Rain Shadow is a collection of poetry that explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and humans yearning to connect with something greater than themselves. The poems range through destabilized lives and landscapes, fathoming presence and absence, transformation and oblivion. They outline the major questions of our time as the poet crisscrosses western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. Witty, playful, serious, and heartsore, Rain Shadow seeks to understand the space in which people and nature are inextricably entwined. I walk like a bear-- I have a bear's gait-- but the gate to the bear's mind is closed. --from "The Bear and the Wind"

Nicholas Bradley is a poet, literary critic, and scholarly editor. He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Victoria.