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.