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

A History of the Theories of Rain was on the shortlist for the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.

Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons, On the Material, Once in Blockadia and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. In 2019, he was awarded the Latner Writers' Trust Poetry Prize, which honours a poet for their body of work. He lives near Vancouver and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.