Launch of J.R. Carpenter's Measures of Weather

Join us for an evening of poetry and conversation with poet J.R. Carpenter and meteorologist Doug Parker to launch J. R.’s new poetry collection Measures of Weather (Shearsman Books, 2025).

Everyone is welcome and admission is free, but please book your ticket via Eventbrite here.

Measures of Weather is about more than just weather. Even weather is about more than just weather. Doug Parker’s research approaches weather forecasting as a transdisciplinary challenge which requires us to understand social and economic factors in addition to the mathematics, physics and data science needed to make a prediction. JR Carpenter’s new collection asks: What isn’t weather? Weather here is a stand-in for the elemental, the transitional, the ungovernable. And what does it mean to measure? To find intersections, to articulate complex subject positions, to use language to make tangible changes in the material world. Measures of Weather calls attention to the invisible in all its myriad of forms from the minuscule to the gigantic, articulates the inchoate, gives shape to the ineffable, the transient, and the impossible. Carpenter uses language as a medium to grapple with organisational structures and their failings, to think beyond the scale of the human body, to engage with a tangle of vast systems.

“Weather often serves as the bleak subject of British small talk, or as the backdrop to more exciting literary drama. But in this blustery yet brilliant fourth collection from the Canadian-born, UK based poet JR Carpenter, weather becomes a fascinating central theme.” — Jade Cuttle, The Observer.

"Shifting between scales, from the celestial to the microscopic, J. R. Carpenter’s Measures of Weather excites the ear with its deft handling of blazing innovative language and its exhilarating music. This exquisite collection thrives under poetic constraint." —Alycia Pirmohamed

J.R. Carpenter is an artist, poet, and Lecturer in Performance Writing at University of Leeds. Their research asks questions about place, displacement, migration, colonialism, and climate. Their digital poem The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. Their debut poetry collection An Ocean of Static was highly commended by the Forward Prizes 2019. This is a Picture of Wind was listed in The Guardian’s best poetry books of 2020 and featured in the Digital Storytelling exhibition at the British Library 2023. Their new collection, Measures of Weather, was The Observer’s poetry book of the month for February 2025.

Doug Parker is a Professor of Meteorology at University of Leeds. His research is concerned with the prediction of high-impact weather in our changing climate. Part-funded by the UK Met Office for 9 years, he led a team which received the Royal Meteorological Society’s Vaisala Award (2014) for work reviving the African meteorological observation network, and made a significant contribution to the Queen’s Anniversary Prize awarded to the University of Leeds (2021), for the co-development of climate services in the Global South. He holds an adjunct position at NORCE in Bergen, where he is working mostly on weather and climate services for Africa.