Wet Dream is an expansive book of ecological thinking for living on a wet planet on fire. Erotic and political, vibrating with pleasures, medicines, and unrest, these poems metabolize toxic logics and traverse enmeshed ecologies through the wetness that connects. A pulse of agency to the heart.
Praise for Wet Dream
“Erin Robinsong’s Wet Dream is an erotic epistemology of humors, the vital fluids linking bodies to cosmos. What does liquidity know? Nerves, skies, rivers, spit, dreams and language are essentially passionate, and here become the shimmering components of a poethics that joins ecology with love with the grammar of song. Here, time is a heretical school that teaches us how not to vanish. Yes, in spite of the current political economy, Robinsong is mystic: it’s her way to think flourishing. I am grateful to her for these spiralling records of survival.”
—Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal
“Wet Dream is brain lube for an insurgent language – creaturely poems that remake your body and relation to the world. I want to smear them all over.”
—Astrida Neimanis, author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology
“Erin Robinsong's Wet Dream is a dazzling torrent of brilliance shot thru with genuinely delicious barbs of disgust, of precision. To read Wet Dream is to tune your ear to ecstasy as the highest form of knowledge, and to a very necessary liquefaction of mere intelligence, a churning of the ore of higher, higher, highest mind. I love this book. It resurrected me in a very cold winter, and primed me for rebirth.
—Ariana Reines, author of A Sand Book
“In this poetry the dreamy melt of the mindbody is all porosity and the subject itself, here investigating itself, is defined by its porous seeping out beyond its lyric skin and that outside seeping in as the ‘skin is continuous’—‘there’s no / Seal’ and ‘water drinks me, water thinks / Me’ and who are we but briefly conscious nodes in this fluid process? Amongst the vagaries of what we have called ecopoetry, I want to reach out from the dissolving liquid commons to hold this book up as exhibit A—beautiful, trenchant, urgent, deeply thought and felt, wide hot wet generous and wild. There is instruction here too: ‘Grow whet & planetary,’ ‘work for the boss of beauty,’ who is the boss of this poet I urge you to read.”
— Stephen Collis, author of A History of the Theories of Rain
“Wet Dream is a potent enquiry into the living world and its many minds. Thought forms are composed and decomposed. Elegy, prayer, hypothesis, invitation, and spell are stirred into beautiful relation. I will read these poems again and again.” — Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life
THE ECOLOGICAL IS PERSONAL; THE PERSONAL IS ECOLOGICAL. RAG COSMOLOGY IS A PULSATING MEDITATION ON THIS MOST INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP. THESE POEMS INJECT PLEASURE DEEP INTO THE TISSUES OF OUR LANGUAGE AND STATE, COUNTERING FATALIST NARRATIVES WITH THE INTIMACY OF ENTANGLEMENT AND ENGAGEMENT.
Praise for Rag Cosmology
“Open this book for deeper information about how sensing and moving among the world’s elements is a cosmic work of images, where touching is a kind of seeing, and thinking is a kind of kissing. For Erin Robinsong, being in language together is a chosen act of joy, a refusal of the imposed debt and dross of the bankers. These poems walk into largesse.”
—Lisa Robertson
“Rag Cosmology is spellbinding. The poems in this stunning debut collection are acrobatic and kinetic, alive with immediacy and sensuality. Experimental in design, yet deeply resonant and familiar in subject matter, Erin Robinsong writes with skillful chiaroscuro, bringing light into darkness, and darkness into light. Reading this collection felt like a breathless game of hide-and-seek—playful, thrilling and haunting, too.”
—Ruth Ozeki
“Erin Robinsong’s long-desired debut, Rag Cosmology is an ecopoethic and turbulent swanlovesong of the personal and mutual. “Do you think our bodies are the only way?” Rag Cosmology sloughs off the dry skin of a 20th-century environmentalist movement’s shame-tactic, revealing a 21st’s poetry’s gold-leafed anus as a will to become-with all that surrounds an ecocentric, curious, and enveloping awe.”
—angela rawlings
Praise for Rag Cosmology
“Open this book for deeper information about how sensing and moving among the world’s elements is a cosmic work of images, where touching is a kind of seeing, and thinking is a kind of kissing. For Erin Robinsong, being in language together is a chosen act of joy, a refusal of the imposed debt and dross of the bankers. These poems walk into largesse.”
—Lisa Robertson
“Rag Cosmology is spellbinding. The poems in this stunning debut collection are acrobatic and kinetic, alive with immediacy and sensuality. Experimental in design, yet deeply resonant and familiar in subject matter, Erin Robinsong writes with skillful chiaroscuro, bringing light into darkness, and darkness into light. Reading this collection felt like a breathless game of hide-and-seek—playful, thrilling and haunting, too.”
—Ruth Ozeki
“Erin Robinsong’s long-desired debut, Rag Cosmology is an ecopoethic and turbulent swanlovesong of the personal and mutual. “Do you think our bodies are the only way?” Rag Cosmology sloughs off the dry skin of a 20th-century environmentalist movement’s shame-tactic, revealing a 21st’s poetry’s gold-leafed anus as a will to become-with all that surrounds an ecocentric, curious, and enveloping awe.”
—angela rawlings
