Sure enough, contemporary philosophies of posthumanism and ecophenomenology, challenging human-centered frameworks and exploring the embodied reciprocity between humans and the more-than-human world, circulate—if at all— in the back eddies of popular consciousness. Most of us go on living as though our species were exceptional and privileged to, as the Bible puts it, “dominion over” all the earth, its species and resources. Newspaper articles on melting glaciers, rising sea levels, bleached coral reefs, and floating islands of garbage haven’t led to clamor for change. After a decade of effort, UN-led negotiations on a legally binding treaty to tackle plastic pollution fizzled out in August 2025. The U.S. delegation opposed regulatory action despite research that shows the average American ingests and inhales some 74,000 to 121,000 microplastic particles annually.
If poetry survives, as Auden wrote, as “A way of happening, a mouth,” it may be because it speaks in a language that isn’t familiarly transactional or instrumental. Because it doesn’t suppress ambiguity or complexity. Because its qualities are experiential and, at times, transformative.
Erin Robinsong’s immensely appealing book of poems, Wet Dream, cultivates ambiguity while flashing glimpses of what might be called relational ontology, the suggestion that entities exist only through relationships. She does this with humor, a deliciously expansive lexicon drawing from science, and a wickedly irreverent tone. Her themes and her techniques are consubstantial. And she never forgets the poet Joan Retallack’s admonition to keep in mind “the fun in profundity.”
Reading Robinsong’s Wet Dream (which term, along with its sexual innuendo, might come to remind us of Robert Creeley’s “Be wet with a decent happiness”) we quickly enough come across an exemplary poem, “Peonies of Dog.” The poem’s title might strike us at first as delightfully surreal. But by the time we arrive toward the poem’s end— passing through references to art-making, a semifossorial worm, an agential lake that sees and speaks, the concession/confession that the speaker “kind of” is “Water’s bitch,” and a nod here and there to empire and dualism—the title “Peonies of Dog” comes to be understood as unimproved realism, a biological formulation whose potent signification I wouldn’t want to ruin by explaining it here. Reading Wet Dream has been one of the highlights of my summer.
— Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer/translator, was born in the Mojave Desert, and has degrees in geology and literature. A signal voice for environmental poetics, his work often focuses on human and ecological intimacies. His latest books are Mojave Ghost: a Novel-Poem and Across/Ground: Photographs by Lukas Felzmann.
You can read Forrest Gander's poetry in Issue 305 (Autumn 2025). Order the issue now:
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