The Kissing of Kissing

"In this remarkable debut, which marks the beginning of Multiverse-a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent Hannah Emerson's poems keep, dream, bring, please, grownd, sing, kiss, and listen"--

List of contents

Contents

My Name Begins Again



Becoming Mud

Kissing Tendrill Mind

Peripheral

Just Happy That Lovely Children Are Dancing

Keep

How the World Began

A Blue Sound

The Path of Please

I Live in the Woods of My Words

Please Try to Go to the Road

Giveness

The Underworld

Connemara Pony

To Go To

The Sun

Another Free Blue Vortex

The Beautiful Beautiful Beautiful Dreaming Beast

Throught

Language of Leaves

To Burrow

Between

Center of the Universe

The Other World

Love is Orange

Irises

Fill Your Arms

Bring the Spring

Animal Ear

Pow Pow Pow Pow

Into the Towards

Teach

Hannah Is Never Only Hannah

The Edge

The Reason You Became Human

Come Home

Lovely Burst

Sugar Beat

Cicadas

Our Feet Become the Music

Musibility

Keep Yourself at the Beginning of the Beginning

Sacred Grove

The Listening World

About the author

Hannah Emerson is the author of The Kissing of Kissing. She is also the author of a chapbook, You Are Helping This Great Universe Explode. Emerson is a nonspeaking autistic artist and poet whose work has graced BOMB Magazine, the Poetry Society of America, Literary Hub, and the Brooklyn Rail. She lives in Lafayette, New York.

Summary

In this remarkable debut, which marks the beginning of Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—Hannah Emerson’s poems keep, dream, bring, please, grownd, sing, kiss, and listen. They move with and within the beautiful nothing (“of buzzing light”) from which, as she elaborates, everything jumps.

In language that is both bracingly new and embracingly intimate, Emerson invites us to “dive down to the beautiful muck that helps you get that the world was made from the garbage at the bottom of the universe that was boiling over with joy that wanted to become you you you yes yes yes.” These poems are encounters—animal, vegetal, elemental—that form the markings of an irresistible future. And The Kissing of Kissing makes joyously clear how this future, which can sometimes seem light-years away, is actually as close, as near, as each immersive now. It finds breath in the woods and the words and the worlds we share, together “becoming burst becoming / the waking dream.”

With this book, Emerson, a nonspeaking autistic poet, generously invites you, the reader, to meet yourself anew, again, “to bring your beautiful nothing” into the light.

Foreword

Major galley campaign, with galleys available for sales force by request, major media, poetry media, autistic-, neurodivergent- and disabled-led media, booksellers and librarians; digital galleys available for download on Edelweiss

Dedicated publicist Jenara Nerenberg, who is the founder of The Neurodiversity Project and author of Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World that Wasn't Designed For You and who has been conducting outreach to writers covering books by neurodivergent authors as well as folx in the neurodiverse, autism, and disabled communities

Major media outreach for book and Multiverse series, positioning this title as a groundbreaking work of poetry from a new and exciting voice, particularly in the context that the market is focused in the genres of memoir and nonfiction when it comes to representing neurodivergent and autistic voices

Major bookseller campaign, with a focus on East Coast and University stores, for pickup in disability studies courses

Marketing collaboration with a professional consultant who identifies as neurodivergent, autistic and/or disabled and who will amplify outreach to these communities

Cover reveal and preorder newsletter campaign in collaboration with East Coast bookstore

Major marketing campaign in both print and digital formats to engage readers and book buyers and invite them into the author's voice and perspective

Newsletter promotion via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 30,000 contacts

Advertising in Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, Library Journal, NAIBA, and Autism Society of Minnesota

Major virtual launch in New York City

Additional text

Praise for The Kissing of Kissing“Inventive . . . Images repeat on a scale that shifts from the immediate, worldly, and intimate to the cosmic. ‘Please try// to imagine how big you are yes yes,’ Emerson suggests, challenging the reader to expand their perception and vision through this unusual and intriguing approach to form.”—Publishers Weekly

“I have never read a book like The Kissing of Kissing . . . Hannah Emerson has exploded cultural assumptions about how we should write, how we should communicate, and what it means to be alive . . . Emerson [draws] the reader out of their trance and into the real world, which to her is grander, vaster, and freer than we all might realize.”—Kate Horowitz, Luna Luna Magazine
“This book feels personal and inviting at the same time–it’s very much Emerson’s story and perspective on display, and yet her work regards the reader not as a distant observer but as a partner in experiencing this big weird world we find ourselves in. The Kissing of Kissing makes the complicated feel comfortable and vice-versa, and that makes it a book worth settling down with and reading again and again.”—Samir Knego, Anomaly
“[The Kissing of Kissing] articulates nascent worlds anxiously awaiting their opening . . . Emerson, as an autistic poet, is not broken in the face of neurotypical linguistic norms, but rather an agent in the breaking and rebuilding of alternative ways to know the world.”—[Sarah] Cavar, Barrelhouse Reviews

“There is a ‘yes yes’ magic spell ‘yes yes’ in these pages, as this planet’s most extraordinary poems will cast. Yes, and more ‘yes yes,’ Hannah Emerson’s The Kissing of Kissing deserves a cult following—I’M IN! You, too, will fall in love with these poems that are coming at life in angles we never knew we needed to imagine!”—CAConrad

“The Kissing of Kissing is incantatory and ecstatic. Ideas and images rooted in the natural world appear and swirl; the patterns and deviations they create combine to form a lush soundscape. In the vibrant heart of this woods of Hannah Emerson’s words, we are implored to embrace gestures that are straightforward and not—to ‘try to dive / down to the / beautiful muck’ or ‘to get to the flake of / snow that indescribable thing / that we need to know if we are to melt.’ The Kissing of Kissing is spectacular in its cadences and in its call to embrace longing, desire, intimacy, and (yes yes) love.”—Michael Kleber-Diggs

 “Hannah Emerson’s The Kissing of Kissing is one of the most accomplished poetry debuts I’ve come across in recent memory. There’s something of Molly Bloom’s final soliloquy in these poems, that deep rush of deep ecstasy made full by having touched deep loss: ‘I sound / each prayer to let all of / language answer me. / Teach our water its art. / Use questions.’ You can feel echoes of Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, and Ross Gay in Emerson’s truly singular and unforgettable voice. This is one of those rare miraculous books that, having read, I want to immediately share with everyone I love.”—Kaveh Akbar

“‘Look very hard to find / the place between / the pillow and hell,’ Hannah Emerson writes in The Kissing of Kissing. Half entreating, half commanding, with an expansive approach to syntax and the urgent repetition of a heart beating with greater and greater intensity toward self-realization through language, these poems demonstrate a poetics of deep listening and deep feeling, of care, that suggests an alternative to the cruelty and carelessness that often take center stage in our historical moment. Hell is always proximate, Emerson’s poems remind us, but through attentiveness to ‘little things,’ so is the possibility for transformation—which is the work of poetry.”—Lauren Russell

Product details

• Authors: Hannah Emerson, Emerson Hannah
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 08.03.2022
• EAN: 9781571315496
• ISBN: 978-1-57131-549-6
• No. of pages: 96
• Illustrations: Illustrationen, nicht spezifiziert
• Series: Multiverse
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; POETRY / American / General, POETRY / Women Authors, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Nature, Modern and contemporary poetry (c 1900 onwards), POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Animals & Nature