a zygote to bring into this kind of world? Raptosh’s epistolary apostrophes address the “life speck” nestled in her niece’s womb as a “spec life,” and their speaker, who nestles in the “mind’s womb” of embodiment, is decidedly of two minds about that: “Flesh is the not-me / I peacock around in.” She is tender: “the me there is you sized.” She is juicy and passionate: “it’s me . . . you know: the one with the raw wrath-wantonness issues.” But above all she is dazzlingly, breathtakingly acute: pure high-energy verbal swerve. Invoking the moral scaffolding of Moby-Dick and lexes from symbolic logic to hip-hop, no line in the book fails to proliferate on second reading. Raptosh proves a masterful mistress of the subtle pun and proverb; the velocity of her sleights of word will leave the reader replete, and maybe depleted. But it also suggests that a world that can embody a mind like this just might be worth being born into. --Randall Couch, author of Peal (2017)

Zygote, zeitgeist: "What we call world is also—perhaps more accurately—called the without." Dear Z barebacks the language that made us human, showing how it is making us super- (as in in-) human--or at the very least, why a terrestrial translator is needed to usher a "Life Speck," a "spec consciousness," into modern humanity, which begins with Moby-Dick, or, "likely East Africa 200,000 / years ago" and hurtles through our rampage to "the Zombies, who borrowed / from Big Mama Thornton and copied Sam Cooke," landing on "Ameri-pire's endpoint," where "person / comes uncoupled / from the rank of citizen." As Raptosh cautions, "Hang on to the winch of all this shape-shifting!" --Megan Levad, author of What Have I to Say to You(2018)

Raptosh’s America is razor-wired by Netflix subscriptions, mass shootings, “mouthy and awful” loving, and the digital grift of a click economy masquerading as a heart but shaped like a blob and hell-bent on commercializing everything in its path. In Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles, we inherit a crushing reckoning with the human experiment, “the self on the one hand, / a cellphone, the other,” as we direct our bodies, sometimes feebly, sometimes with a swiped-in grace, “toward the arms / of the moans .…” This is a collection simultaneously anchored to the past and miraculously stretching forward, along the Ethernet cables, into what is entirely, brazenly, Raptosh’s time. --J. Reuben Appelman, author of Make Loneliness (2008) and The Kill Jar (2018)