Launch: The World After Rain by Canisia Lubrin
a landmark work of elegy by award-winning writer and poet Canisia Lubrin.
With readings from Canisia Lubrin, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, So Mayer
and Momtaza Mehri.
The World After Rain is a mesmerising elegy for the poet’s mother, interwoven across public and private entanglements. The poetry in this collection winds through an unresolvable axis of astonishment, from deep grief to its ultimately transformative expression. This is poetry of haunting gravity, with meditations on love, time and loss, at once meticulously far-seeing, interior and inexpressible.
‘How incandescent the language is, each line emitting light through the membrane of time and anticipated grief. The work has a rigorousness, the poet pushing through the ache of experience from the first to the last word.’ – Dionne Brand
Canisia Lubrin is a writer, critic, professor, poet and editor. Her books include Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphxst. Lubrin’s work has been recognized with the Griffin Poetry Prize, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, the Derek Walcott Prize, the Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Stars prize, and others. Also a finalist for the Trillium Award for Poetry and Governor General’s Literary Award, Lubrin has held fellowships at the Banff Centre, Civitella Ranieri in Italy, Simon Fraser University, Literature Colloquium Berlin, Queen’s University, and Victoria College at University of Toronto. She studied at York University and the University of Guelph, where she now coordinates the Creative Writing MFA in the School of English & Theatre Studies. In 2021, Lubrin received a Windham-Campbell prize for poetry, and the Globe & Mail named her Poet of the Year. Born in St. Lucia, Lubrin now lives in Whitby, Ontario, and is poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart.
So Mayer is a writer, editor and bookseller; their recent books include BAD LANGUAGE (Peninsula Press, 2025) and, as co-editor, The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin (Spiral House, 2025).
Momtaza Mehri works across poetry, criticism, research, and radio. She was the Poet-in-Residence at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, as well as the former Young People’s Poet Laureate for London.
Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist. She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and her critically acclaimed poetry debut, QUIET, won the Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber & Faber in the UK and in North America by Knopf.