Take Rain: Poems

A collaborative ecopoetry collection that is lyric and experimental, lively and absurd

The poems in Take Rain are collaborative and color-saturated. Concerned with climate change and how we mediate life via images, they reflect a belief in relationality and process as a creative tactic for navigating both poetry and the current moment. From swans, snails, and clocks, to polar bears, grief, and airports, the poems reenact a perplexing and uncanny world.

Written in a poetic voice belonging to neither poet but corresponding to aspects of both authors, the poems consider the environment (both psychological and natural) and how, through engaged, creative connection, we can be collaborators. Both humans and nature are, after all, a kind of “wetware.”

The poets used three provocations, such as quotations, visual prompts, and phrases gathered from their peripatetic, multidisciplinary lives, to seed a prompt for a poem. Sometimes these triangles of association yielded multiple poems. The authors then traded these “triangle poems,” and during the joint editing process, a recognizable tone and timbre emerged.

Take Rain addresses difficult topics with liveliness, surprise, and absurdist humor, and proves collaboration can help. Short enough to allow readers to dip in and out, but intense enough to transport them from daily life, these poems practice what they propose: They were created from a place of convivial sharing and trust. What grew from this “artnership” is a unique third voice that surprised both authors.