Feature Friday: Rag Cosmology by Erin Robinsong
Looking for some weekend reading? BookThug is excited to introduce Feature Friday—each Friday, we’ll feature one book from our current season and include a special excerpt for your reading pleasure. If you’re intrigued by what you read, you can order a copy here. We promise you won’t regret it!
Meet Rag Cosmology, the debut poetry collection from poet and interdisciplinary artist Erin Robinsong.
In Rag Cosmology, the ecological is personal; the personal is ecological. Rag Cosmology is a pulsating meditation on this most intimate relationship. These poems inject pleasure deep into the tissues of our language and state, countering fatalist narratives with the intimacy of entanglement and engagement. Of the book, Lisa Robertson writes, “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.”
Cosmology is the study of the universe. In a recent interview with Open Book, Erin shares that her cosmology “is a way that I have found to put my sense of fracturedness and majesty together, and to give theories to the communal question – what kind of intelligence are we part of? I’m enthralled by this weird, sexy, pulsating intimacy we share with the earth, and also deeply confused about what it means to be a person right now. How do we become less deadly? (to borrow Donna Haraway’s phrase).”
Credit: Bernardo Fernandez
Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist. Her work has appeared in numerous Canadian journals and anthologies, and onstage at the &NOW Festival of New Writing, The Conference on Ecopoetics, Tangente Danse and others. With longtime collaborator Andréa de Keijzer, she is featured in Mike Hoolboom’s film We Make Couples, a Marxist love story. Erin has an MFA from the University of Guelph, is a recipient of the Irving Layton Award for Poetry, and has been nominated for a KM Hunter Award. She has driven horse carriages, sold knives, restored books for a living, and is currently a teacher and editor. Originally from Cortes Island, Erin lives in Toronto & Montréal. Rag Cosmology is her debut collection.
