'In this, her fifth poetry collection, Karen Throssell revisits similar links between the intensely domestic/ personal and the broader social and political worlds. But in The Dialectics of Rain there are not only new fields of interest – travel and place (Cuba, an Aboriginal settlement in the Northern Territory, and France); a wry and unflinching look at the generational phases of ‘love’; and a series on race and terrorism. The work also experiments with form in a series of ekphrastic poems (looking at the interconnection between poetry and art, music, pottery and film) and a number of longer collage poems which weave poetry and prose.' (Publication summary)