A History of the Theories of Rain, Paperback

Approaching the unfolding climate catastrophe conceptually through its dissolution of the categories of "man-made" and "natural" disasters, A History of the Theories of Rain explores the strange effect our current sense of impending doom has on our relation to time. 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 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 resistance to the tenor of these out-of-joint times might look like. 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. "Can you walk away from a climate?" Maybe. But "in the future / everyone will have their fifteen minutes of blame."

About author(s):Dubbed the most dangerous poet in Canada, 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.