Danielle LaFrance, Tentacle Rasa

If to be a subject is to be subjugated, then Danielle LaFrance’s latest chapbook suggests that we might find a way out of this state by plunging through murky depths, the mind working as a tentacled sex organ feeling through possibilities of desire, sovereignty, and communion. Tentacle Rasa seeks seeking when LaFrance asserts that “One moment this self is In & the next/ this self is Out,” putting the lie to the myth of the stable subject and showering the reader with “fuck words,” with a deluge that flushes through questions of devotion and the limits of ideology. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes that “being” is always a “being-with,” LaFrance utterly wrecks the borders between subjects but also between species, so that the self “smells of/ everything”: crisp air, pine, bear scat, smoke from the tracks, seaweed, oil, the bracken inky stew of erotic thought.