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. Praise for Rag Cosmology: "Have you ever had the feeling of being spoken by a branch, a dress, a late slant of light? Then 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." --Ruth Ozeki "These words are also a way of touching and being touched, an ecology of creatures that smile even when the passing is violent and sad." --Mike Hoolboom "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