The Middle Front Cover


ISBN: 9781772016420
Pages: 152 pp
Pub. Date: October 16 2024
Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 0.5"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Non-Fiction / NAT045000

  • POETRY / Canadian
  • POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Animals & Nature
  • POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Political & Protest
  • NATURE / Ecosystems & Habitats / General

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The Middle
By Stephen Collis

Written amid wildfires and atmospheric rivers, The Middle extends Stephen Collis’s 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 on the move. Focusing on the human-plant relationship, each of The Middle’s linked sequences employs various forms of citational practice, rooted in the idea of a “poetic commons,” a kind of literary seed dispersal where words are blown, carried, and scattered from one textual field to another, akin to all the plants and animals in motion on our dangerously heating planet.

"This book is a dense, rich reflection on the natural world and … human impact. Collis considers poets and their writings, as woven in … a “poetic commons,” the current and historic ecology that poets and language’s evolution share. There is sorrow, there is hope … Stephen Collis sees the interweaving, seeks understanding, and expresses awe and awareness." – Steven Ross Smith, The British Columbia Review

By Stephen Collis

Stephen Collis is the author of six books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize–winning On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010). 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.

Read more about Stephen Collis