A History of the Theories of Rain

(Paperback, New edition)

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A History of the Theories of Rain explores the strange effect our current sense of impending doom has on our relation to time, approaching the unfolding climate catastrophe through its dissolution of the categories of man-made and natural. How do we go on with our daily lives while a disastrous future impinges upon every moment

Stephen Collis provides no easy answers and offers no simple hope. Instead, he probes our current state of anxiety with care, humour, and an unflinching gazing into the darkness we have gathered around ourselves. Asking what form a resistance to the tenor of these out-of-joint times might take, A History of the Theories of Rain explores the links between climates tipping points and the borders constraining the plants, animals, and peoples forcibly displaced by a radically altered world ecology.

Reviews

Taken together, these poems are as much an account of how we humans are grappling with a terrifying environmental predicament ... as they are odes to Earth itself.
Poetry Foundation

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Colliss work is immediate, timely and timeless, providing amplification to what the lyric has long held as a quiet, underlying thread; by Collis, this eco-poetic is not mere flowering, but magnified... Collis has become one of our most essentially-engaged contemporary poets... [his poetry] is a rare lyric that includes actual action.
rob mclennan, periodicities

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The past was imperfect, the present is imperfect, and so is the future. No nave idealism lurks in the words carefully chosen by Collis, who warns us that every step is a risk ... Collis reminds us of the consequences of homocentric thinking in a world that depends on diversity.
Ormsby Review

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Stephen Collis has achieved something remarkable: an invigorating body of work that convincingly addresses both the urgency of the present moment and the long echoes of our historical and lyrical past The depth and scope of Colliss vision is startling and impressive; so are the courage, precision, and care he brings to the poems he creates.
Hoa Nguyen and Margo Wheaton

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Author Bio

Dubbed the most dangerous poet in Canada by Eden Robinson, Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (Talonbooks 2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (Talonbooks 2010), Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks 2016) and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (Talonbooks 2018). In 2019 he was awarded the Latner Writers Trust of Canada Poetry Prize in recognition of his body of work. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.