The Rape Kit

by Terri Witek

Poetry

Genres: Poetry

149 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2018

About the author

Terri Witek (born Therese Ann Damm in Sandusky, Ohio) is a U.S. poet. Her collections include Exit Island (2012), The Shipwreck Dress (2008), a Florida Book Award winner; Carnal World (2006); Fools and Crows (2003); and Courting Couples (2000), a Center for Book Arts Prize winner. She is also the author of Robert Lowell and Life Studies: Revising the Self. Throughout her career she has worked with visual artists, and the reverberations between mediums is explored in much of her work. Her collaborations with Brazilian new media artist Cyriaco Lopes have appeared in galleries and site-specific installations, and their 2009 video "recife/s," was a finalist in avant-garde film at the British Film Festival in LA.

Witek holds a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and is the director of the Sullivan Creative Writing Program at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, where she holds the Art & Melissa Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing. In 2000, she received the McEniry Award for Teaching, and in 2008, she received the John Hague Teaching Award for outstanding teaching in the liberal arts and sciences.

She is married to comic book scholar Joseph Witek.

Reviews

[S.W. Gordon]

Terri Witek is most successful where words alone fail. How does a poet convey the unsayable, the almost unimaginable violation? Witek explores the dehumanization of the rape victim by the double assault first by the rapist then by the bureaucratic system to catch, convict and punish the rapist. Both use a "rape kit" to complete their task. I don't think this is meant to necessarily disparage the health care workers and police detectives who have become numb and desensitized. Witek captures the reality of the situation--the unvarnished truth. The cover image called Reliquaries #1 by Cyriaco Lopes is rather intriguing. It looks like a weathered bust of the persecuted Christ stained with graffiti (pink vulvar folds, uriniferous yellow, blue bruised cheek, grey matter on the brain, golden flakes chipping away) or perhaps an unfinished bust of a woman with wild hair inside of which resides sacred things. The aqua blue folds (one of which is rather suggestive) could represent an ocean wave about to crash over the woman or a veil/shroud being lifted off the the persecuted victim. Terri and Cyriaco bring out the best in each other's work.

[Michele]

Terri Witek’s poetry collection is uniquely thought provoking in both content and form. Text that’s recognizable as poetry, with line and stanza breaks, alternates with graphics, diagrams, and (most interesting to me) chunky paragraphs of text on investigation procedure, history, and literature that also contain stories of Ancient Greek nymphs, sprinkled in boldface in a sort of blackout and erasure.
Ambitious in scope and strategy, Witek’s illustrations and meditations on sexual assault, the investigation of crimes, and rape’s impact on victims and witnesses are intelligent and insightful.

[Simón]

Best New Poetry of this year.

Experiencing Witek recite/perform pieces from this intermedia, hybrid text added yet another level of textuality and energy to an already multi-vocal work. As soon as she began a panting, breathless, panick-attacky delivery of a poem, I was hooked.

In order to attend to the unspeakability of rape, of the limited discourses that have been developed to even articulate rape, these "poems" resist the problematic, autobiographical narrative accounts demanded of survivors both to prove their trauma and to guarantee their healing. One prominent discourse is that of the legal system that approaches rape as a crime, hence, documentation from actual rape kits sit alongside fragments of memory.

As a physical artifact, I love how much space has been made of the page by incorporating collage or visual elements like a single vertical dashed line which is immediately a path, a boundary, or a limit.

I'm a survivor of sexual abuse frustrated by the potential of retraumatizing myself simply by using language within certain discourses, so that's partly why this hit me so hard. I'm also writing about systemic, historical trauma and developing hybrid ways of accounting for how experience lives in culture, and whether authenticity is preserved or disturbed by questioning and fracturing.

Rather than imposing totality, strength, justice, etc., onto rape, this text is open to its contradictions, terror, and holding faith that "nothing's too much-she thinks (almost)--to bear" (72).

[Tsundoku By the Day 📚]

4.5 Stars. This poetry books was a strange but fresh read. I liked the fact that everything something you had to piece together and were somewhat cryptic but in a more modern way. It almost felt like a game reading it. It had drawings, quizzes, Q&As, lists, interviews, and so on. However, it even with all of this, it makes you think.
The book’s about a serious topic but it’s not as “in your face”, depressing, and difficult to take in as other poems about it have been—which is why I enjoyed it so much.
I also admire the cover. 😆
But, I sometimes found myself trying to connect certain things together and came up blank (maybe some were too cryptic?) so I just skipped over it and moved on.

[Tyler Barton]

Terri Witek breaks poetry