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.

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.

Erin Robinsong's profile page

• Winner, A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry

"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

"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

"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

"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