Yes you, you chose to carve out this moment for you. No one else gets this time just for you, chirps the onscreen calisthenic coach. It’s midnight. OUR DARK ACADEMIA’s contingent academic antiheroine is perpetually working, trying to work it out. She’s lonely but onscreen. I don’t feel anything at all it is so fun to be alive! she lies. Meanwhile, is this new sensation grief or groin pull? Who’s in the waiting room? Is it too late to join the symposium? To buy organic greens? To save up? Save anything? With unsettling humor, Adrienne Raphel traces the suspect filigrees of the late late stage: advanced degrees, wellness trends, inherited trinketry, GIFs of inspo lynx. Sliding with formal dynamism from sonnet crown to sestina, Wiki page to personal statement, crossword to quiz, OUR DARK ACADEMIA captures the exuberant florid panicked acrobatics of this time at the edge of time.
Nervy, deft, and shot through with gloriously manic wit, OUR DARK ACADEMIA sounds out the limits of our moral commitments in this age of intersecting global crises and ongoing precarity. In their voracious appetites, these poems trawl through Pelotons and permanent positions, Tarot decks and tattoo teeth, all while making ‘lemons out of lemonade.’ ‘I feel fine, I worry a lot / But at a distance’–would it be that worrying were always so rhythmically lush and piquant, so deeply capable of eliciting delight. OUR DARK ACADEMIA meets life’s ungovernability with wild sonic ringing and the light of this singular mind’s tragicomic connections and insights. Adrienne Raphel is a category all her own.–Jenny Xie
STRONG PANDEMIC ENERGY, I was saying while reading Adrienne Raphel’s exquisite, frenetic poems of interchangeability and the outoftime. Raphel’s work is cerebral, melodic, and discomfiting, expertly evoking contemporary disconnection: the mad chatter of machines and the infinite loop of the oneperson callandresponse. These poems feel like what it feels like to think in a time when thinking feels unthinkable.– Natalie Shapero
It’s strange times lately, and nowhere are they stranger than in Adrienne Raphel’s OUR DARK ACADEMIA, where all connections are unstable and the math never checks out. In this gendered dystopian world, hysterically funny–hysterical as in lol and hysterical as in wandering womb–Raphel’s voices are sharp as tacks and tough as nails. Offrhymes pile up like hoarded soup cans, and isn’t Chrissie the Peleton instructor starting to sound a little like Samuel Beckett? Nothing is easy going, and behind a certain loveable crankiness lurks the suspicion that it might be the end of the world, but there are worse things you could do in an age of pandemic carnivalesque than load up your online shopping cart (‘Viv, ’ for example, ‘is buying futures, whatever that means’) and luxuriate in Raphel’s signature madcap lyricism, which is–in the midst of anxious times–a true joy.–Lindsay Turner
Poetry. Hybrid. Art. Literary Criticism. Women’s Studies.
