The Rapture
About this ebook
In November 2019, a nineteen-year-old university student pulled an all-nighter to study for a midterm. The following day, after the exam, he went to his bedroom to lay down for a nap.
He didn't wake up. He is still asleep.
For those that knew and loved him, that absence is a defining feature of their experience. The implications and effects of the loss are still rippling outward, altering both past and future, still burrowing deeper into the lives of the people left behind.
Occasionally we are marked by events so sudden and shattering that the world we inhabit is reborn as something wholly strange, something nearly helpless. The Rapture is a response to one such event, a stab at the “impossibly holy task” of living with and recording it. From close observations of the raw intimacies of grief, to riffs on the beauty and absurdity and arbitrary consequence of being, these poems are an attempt to name an irremediable loss and to fix the world we love in its glaring, all-consuming light.
About the author
MICHAEL CRUMMEY is the author of thirteen books of fiction and poetry. His latest novel, The Adversary, was the winner of the 2025 International Dublin Literary Award. His work has been published in a dozen countries and has won or been a finalist for many Canadian and international awards, including the Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award, the Commonwealth Prize, and the Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. His most recent poetry collection, Passengers, was published by Anansi in 2022.
