Description
Book SynopsisPoems that personally engage with the materiality and danger of earth. A kind of translation of the thousand-year-old poem “Earth Took of Earth,” this book is an attempt to restate in personal, emotional terms a sense of both the danger of and the consolation given by earth itself. Many of these poems arose during a collaboration with the ecologist-ceramicist Mia Mulvey: her work with earth, clay often extruded through digitally guided machinery, echoes Ramke’s attempts to understand damages done to and celebrate the facts of earth—for instance, that geosmin, the scent of wet soil, is so powerfully recognizable even in trace amounts. The title of this book is also a play on the phrase “heaven on earth,” turning this idea around and encouraging us to instead turn our hopes toward earth on earth.
Trade Review“The title of Ramke’s collection
Earth on Earth signals an intent to take what tends earthward as so many mirror-inverted ascents of sense. ‘We want to fall,’ the poet writes, but instead ‘we walk radiant,’ aligned away from the center of a world lost in space. Here is a Lucretian meditation on the melody and melancholy of matter; here is a memory-haunted review of the ‘body parts’ of language; here is a word-music played in a minor key, a night-cry replete with intricate trickeries of sound and syntax. Ramke joins the ranks of Rilke and Stevens as a writer of philosophical lyric.” -- Andrew Joron, author of The Absolute Letter
“What can be said of earth on earth? Ramke’s
Earth on Earth isn’t interested in answers, but sonic embodiments, linguistic mirroring, and metaphysical music that invites us to behold: ‘a way to say / is a way to see.’ The work in this collection rides a whirlwind of fact and occult conjecture into delightfully allusive airs. As readers, we find ourselves in a new neural capaciousness, ‘the brain beyond itself,’ beside itself, ecstatic, remembering a bayou, a dead brother, an asteroid, a word slipping out time. Poem by poem, Ramke perpetuates a haunted present into a future that is achingly imminent, god-shaped and ‘god-sharpened.’” -- Christine Hume, author of Saturation Project
