Wet Dream

by Erin Robinsong

Wet Dream is an expansive, erotic, and enlivening book of ecological thinking.

Wet Dream vibrates with pleasures, fears, and medicines for living on a wet planet on fire. Erin Robinsong's poems are enmeshed ecologies of body and planet, brain and ocean, moisture and consciousness. From the sleep paralysis of necrocapitalism erupt moth-angels, bird teachers, feral study, Venusian warnings, an extremophile lover, and a dying cat to lead us through the underworlds of ecocide. This book is a meditation on nearness, metabolizing toxic logics through the air, water, and relational space.

Brilliant, embodied, and gorgeously disorienting, Wet Dream is a pulse of agency to the heart.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published September 23, 2022

Reviews

[Kasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the idea of this more than the actually writing. There were some really nice lines but overall it didn’t resonate with me. I might have powered through and could have given it more time, but I didn’t. 💦💦💦

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is some stunning poetry with amazing lines and imagery for sure, and moments of sparkling brilliance. The book is beautifully made, and the spiral-shaped table of contents is wonderful. The poetry feels very elliptical though, almost hermetical, like it wants to be a language of its own—the language of water and all things fluid, and the speaker flowing into it and with it. I had a somewhat hard time entering these poems and simply let myself be carried by their current.

[darya · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Is everything rhythm?”

On a big poetry kick right now, evidently. I love how this one blends eroticism with natural imagery, still leaving intentional space between the two.

“To speak of water’s entanglements is to dissolve
All lineation. Relation is osmotic, cosmic, contagious.”

[Lei · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tried to be too many different things and became nothing.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

a beautiful work that addresses the ethereal and the earthy through engagements with water, nature, angels, flowers, philosophy and the nature of humanity. I loved the cover which is from ink made by Flora Wallace.

[Eduardo Santiago]

I don’t get poetry. But I’ll keep trying for what’s left of my life. The eros here escaped me. What I felt was despair, partly at myself for being so dense, but partly, too, in the content. There were moments when I maybe almost got it?

I’ll read it again one day. Something tells me it might feel different under an entheogenic perspective. Maybe one day I’ll ask a loved one to read it to me then. I need to keep trying.

Unrated, because I haven’t earned the right.

[Andie Wardrop · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were about three poems I both understood and enjoyed. Not sure how this book is "erotic" or "vibrating with pleasures." For me I found it more of a confusing mash of water imagery and an overuse of the word "juices."
2 stars because I thought it had some interesting insights on capitalism peppered in.

[Dereck]

However erotic this sensual work may seem, it isn’t about unconscious humping through a night of physical lusting; athough it may well be in a metaphysical sense which, soon enough becomes literal.

Picture old water turned into cloud, which we breathe as ancient thought that's too complex to translate and respond to other than by lubricating.

[Lee Suksi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is intimate, clear, and loving. The poem about the angels for god's sakes!

[Alex Sitar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read this for school, the professor was awful and I think this is an irritating elitist soulless style over substance art kid piece of garbage