FITS: a biomythography, 7”x7,” 39pg, Asringent Press, 2023.
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Recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Anna Rabinowitz Award
“Having figured the power of the erotic as a turning toward one’s own work with the same sensual relief of coming to rest in one’s own bed, Audre Lorde prepares us to read rachel j. atakpa’s FITS: a biomythography. But atakpa’s project begins from and exceeds Lorde’s hope of concentrating power by returning sensual ease to one integrated and politicized body. Fits sensitizes the attention in a way that’s all the more political because it disperses itself across a network of inside and out, present and past, body and ghost, landscape and memory.
Eager to inhabit simultaneous registers, it’s right that this photographic and textual work should begin with a catalog of the distinct semantic baggage the word “fits” can carry. In word and in saturated, layered photographs, Fits orchestrates tender tremors and finds room for them in moments as quotidian and intimate as taking out the trash or releasing a bug trapped behind one’s glasses. Sometimes revisiting memory through the shared gaze of sisters, these poems are always susceptible to a present tense relation to land and place that achieves nothing less than an anointing. In this blessing, the middle land of this continent becomes a kind of sibling in witness. But there’s no distance here that would organize the world into observer and obseved.
These poems witness by staying attuned to electromagnetic impulses and pathways coursing intimately under signification, deeper inside at the register of what Hortense Spillers taught us to think of as flesh. atakpa follows these pulses threading through and out of the body toward topography and its geologic archive to inhabit any point along this involute spiral as nest, vantage and point of gathering.”