Hand Signs from Eternity's Yurt

In Diane Raptosh's terrific new collection, Hand Signs from Eternity's Yurt, we find sonnets of rare visionary range, lyric density, and expressive power, inspired by the writings of Mary Midgely, a philosopher so sorely overlooked, though given here a contemporary address in the meditative heart and the polis of the political imagination. Such work, born of speculative hunger, reverence, conscience, and civic unease, explores an "age of seclusion" wherein the boundaries of fixed form mirror the rooms we live in, write in, speak from, aware our privacies cannot be extricated from the world at large. While sonnets here admit a figurative kinship with exclusionary spaces, they do so if only to open their windows to the threat of such exclusions. They seek, in their scale, precision, and largesse of resonance, to intensify our attention to detail and what, therefore, we have to lose, to mourn, to praise, to honor in the complexity of the human and its margins. These are the songs, so timely in their incisiveness, that teach us "the most slowly debuted / state of risk." A phenomenal book.

-Bruce Bond,
author of Patmos

In 21-plus-one sonnets provoked by and tethered to quotes drawn from the work of British philosopher Mary Midgley, you know right away from her very first words what Diane Raptosh cares about: "I prize what praise phrases" is her flagship declaration that sound is queen in this realm. What follows is a series of inventively packaged powerplants of sonic signification, poems that yield just as many aha moments as ooh moments in their condensed and intensified engagement with big questions. Do you detect underlying trumpet voluntaries on the themes of informed resistance and revolutionary compassion? Yes, you most certainly do.
-Karen Donovan,
author of Planet Parable within multi-author volume Trio

In her gorgeous new collection, Hand Signs from Eternity's Yurt, Diane Raptosh extends the "conscious recoupling of feeling / with thought" that makes all of her work so powerful. Here, with the words of philosopher Mary Midgley as provocations for each poem, Raptosh contravenes the "structures that lure [people] / to cruelty," not with cruelty in return but with a gift, "lines / of plucked tones," to be savored as she plucks them, and to hear resonating long afterward.

-H.L. Hix,
author of The Death of H.L. Hix