BY KATE HOROWITZ
The Kissing of Kissing, Hannah Emerson. Milkweed Editions, March 2022. 112 pp. $16.00.
Please get kissing is exploding
yes
yes.
Please get that you need
to only explode
into yourself nothing
yes
yes
yes.
I have never read a book like The Kissing of Kissing. In her first full-length poetry collection, nonspeaking autistic writer Hannah Emerson has exploded cultural assumptions about how we should write, how we should communicate, and what it means to be alive.
Repetition, in conventional poetry, is often treated like a strong spice: a useful addition, where called for, but best applied sparingly. But in The Kissing of Kissing, repetition is the dinner table, the cooking pot, the serving spoon, the steaming bowl.
Emerson uses repetition like a weaver at a loom, knotting the same words (kiss, try, breath, life, yes, yes, yes, please) together over and over in dozens of bright, unique poetic patterns. The resulting collection is cohesive and startling. It is moving—as a beautiful song is moving, yes, but also as a river moves, rushing toward a waterfall.
please try to let
go to help
yourself keep
from going down
the drain yes yes —
The poems are guided meditations, of a sort, with Emerson drawing the reader out of their trance and into the real world, which to her is grander, vaster, and freer than we all might realize. Emerson writes of speech, of blood, of gender, of beauty, of growth, and, most fervently, of self-love.
***
I didn’t know I was autistic until last year. All I knew, for 37 years, was that I was different, and that, quite often, my difference was a problem. Since my realization and diagnosis, every day has held epiphanies. Many of them make me sad, as I tap into just how alone I’ve felt, and how defective, and how this information could have changed my life if I’d known it when I was young. Other epiphanies are more hopeful. So my brain is different. Not broken, just different. So maybe the rules of brains don’t always apply. So maybe the rules don’t matter. So maybe this is magic.
I was relieved to find this same dual truth in The Kissing of Kissing. Emerson gracefully balances autistic frustration—
I am
me here. Keep
out.
—and equally autistic mysticism:
Please get that great animals are all
autistic. Please love poets we are the first
autistics. Love this secret no one knows it.
***
The publication of The Kissing of Kissing marks the launch of Milkweed Editions’ new Multiverse series, which celebrates neurodivergent, autistic, neuroqueer, mad, nonspeaking, and disabled poets.
Multiverse editor Chris Martin, a neurodivergent poet himself, told me that The Kissing of Kissing was “one of the books that made this series necessary. When I saw the poems coming together,” he said, “I realized that there needed to be a way to bring them into the world that would honor them. People really need these poems.”
Disabled and neurodivergent writers experience tremendous obstacles to publishing their work. Accessibility is often a last thought for editors, presses, and publications, when they think about it at all.
But uplifting marginalized writers is not just important for equity’s sake. Neurodivergent and disabled poetics have rich cultures and practices of their own to share. Existing and creating in a hostile environment has forged us into adapters, alchemists, and innovators. Our work eludes and transcends expectations. All readers and writers, regardless of ability or neurotype, would be wise to pay attention.
“One of the things I love about the idea of a multiverse is that there’s a way in which it’s already happening, and it’s already here,” Martin said. “In some ways, the problem is just our ability to perceive this multiplicity of multiverses. There are different universes of unheard and underheard languages happening all around us. We just wanted to create a forum for them to be received.”
For some nonspeaking writers, Martin said, “poetry is not some sort of ornamentation. It’s not this thing on top of everything else. This is it. This is the core. This is the most direct way of languaging.”
***
In the crowded landscape of modern poetics, which often conflate obfuscation with artistry, The Kissing of Kissing stands out, stark and radical in its directness.
There is a you in Emerson’s poems; it is you, the reader. And to this you, Emerson offers instructions and invitations. Please kiss. Please dance. Please try. Please listen. Please let go.
Emerson plays the imperative voice like an instrument, shifting its tone from forceful to didactic to pleading, always delivering, always impelling the reader forward. We are pushed, pulled, and carried. At times we are dropped and feel the dizziness of falling, the dissolution of the ground we believed was beneath us.
please
try to yell in hell
yes yes —
More often, Emerson bears us upward, and we discover that what we took for the sky, the limit, was no more than an illusory lid.
Please
try to evaporate into the great universe.
Please try to help me do it too.
Please try to go to your light it is trying
to love you yes yes yes.
(Poems quoted: “Pow Pow Pow Pow,” “Another Free Blue Vortex,” “Becoming Mud,” “Center of the Universe,” and “The Path of Please”)
Kate Horowitz is an autistic and disabled poet, essayist, and science writer in Maine. Her work has appeared in Rogue Agent, The Atlantic, and bitch magazine; on tarot cards and matchboxes; and in anthologies on inanimate objects, pop culture, and the occult. You can find her at katehorowitz.net, on Twitter @delight_monger, and on Instagram @kate_swriting. She lives by the sea.