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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.
