The Abridged History of Rainfall

Jay Hopler's second collection, a mourning song for his father, is an elegy of uproar, a careening hymn to disaster and its aftermath. In lyric poems by turns droll and desolate, Hopler documents the struggle to live in the face of great loss, a task that sends him ranging through Florida's torrid subtropics, the mountains of the American West, the streets of Rome, and the Umbrian countryside. Vivid, dynamic, unrestrained: The Abridged History of Rainfall is a festival of glowing saints and fighting cocks, of firebombs and birdsong.

Jay Hopler is the author of Green Squall and the editor (with Kimberly Johnson) of Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry. The recipient of, among other awards and prizes, the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Rome Prize in Literature, he teaches in the writing program at the University of South Florida.