The Kissing of Kissing

                                    […] Please
Try to evaporate into the great universe.
Please try to help me do it too.

Hannah Emerson’s The Kissing of Kissing is the first book in Milkweed Editions’ new series “Multiverse,” featuring works emerging from “the practices and creativity of neurodivergent, autistic, neuroqueer, and disabled cultures.” 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. In “Center of the Universe,” the speaker exhorts: “Please try to go / to hell frequently,” and later: 

try to help yourself 
by kissing the hot hot 
hot life that is born 
there yes yes—please

This synthesis of hell and hot life culminates in a rebirth. The repeated yes, for me, evokes a well-known Yoko Ono work, in which the viewer climbs a ladder to look through a magnifying glass at the ceiling, to find the word yes painted in tiny letters, an invitation, an affirmation, an exclamation. In Emerson’s poem, yes can also work as a rhythmic element, sometimes serving as the heartbeat of a poem, while kissing is living contact, the brushing against a thing (or thought), even briefly communing with it.

Emerson’s work provokes ecological awareness through musings about animal consciousness, plant life, and the paradox of an individual psyche that might engage in an elemental dissolution into snow, sunlight, or mud. In “Becoming Mud,” one of the most memorable poems in this unforgettable collection, Emerson describes “the place in the mud that is where I try to live / in peace […]” and asks, “Please try to get to the mud / helpful to you to if you become mud too,” before ending the poem with a poignant centering of autism and neurodivergence:

Please get that great animals are all

autistic. Please love poets we are the first 
autistics. Love this secret no one knows it.