Earth on Earth

Poems 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.


Author: Bin Ramke
Publisher: Omnidawn
Published: 10/21/2021
Pages: 104
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.91w x 0.32d
ISBN13: 9781632430991
ISBN10: 1632430991
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | General

About the Author
Bin Ramke is the author of twelve books, most recently Light Wind Light Light and Missing the Moon. He was editor of the Denver Quarterly for twenty years and has taught at Columbus State University in Georgia, the University of Denver, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He continues to write, teach, and live in Denver.