Erin Robinsong's Discerning & Voracious Rag Cosmology

Erin Robinsong's first collection, Rag Cosmology (BookThug, 2017), is reviewed by Domenica Martinello for Canadian Notes & Queries (CNQ). "Pleasure and terror are not mutually exclusive in Rag Cosmology. In fact, they’re bedfellows," writes Martinello. More from this review:

Robinsong also breaks down the spell of the perceived split between human beings and the fate of the environment. Highlighting our interrelations between oceans, trees, and the rest of the environment seems obvious yet ominous in the age of climate change and its deniers. One of the book’s most iconic moments comes when the speaker declares:“I don’t bleach my asshole//I gold leaf it,” a statement preceded by the almost mythological image of night “falling from a singing bird’s bright anus.”

Trees are the epitome of desire in “Autobiography,” as letters explode and reconfigure themselves across the page in different punning variations of “pine fir yew.” Water is also a constant spectre, an essential resource whose personal and political resonances are always pooling nearby. The “politics of hot and bleached//oceans” culminates in the poem “It Is No Good and I Continue”: “Do you miss the ocean? Of course! The ocean misses me too.”

Rag Cosmology contains over forty italicized quotations woven seamlessly into the poems like the line above, attributed to an interview with Cecilia Vicuña and Jonathan Skinner published in ecopoetics no. 1 (2001). The title of the poem itself is foraged from Lisa Robertson’s 3 Summers (Coach House Books). Robinsong is both discerning and voracious with her sources, conjuring voice fragments from Heraclitus, Homer, Barthes, Bataille, Abramović, Fred Moten, Bernadette Mayer, and Tom Waits, to name only a few. The borrowed lines manage to add emphasis without disruption. By channelling her ragtag team of influences, Robinsong heightens the collection’s sense of harmony and connectedness.

Read it all at CNQ.