The Kissing of Kissing

“This expansive and ecstatic debut, by a nonspeaking autistic poet who calls on ‘prayer to let all of / language answer me,’ inaugurates the publisher’s ‘Multiverse’ series of books by neurodivergent authors.”

“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.”

“[The Kissing of Kissing] is beautiful to behold and even more refreshing to see pleasure so central to neurodiversity because of how often mainstream literature erases this fact.”

“The first entry in Milkweed’s Multiverse series of books focused on neurodivergent and disabled writers, Hannah Emerson’s debut is utterly beguiling, her poetry an indescribable combination of interior monologue and public address. ‘Please try/ to become the breath that gives/ helpful thoughts that are floating / towards you yes yes,’ she writes with characteristic longing and confidence. Reading this beautiful book, I felt as though Emerson’s words had always been in my head.”

“A testament to the idea that poetry is truly the root of human connection via language is The Kissing of Kissing, a groundbreaking collection from neurodivergent poet Hannah Emerson. The raw beauty of each individual poem — and the entire book — is stunning and absolutely confident in its structural integrity.”

“Emerson, a non-speaking, autistic writer, communicates a sublime personal cosmology in poems vibrating with an energy that derives, in part, from surprising repetitions, especially of the words kissing and yes … Unforgettable.”

“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.”

“The Kissing of Kissing is the most original collection of poetry I’ve read in years … [Emerson’s] ability to transmit the full-body experience of joy is rivaled only by Whitman. Please, please read this book. Your mind and your poetry and your life will be better for it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“[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.”

“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!”

“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.”

“‘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.”