Winner 2023 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry

Wet Dream is an expansive book of ecological thinking for living on a wet planet on fire. Erotic and political, vibrating with pleasures, medicines, and unrest, these poems metabolize toxic logics and traverse enmeshed ecologies through the wetness that connects. A pulse of agency to the heart.

"Erin Robinsong's Wet Dream is an erotic epistemology of humors, the vital fluids linking bodies to cosmos. What does liquidity know?" — Lisa Robertson

"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 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

"Wet Dream lures you to dissolution, even as you're already keeling from falling apart: no solidity will save you now. On offer instead 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

"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 and 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

"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

"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

"A deliriously loopy and hooligan collection of poems, word-clusters that bring an abundance of pleasure to the body reading. It marks the arrival of a uniquely wayward and playful intelligence, fierce and tender and curious, tracing its own unanticipated swerves and quirks as it cartwheels into the erotic immediacy of creaturely existence. Given to moisture, ooze, and the lustrousness of the body's excretions — those substances through which we materially merge with what envelops us — this palpable clutch of poems leaves me happily thingified, delighting in my own tangible density (and my consequent kinship with broken chairs and granite boulders and all the bric-a-brac of the world). Yet at the same time the book leaves me deliquesced all over the place, like a tide, or the shifting lattice of foam on a heightening wave. Like mist. Like a wet dream." — David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal