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 Theres a scratching uneasiness under Adra Raines 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 doesnt 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 isnt 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 Raines 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 fetuss 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 its memoir or creative nonfiction. Whatever it isnt Want-Catcher is an offering: a communion of thoughts and feelings and language a meditation on time and times record.