Diane Raptosh

[2] She is the mother of Keats Conley, whose first book, Guidance from the Gods of Seahorses, was a finalist for the Wandering Aengus award and was published by Green Writers Press in 2021.

"[8] 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 Sandra M.

The dramatic monologue, which Raptosh also considers a novella in verse, takes on individual identity, corporate personhood, and the U.S. prison system.

A finalist for the 2013 Housatonic Book Award in Poetry, American Amnesiac was described by Daniela Gioseffi as "a magnum opus—one long poem spoken in the persona of an older man suffering from amnesia.

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.

[12] In 2015, Raptosh gave a TEDx Talk in Boise, Idaho 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.