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By Vanessa Moeller, Frye Correspondent
Work visited: The World After Rain by Canisia Lubrin (McClelland & Stewart, 2025)
The word elegy comes from the Greek elegos, meaning a song of mourning. Elegies were born in song, in voices lifted up to the heavens like an offering to the person being mourned. In Canisia Lubrin’s The World After Rain, the elegy is still musical but also elemental, filled with rain, rivers, and oceans as it anticipates the grief of losing the body whose waters once created and sheltered her: her mother, Anne.
Throughout the collection, language becomes aqueous, and who Anne is as an individual and what mother means overflows its shores, expanding, contracting, and complicating. We are swept up in a torrent that rarely lets us come up for air. Time carries us, pulls us down into history, lets us drift on softer memories, or drags us, inevitably, toward the monumental loss waiting somewhere, there, in the future. Lubrin’s elegy reminds us that grief reshapes us as individuals, affecting how we speak, remember, and understand ourselves in the world.
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Part I: Language as Liquid
“Liquidity is, in my opinion, the very desire of language. Language needs to flow.” ― Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams
As we are swept up in the currents of this collection, one thing quickly becomes clear. When we are faced with an unimaginable loss, words become mercurial, refuse to hold the “wor(l)ds” and experiences we are struggling to name. Mourning demands new forms of expression, ones that spill past syntax and flow around subjects rather than trying to contain or offer up a simple meaning. As both complex elegy and moving ode, this work understands that “death makes sense of nothing” (63). The best we can hope for is to float close to meaning before we are carried away from it again. Language behaves like water. It floods in, eddies, evaporates, making the page feel more like a shifting surface than stable ground. When the speaker says, “I wish this anomaly in your belly // into sad-mad emojis // I have tried to throw them aside with the good syllables / of unreadable ends” (53), it is immediately clear that even new, modern forms of expression strain and fall short when trying to capture the timeless struggle of translating grief. Instead, language keeps moving, dissolving, and reforming in the wake of loss. It is this space Lubrin asks us to inhabit: the fluid, unsettled space loss creates.
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Part II: Mother as Ocean
“When the heart is sad, all the water in the world turns into tears.” ― Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams
At the centre of this book lives the person whose loss looms, the speaker’s mother, Anne. Like the ocean is for all life on earth, Anne is the origin point of the speaker’s life. But even here, complexity exists. Mother may be the person who gave you life, who you literally get to know from the inside out, but she is also a person with depths you may not be able to reach, with a history and interior life that existed before you and beyond you. As the speaker notes, “but there is a private time, a mother beneath the literal / where we can talk for hours about yours / gone and mine going, gone and mine / distance is the thing you least expect will mother you” (83). This creates a sense of layers not only for the mother as an individual, but also a kind of palimpsest in which traces of all the mothers who came before continue to echo. Lubrin refuses a stable definition of mother, instead letting it change course throughout the collection until who or what can mother expand to include distance, time, cloud, and rain.
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Part III: Time as River
“Water always flows, always, always ends in horizontal death.” ― Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams
As we travel through the collection, the lines on the page feel like a clock’s pendulum, ticking back and forth, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but always carrying us forward. But even this sense of linear time is complicated. Instead, “it is time unspooling past time, galloping” (19). This unspooling appears at the line level, where past, present, and future can exist simultaneously: “the future kited across whatever sky, whatever vague family trees, / our promised and seasonal flight, fighting fighting to reach / going going going until our life is endless ours” (28). Days become “telescoped,” stretched and compressed to hold single moments or whole histories. Anticipatory grief, especially, distorts time so that the future loss feels present in the now and alongside past moments that bubble up. In The World After Rain, elegy is not saved for after death. The future loss seeps into the speaker’s present, where “every raincoat is practice / for when you leave, for crawling on rain” (100). Yet time in this collection does not feel bleak. It feels expansive, like an ongoing conversation between past, present, and future. Even when the mother is inevitably lost, there is a sense that we all stand in the same river of time, connected by its flow even as we are carried away from each other by it.
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Grief is unmooring. Losing someone we love forces us to figure out how to live with the absence while also considering our own mortality, time thinning us all. As we travel the whirlpool of this collection, considering loss from multiple angles as we circle, we come to understand grief as an ongoing ebb and flow. Like the moon, the person we have lost will continue to exert their pull on us, forever shaping the tides of our lives.
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Lubrin, Canisia. The World After Rain. McClelland & Stewart, 2025.
Bachelard, Gaston. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Joanne Stroud. The Pegasus Foundation, 1983. Originally published in 1942 as L’Eau et les rêves, essai sur l’imagination de la matière.
Pour citer cet article:
Canisia Lubrin is coming to the Frye Festival!
- FRYE Cabaret — April 25 · 7:30 PM
- How Far the Light Reaches — April 27 · 6 PM
Vanessa Moeller
Les poèmes et nouvelles de Vanessa ont été publiés dans de nombreux périodiques, notamment The Fiddlehead, Prism International, The Antigonish Review, CV2 et The Pottersfield Portfolio. Son premier recueil, Our Extraordinary Monsters, a été publié par Signature Editions. Ses œuvres ont également été publiées dans des anthologies par Guernica Editions, Baseline Press, Frog Hollow Press et Owl’s Head Press. Elle a travaillé pour Qwerty et The Fiddlehead et a été rédactrice adjointe pour la poésie chez Goose Lane Editions. Elle a obtenu une maîtrise en création littéraire à l’Université du Nouveau-Brunswick.
Passionnée par les arts, Vanessa a été directrice adjointe du Conseil des arts du Nouveau-Brunswick (artsnb) pendant plusieurs années et continue de soutenir la communauté artistique en occupant plusieurs postes bénévoles au sein d’organisations artistiques.
Vivant actuellement à Moncton, Vanessa est rédactrice créative senior chez m5 the agency, la plus grande agence de communication intégrée du Canada atlantique.
Canisia Lubrin
