Stephen Collis’s The Middle: A Poetic Exploration

Description

Talonbooks, paperback

Publication Date: December 3rd, 2024

Publisher Marketing: Written in the midst of wildfires and atmospheric rivers, The Middle extends award-winning poet 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 in motion, fleeing the rising heat. Taking up the human-plant relationship in particular, each of The Middle’s linked sequences finds itself somewhere on a mountain, in the company of trees (or the ghosts of now absent trees), climbing in altitude, or heading north. Across the poem’s three sections, Collis employs various forms of citational practice, rooted in his long engagement with the idea of a “poetic commons” where writing is made out of what one is reading. This practice is a kind of entanglement, a form of literary seed dispersal, where words are blown, carried, and scattered from one textual field to another, akin to the mammals, fish, crustaceans, reptiles, rodents, birds, insects, plants, grasses, and trees in motion on our dangerously heating planet.

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