Wet Dream by Erin Robinsong

Wet Dream vibrates with pleasures, fears, and medicines for living on a wet planet on fire. Erin Robinsong’s poems are enmeshed ecologies of body and planet, brain and ocean, moisture and consciousness. From the sleep paralysis of necrocapitalism erupt moth-angels, bird teachers, feral study, Venusian warnings, an extremophile lover, and a dying cat to lead us through the underworlds of ecocide. This book is a meditation on nearness, metabolizing toxic logics through the air, water, and relational space.

Brilliant, embodied, and gorgeously disorienting, Wet Dream is a pulse of agency to the heart.

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

““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

“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

 “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