ISBN: 978-1-915108-29-6
Published: 2 April 2025
The poems in Kiss My Earth illuminate the quiet, bright place of strength inside the broken and remind us how to live well. Unafraid of silences, this bold collection of long poems ventures into the future where East Anglia is under the sea and circles back to critique the turbulence of our transitional times. Alice Willitts wants us to fall in love with ourselves again even as our species falters. Precision and tenderness characterise the vitality of her language in these morally enraged, wise poems that grapple with precepts of creation under the rising gods of technology. Kiss My Earth is an urgent, philosophical collection from this Fen writer who understands intimately her own relationship with body, pain and belonging.
*
a sharp flock of blue-tits
breaks the sick tiltinggratefully, gratefully
I simply see them
as I always have
swift flurries of blue-yellow
see? how they dip through all the
moving
and make it look still
(from Still Moving)
*
Kiss My Earth tends to the interface of poetic language and water, human language and earthy life forms. Her sensitivity and fluent, lively intelligence interrogate what it means to be a mother during an era of complex and mounting crises. Kiss my Earth has a wild, womanly energy, rooted in previous generations’ wisdom. The writing is accomplished and haunting, “attending fully to the business of/ being”, “the rain/ that pelts my mind today”, and also heart-wrenching and urgent “you cannot hear plants preach/ if you believe they do not speak”. This collection resists singular interpretations, and uncorroborated, complacent hopefulness. Kiss My Earth is seeped in love: for the body, the community of the living, and the earth. —Jenny Pagdin
Kiss My Earth is a kind of poetic summoning: a full-throated, impassioned storm of language, with whirling eddies and moments of calm, meticulously and lovingly crafted to raise the “miracle/ we need to heal”. Rooted in the earth, and the love that binds us, this is poetry of, and for, a planet in menopause. —Elizabeth Lewis Williams
Alice Willitts is a poet of extraordinary linguistic inventiveness and emotional depth. These poems are born of black fen soil but stretch to the cosmos, they are rooted in womb and mother but ask questions of society and a future where what we know has been sunk and is reimagined. Kiss my Earth feels both contemporary and ancient but above all a collection that is essential for our time. — Ilse Pedler
Kiss My Earth by Alice Willitts
[from Womb Proverbs]
In the electrified feathers of creation.
Soil’s placenta receives and receives us. Air’s
amniotic sac cushions us. And cushions us;We can suck and swallow, frown and
stretch – yawn even, we are so blessed:
A low-down rolling sensation is
making some of us sit down sharply.The people not to trust are five-faced.
With an expression of looking all ways at
once. East, South, West, North and Satellite:
And they think with their faces. Five-
faced-babies. Growing directly out of tech.
Their mantra. Never look down!
Precious. Fusty. Life. The humid
brown soil. Is deeply played. The rumble of
an organ base. Blowing air in the pipes of the
ground. Bellowing at the five-faced to stop!
Other voices vibrant with static.
Multiply like old man’s beard. Become a
swamping lanugo on the bodies where
silence used to thrive;
Think of the five-faced like this. Their
muck is pungent because they are host to a
rare smut. A kind of incensed fungus. (And
with no studies funded). We do not know.
Where it will put down its tumorous musk
foot. Where next.
*extinction turns out to be the footsteps of children behind distracted adults
*
Chasing her watery children, the worm
weeps over blackbirds and ice;
And when her motherly insight needs
the sassy truth of weeds, her children’s
disruptions become tiny porches. For things
that have no fellowship in the nosy kerfuffle
of daytime.
And I have withheld nothing. I
thought we had come so far. Made a garden
contented. Truth littering the lawn like leaves
we could rake up. Could collect them all.
Stuff bags with truths. And call ourselves
prepared;
Made us ponds with decorative solar
pumps; built patios and shoffices;
Made us great works, of earth and
avocado orchards; moved water and drained
valleys;
Made us pergolas and hot-tubs; razed
hillsides and planted forests of sameness;
Meanwhile the five-faced lops and prunes
and the world splits. And the worm? She still
walks as a war;And when she parleys with him now,
they are carefully raw.
Alice Willitts is a plantswoman from The Fens; created and leads The 57 Poetry Collective; is creator and editor of the plantable poetry project DIRT; edited Magma 78 on the theme of Collaborations; is a founding member of the biodiversity project On The Verge Cambridge. Kiss My Earth is her second full collection.
Poetry publications:
Something Light Written (Elephant Press, 2023), co-authored with Clare Whistler and an oak tree.
With Love, (winner of the Live Canon collection competition, 2020).
Dear, (winner of the 2018 Magma pamphlet competition).Non-fiction:
Think Thing: an ecopoetry practice (Elephant Press, 2021).
Food Allergy and Your Child: a practical guide for parents (Class, 2007), co-authored with Deborah Carter.