The World After Rain

Canisia Lubrin’s new poem is a luminous elegy. A meditation on grief, history and the inexpressible weight of love.

A Carol Shields Prize winner for her collection of fictions Code Noir, Canisia Lubrin now brings readers a long-form poetic tribute to her mother, praised by Dionne Brand as “incandescent”.

In this stunning new poem, Canisia Lubrin’s signature epic vision distils her elegy to her mother, along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment that belongs as much to history as to today. Her lucid attention to what might be the oldest metaphor for grief is drawn from the searing gravity and resonance of the modern poet’s decisive, interior, and inexpressible meditation on love, time, and loss in the excesses of life’s ambitions.