A History of the Theories of Rain

"Can you walk away from a climate?" Maybe. But "in the future / everyone will have their fifteen minutes of blame."A History of the Theories of Rainexplores the strange effect our current sense of impending doom has on our relation to time, approaching the unfolding climate catastrophe conceptually through its dissolution of the categories of "man-made" and "natural" disasters. How do we go on with our daily lives while a disastrous future impinges upon every moment?

Collis provides no easy answers and offers no simple hope. What his book does instead is probe our current state of anxiety with care, humour, and an unflinching gazing into the darkness we have gathered around ourselves. All the while in song, in lyrical outbursts, and in philosophical and speculative excursions it asks what form a resistance to the tenor of these out-of-joint times might take. In doing so, it explores the links between the climate's "tipping points" and the borders which constrain those who are fleeing the disaster including the plants, animals, and peoples forcibly displaced by a radically altered world ecology. (From Talonbooks)

A History of the Theories of Rain was on the shortlist for the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.

Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, includingThe Commons,On the Material,Once inBlockadiaandAlmost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. In 2019,he was awarded the Latner Writers' Trust Poetry Prize, which honours a poet for theirbody of work. He lives near Vancouverand teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

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