Halfway through poet Hannah Emerson’s The Kissing of Kissing, I felt a shift in my thinking. The term ‘brain freeze’ comes to mind: Dubbed the ‘ice cream headache’ or called by the scientific term sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia, it’s what can happen when eating something intensely cold like a Grape Popsicle. You stop, unable to function, but you are hyper-aware because the mind-body connection is deeply, painfully felt. That’s not exactly what I experienced reading Emerson’s impressive debut collection, but her poem “Pow Pow Pow Pow” abruptly brought me to my senses:

Please try to go to the beautiful kissing
helpful great great great nothing to find
the explosion
that you need
to do to explode
into the beautiful
you yes yes yes.

The effect was more ‘brain freeing’ than freezing, a welcome detour from the literal, linear and limited way we read prose and, often, poetry. In the book—the first in Milkweed’s Multiverse literary series curated by neurodivergent poet Chris Martin—Emerson ushers us into her evocative mental universe with its unique rhythms giving voice to herself as a nonspeaking autistic artist and poet. Truthful, startling and deeply felt, The Kissing of Kissing charts the progress Emerson takes while evolving into a true self; she has found “the beautiful you” and wants the reader to find it as well. Read the book in one sitting, from start to finish, or dip into it, over days, weeks, months and years, and the arc of her enlightenment and self-discovery can be yours as well. Her line structure, use of repetition and sophisticated conceptual constructs “make it strange,” to borrow a phrase from poet Matthew Zapruder. In his book Why Poetry, Zapruder talks about how poetry can “defamiliarize” us by reframing the familiar ways we look at the world, and in her poetic universe, Emerson shakes up language and reframes the predictable to do that.

Her origin story kicks off in “My Name Begins Again” and continues through the stages in a life, where the self is reckoning with the world. In “Becoming Mud,” she acknowledges her companions in her odyssey, the “…great free animals” and seems more connected to them than to people: “Please get that great animals are all/autistic. Please love poets we are the first/autistics. Love this secret no one knows it.” Throughout the book, we meet up with these creatures. There are the worms in “To Burrow”

Please get that worms deep
down help the very great life
that we think only beauty
greets us on the lovely great
helpful helpful freedom of the dirt.

There is a Connemara pony, cicadas and the hummingbirds of “Sugar Beat” that thrum “to the freedom of the flight/that is your life yes yes.” In “Animal Ear,” she sees creatures as “great teachers/of the normal way of hearing.” People no longer listen to the world the way creatures do, she implies, and that inability puts them at a disadvantage (“I hear/the vibrations of fear… coming from everyone holding fear/in their mussy lives”). Initially, the odyssey of becoming a self holds dangers, because it involves breaking apart the self in its societal reality and joining a volcano’s “stream of molten life” as Emerson describes it in “How the World Began.” Freeing oneself of prejudice or anger is high on the list of priorities for the good of the self and others:

…please try
to help the world
by heaving your
hatred on the flames
that burn in your town
yes yes —please try
to melt yes yes…

The steps taken to awaken the self become clear to us after the immolation, as we emerge into “the waking dream/that is nothing/when we open our eyes/to try growing into the world,” states Emerson in “Coming Home.” Risk has its rewards when one embraces the world, and what makes these poems so persuasive is the raw politeness Emerson uses to argue these profound ideas. Repetition of words such “please” and ‘great great great” and “yes yes” temper the concept of discarding the self in order to begin anew: “Please/ fill your arms trying to take in the nothing of everything yes yes.” That’s the end line of “Fill Your Arms” that exhorts the reader to “kiss/ this place that is probing our sweet soul that is trying to understand just/what the hell is going on yes.”

Accepting the challenge of evolving, of making the soul open to the world each day is the gauntlet Emerson throws down to herself and the reader. It may not be a new idea but the way the young poet explores it is fresh and mind-altering. That ‘brain freeing’ I felt halfway through her book continues to build in a transformative way; she succeeds in describing the great leaps of faith and energy one has to take to alter a staid way of life and ossified patterns of thinking and understanding. I heard echoes of writers in Emerson’s work: Her use of the repetitive yes naturally took me to Molly Bloom’s rhythmic soliloquy at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses while her sweetness about nature and kissing (love) felt akin to E. E. Cummings, especially in a poem such as his “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in].”

Wonder also plays a part in Emerson’s universe; in “The Listening World,” the last poem in the book, I was struck by her meaningfully awkward line breaks reminiscent of Emily Dickinson, while W. B Yeats’s “rough beast” of “The Second Coming” no longer slouches in Emerson’s poem “Sacred Grove” but is a “beast that is dreaming/helping us go to the freedom.” Her poetic personality is uniquely hers, and it is one I applaud and love and will return to often; still, I couldn’t help thinking of Caddy in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and envision the persona in The Kissing of Kissing as real, sensual, muddy and desirable as that novel’s heartbreaking heroine. What this young poet has achieved in her soul-searching collection is as fleshed out, sharp and clear as her literary predecessors, but it is in a language uniquely, rhythmically and metaphorically all her own.—Donna Bulseco

Donna Bulseco, MA, MS, is a graduate of the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University. After getting her BA at UCLA in creative writing and American poetry, the L.A. native studied English literature at Brown University for a Master's degree, then moved to New York City. She has been an editor and journalist for the past 25 years at publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Women's Wear Daily, W, Self and InStyle, and has written articles for Health, More and The New York Times. She is editor-in-chief of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, a literary journal recognized as a leader in the medical humanities world.