Earth on Earth

Poems that personally engage with the materiality and danger of earth.
A kind of translation of the thousand-year-old poem “Earth Took of Earth,” this book is an attempt to restate in personal, emotional terms a sense of both the danger of and the consolation given by earth itself. Many of these poems arose during a collaboration with the ecologist-ceramicist Mia Mulvey: her work with earth, clay often extruded through digitally guided machinery, echoes Ramke’s attempts to understand damages done to and celebrate the facts of earth—for instance, that geosmin, the scent of wet soil, is so powerfully recognizable even in trace amounts. The title of this book is also a play on the phrase “heaven on earth,” turning this idea around and encouraging us to instead turn our hopes toward earth on earth.