Humans

• Adra Raine (author)
• Elæ Moss (artist)

ISBN

9781946031402

Page count

56

Keywords

Poetry, Visual Poetry, Prose, Memoir, Creative Nonfiction, Collage, Photos, Photography, Illustration, Art, Pregnancy, Pregnant, Conception, Reproduction, Fetus, Family, Mother, Motherhood, Parenthood, Parent, Race. Sex, Gender, Culture, Misogyny, America, United States, US, USA, Time, Chapbook, Tales

Publication date

2018

Language(s)

English

Publication media type

Print Document
Chapbook

Publication series

Unlimited Editions

Want-Catcher: A Record of Pregnant Writing

“These companionable, searching, smart, smart-ass diary-poems — one per week of pregnancy — talk their human into the baby moving through her into love, racism, climate change, kitties who turn into tigers, domination/damnation of capital, body-pain, fear, gritted teeth, safety (maybe, sometimes), future (maybe), autonomy (no such thing), love.” — Catherine Wagner

“One of my new favorite books Adra Raine writes poems while pregnant, collaborating with her unborn child, taking long, contemplative looks at the world as cells proliferate inside. Her body is part of our own awakening, to not be shy in a world ready to judge by race, by sex, gender. This is a book about getting ready. This is a book of revolution for beauty unleashed.” — CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

“There’s a scratching uneasiness under Adra Raine’s Want-Catcher: A Record of Pregnant Writing. Certainly, we find it in the anxious, intimate accounting of what Raine expects motherhood will change. She renders these instabilities with a directness that doesn’t pretend at settled clarity. But what surprised and troubled me is how consumerism wends its hungry way through the 32 weeks documented here. ‘A want is a mole, ‘ Raine writes, suggesting first the small creatures that live inside the dark. But isn’t a mole also a kind of traitor? Want-Catcher digs through to shine light on desires, how they can turn people into things and leave us wanting. How they tunnel their way into the life-changing and the life-making. Intimate accounting indeed.” — Douglas Kearney

Want-Catcher comes out of Adra Raine’s writing through her first pregnancy and the way contemporary U.S. culture speaks through, at, and against the pregnant body. Becoming pregnant in late capitalism, one of the first things one encounters in the pregnancy-industrial complex is week-by-week guides to what is happening in the body and in the fetus’s development, along the path to the 40-week “due date.” Taking the week as a unit of measure, Raine wrote for forty weeks, at the end of which arrived a baby and a book. With both, she writes, she “met a remaining stigma around pregnancy and parenthood, domestic topics both too personal and too mundane to talk about in public, much less write and read poetry about.” Is this poetry? It may be prose poetry or poetic prose, or maybe it’s memoir or creative nonfiction. Whatever it isn’t, Want-Catcher is an offering: a communion of thoughts and feelings and language, a meditation on time and time’s record.

About the Contributor(s)

Adra Raine is a writer living in Durham, NC. She is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches literature and writing and is completing a dissertation on contemporary U.S. poetry titled "Resonance Over Resolution: Resisting Definition in Nathaniel Mackey, Ed Roberson, and Susan Howe's Post-1968 Poetics." Otherwise, she is working on a book-length manuscript of poems and prose about parenthood in late capitalism titled Wonder Weeks, of which Want-Catcher (The Operating System 2018) is the first chapter.

Elæ Moss is a multimodal artist-researcher, curator, designer, and educator. Seeking Speculative Solidarities, they employ analog and digital media to investigate human, institutional and ecological systems and to iterate open source strategies for ecological and social change. Recent projects have shown at La Mama Galleria, EFA Project Space, STWST/Ars Electronica, Usdan Gallery, Judson Church, the Segal Center, SOHO20, Dixon Place, and the Exponential Festival, among others. Select publications include Big Echo, Tagvverk, Vestiges, Matters of Feminist Practice, The Transgender Narratives Anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, The Brooklyn Poets Anthology, and Resist Much, Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance. Books include Ground, Blood Altas, Overview Effect, Sweet and Low: Indefinite Singular, Bodies of Work, and The Precarity Bodyhacking Work-Book and Guide. Moss is a Professor at Pratt Institute, and the developer / founder of the Operating System + Liminal Lab. More at: https://onlywhatican.net and https://theoperatingsystem.org.