Reality Reality Reality

The luminous follow-up to the phenomenal collection that launched Milkweed’s Multiverse series, Hannah Emerson’s Reality Reality Reality sings the universe back to itself.

In Hannah Emerson’s incomparable second collection, reality is material. Reality can be creased, dreamed, freed, and reeled; it can be greeted, billowed, treed, and tilled. This is a book of devotions: to freedom, to interconnection, and to words themselves. The poet wakes each word, one at a time, until they are collectively teeming with song, making evident that we cannot exhaust the magic of words—we can only deepen it, allowing reality to reveal all its bright and beaming layers.

Yearning, heralding, reaching, and becoming, Emerson’s poetry inhabits the body, grounded in the feet and enlivened by breath, and familiar sounds transform into both everything and nothing. Concentrated and controlled, Reality Reality Reality moves like a river, like one cascading, incantatory prayer, and the meditative repetition of this carefully assembled lexicon offers a new way of experiencing words on their own and in relation to each other. She opens words into portals we can look through, words that “become universe yes yes yes.”