news | Thursday February 13, 2025

Steven Ross Smith Reviews The Middle

Steven Ross Smith reviews The Middle by Stephen Collis in The British Columbia Review. The Middle, released in October of 2024, extends Collis’s investigation of threatened climate futures into a poetics of displacement and wandering. 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.

An excerpt from Smith’s article: “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.”

Read the full review here.