news | Wednesday November 6, 2024

The Middle Has Arrived!

Hot off the press! The Middle by award-winning author Stephen Collis is here! Written amid wildfires and atmospheric rivers, The Middle extends Collis’s investigation of threatened climate futures into a poetics of displacement and wandering. This collection 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 plants and animals in motion on our heating planet.

An excerpt from “Sketch of a Poem I Will Not Have Written: A Blazing Space”:

“fire was the element
the sky called to
but only rain came
rain after rain and then
the fire remained in the cold sky alone

somewhere in a land
I’d like to be able to remember
every plum blossom
co-regulating
clings to the sound of bees”

Order your copy of The Middle here.