The Middle

(Paperback, New edition)

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Written in the midst of wildfires and atmospheric rivers, The Middle extends award-winning poet Stephen Colliss investigation of threatened climate futures into a poetics of displacement and wandering. The fulcrum of a trilogy begun with A History of the Theories of Rain, The Middle hikes the shifting treelines of our warming world to reflect on the way all life is in motion, fleeing the rising heat. Taking up the human-plant relationship in particular, each of The Middle's linked sequences finds itself somewhere on a mountain, in the company of trees (or the ghosts of now absent trees), climbing in altitude, or heading north. Across the poems three sections, Collis employs various forms of citational practice, rooted in his long engagement with the idea of a poetic commons where writing is made out of what one is reading. This practice is a kind of entanglement, a form of literary seed dispersal, where words are blown, carried, and scattered from one textual field to another, akin to the mammals, fish, crustaceans, reptiles, rodents, birds, insects, plants, grasses, and trees in motion on our dangerously heating planet.

Author Bio

Stephen Collis is the author of seven books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize-winning On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010). Other titles include Anarchive (New Star, 2005, also nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008, 2014), To the Barricades (Talonbooks, 2013), Decomp (co-authored with Jordan Scott, Coach House, 2013), Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks, 2016), and A History of the Theories of Rain (Talonbooks, 2021), nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. An activist and social critic, his writing on the Occupy movement is collected in Dispatches from the Occupation (Talonbooks, 2012). Collis is also the author of two book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks, 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions, 2006), as well as the editor, with Graham Lyons, of Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation (Iowa University Press, 2012). His memoir, Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten, was published by Talonbooks in 2018. He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University. Collis was the 2019 recipient of the Latner Writers' Trust Poetry Prize, which is given to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work, and in anticipation of future contributions to Canadian poetry.