Join us for the UK launch of Erin Robinsong's Wet Dream. Following a reading from the book, biologist Merlin Sheldrake will join Erin in conversation, moderated by poet Florence Uniacke.
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.
About the author:
Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist. Her debut collection of poetry, Rag Cosmology, won the 2017 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and her chapbooks include Liquidity (House House Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in Lemon Hound, Vallum, The Capilano Review, Effects, Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, and many others. Collaborative performance works with Andréa de Keijzer and Hanna Sybille Müller include This ritual is not an accident; Facing away from that which is coming; and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies. Originally from Cortes Island, Erin divides her time between Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and the UK.
Praise for Wet Dream:
“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 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
“Erin Robinsong’s Wet Dream is a dazzling torrent of brilliance shot thru with genuinely delicious barbs of disgust, of precision—I think as a poet she’s more about flow than sculpture but, whoa, the crystalline music and the magic and the compression of the insight & prescience her flow throws upon my shores! 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