Rag Cosmology

Winner of the 2017 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry

BookThug is proud to introduce a groundbreaking debut collection of poems by Erin Robinsong. In this time of ecological precarity, Rag Cosmology is an urgent invitation to reinvent our modes engagement with the environment we not only inhabit, but are. Refusing the lamentation that leaves us as resigned witnesses to devastation, Rag Cosmology counters fatalist narratives with the pleasures of ecological entanglement and engagement.

Tracing relationships between seemingly irreconcilable things–economy and ecology, weather and lust, bills and inner voices, wages of avoidance and wages of listening–Rag Cosmology offers the intimate and lush language of thought that yearns for an imaginative reinvention of how we understand what we are part of and what we are losing.

AUTHOR

Erin Robinsong

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 lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.

Reviews

“The poems contained in Rag Cosmology undulate freely, slipping traditional line breaks like a black gown, and sometimes abandoning horizontal displacement altogether. While formal experimentation is a big part of Robinsong’s work, it is her pristine motions of thought, both outward and inward, that make her crystalline craft.”—Largehearted Boy

“Robinsong’s poetry is not here to assuage fears of environmental crisis; rather, its intent is to make one realize that one is living in the midst of one.” —Wildness

“This debut explores an intimacy of ecological identities as wild, sensual and rhythmic as the cosmos.”—The Globe and Mail

“Gratifying and bold, Robinsong’s poems vibrate as the reader is implicated in the lushness of the cosmos, nature, and the self.”—Montreal Review of Books

“Sex and nature cannot be compartmentalized. Life and pleasure cannot be separated. The poems in Rag Cosmology remind us that we are all part of the world’s constant intercourse.”—Canadian Notes and Queries