Diane Raptosh

Diane Raptosh is an American poet of Sicilian/American descent who became the first poet laureate for Boise, Idaho, in 2013. Her book American Amnesiac was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award.
Raptosh grew up in Idaho and attended the College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho, where she earned her BA in literature and modern languages. She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan, after which she taught at a variety of institutions before returning to teach at the College of Idaho in 1990.
Raptosh has received three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts and holds the Eyck-Berringer Endowed Chair in English at The College of Idaho. In 2013, the Idaho Commission on the Arts awarded her the position of Writer-in-Residence, the highest literary honor in the state, for 2013-16. She was appointed the first Boise Poet Laureate in honor of the city’s 2013 sesquicentennial celebration.
She has completed literary residencies in such places as the Banff Centre and the Studios of Key West. Currently, Raptosh teaches literature and creative writing and directs the Criminal Justice Studies program at the College, the goal of which is teaching students to facilitate writing workshops in prisons and jails, juvenile detention centers and safe houses throughout southeast Idaho and western Oregon, and introducing students to the study of American prison writing.
Raptosh lives in Boise, Idaho, with her family.

Writing in varied forms ranging from prose poetry to sonnets, faux crossword puzzles to the ghazal, Raptosh’s poems visit and revise sociocultural and aesthetic norms, such that all axes may eventually point toward what one of the poems in American Amnesiac calls “the spine of a possible decency.”

Raptosh's first book of poems, Just West of Now (Guernica), was published in 1992. Her other books of poetry are Labor Songs (Guernica, 1999), Parents from a Different Alphabet (Guernicak, 2008), and American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press, 2013) in 2013.

The poems in Just West of Now are concerned with “our failures of communication, the limitations and possibilities of speech, the search for a literal and figurative home, the entanglements of love given and received,” according to a review by Alice Fulton, who notes further that “Raptosh’s work will please those who don’t read much poetry as well as those who read little else.”

Her second collection, Labor Songs, “speaks in many voices in order to scrutinize the world from multiple perspectives... to chart a complex geography centered in Idaho but further reaching out towards Michigan, Florida, Alaska, and beyond,” according to scholar/poet Sandra M. Gilbert.

Raptosh’s third book, Parents from a Different Alphabet, is a collection of prose poems that reckon with gender constructs as well as the plights and blitheness of the body, individual and collective. This book is dedicated to her late father, whose death helps to shape her third work.

American Amnesiac (2013), Raptosh’s fourth poetry collection, was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award. The booklength dramatic monologue, alternately considered a novella in verse, takes on such themes as individual identity, corporate personhood, and the U.S. prison system. Also a finalist for the 2013 Housatonic Book Award in Poetry, American Amnesiac was hailed by poet/reviewer Daniela Gioseffi as “a magnum opus—one long poem spoken in the persona of an older man suffering from amnesia. The book constitutes his stream of consciousness as he attempts to piece together who he is and what he’s experienced in his American life.” Poet H.L. Hix writes that “American Amnesiac makes a genre of the condition its protagonist suffers: it is a dissociative fugue. What its speaker cannot remember, its reader will not forget.” Poet/reviewer Marc Sheehan wrote, “In these poems, Rinehart/Doe spends as much time and emotional energy piecing together the world around him as he does trying to reconstruct his past. Culture, Rinehart/Doe discovers, both liberates us from ourselves and imprisons us in its expectations.”

Her upcoming fifth poetry collection, Human Directional (Etruscan Press 2016), tests and explodes boundaries between self and other, human and animal, individual and world. Within this process, the speakers take up a variety of themes ranging from the vicissitudes of love and identity configurations to animal rights and social justice issues. In so doing, the poems point the way to “the space of the thinkable”—poetry the most obvious means to reconstruct, imaginatively and compassionately, what is. About this work, Craig Morgan Teicher wrote, "Nothing is off limits to the whirling speaker of Diane Raptosh’s Human Directional, because ‘the space of// the thinkable is so much/ larger’ than any one kind of poem, any form, any tone, can contain. So here are spidery couplets, blocks of off-kilter prose, Q&A as poetry, new compound words, fractions and factoids, whatever’s necessary to speak the mind of this ‘every anyone,’ ‘a human tornado’ whose careening meditations cover everything from Wittgenstein to ‘blue-footed-boobies’ to ‘Gayle next door...’ Raptosh is at heart an old-fashioned lyric poet, endearingly lonesome, hopeful about the prospect of a reader’s company, generous with her ample wisdom and energy: ‘I am here,’ she writes, ‘because I have this tightness in my throat/ I don’t want taking over the earth,’ and because ‘I fall slightly in love with whoever I get to/ stand next to.’ It’s hard not to feel loved by these poems, and to love them.”

Raptosh's work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Terrain.org, Michigan Quarterly Review and OccuPoetry.

• 2013: American Amnesiac longlisted for National Book Award
• 2013–2016: Named Idaho Writer-in-Residence
• 2013: Named Boise Poet Laureate
• 2007: Fellowship in Literature, Idaho Commission on the Arts
• 2001: Fellowship in Literature, Idaho Commission on the Arts
• 1991: Fellowship in Literature, Idaho Commission on the Arts

• Human Directional. Etruscan Press. 2016. ISBN 978-0-9903221-6-0
• American Amnesiac. Etruscan Press. 2013. ISBN 978-0-9839346-6-0
• Parents From a Different Alphabet. Guernica Editions. 2008. ISBN 978-1550712858
• Labor Songs. 1999. Guernica Editions. ISBN 978-1550710595
• Just West of Now. 1992. Guernica Editions. ISBN 978-0920717714

• Verse/Chorus: A Call and Response Anthology, 2014
• The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets, 2013
• Classifieds: An Anthology of Prose Poems, 2012
• New Poets of the American West, 2010
• Mamas and Papas On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Act of Parenting, 2010
• Families: The Frontline of Pluralism, 2008
• Sinatra... but buddy, I’m a kind of poem, 2008
• Writing With An Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors, 2002
• Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers, 2001
• Woven on the Wind: Women Write About Friendship in the Sagebrush West, 2001

In 2015, Raptosh gave a TEDx Talk called “Poetry, Democracy, and the Hope of Sounds” in which she describes the poet as “language’s bodyguard,” citing her mother’s linguistic influences on her. “Poetry retunes language into angles of truth,” she says.