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On the Material

By Stephen Collis

Structured in three parts, On the Material is a meditation on language, geography, socio-economics and the body, moving from the glut of fossil-fuelled consumer excess to the materiality of a single book.

Composed almost entirely of quatrains (each page being comprised of four four-line stanzas) and written while travelling through North America in 2008, “4 × 4” navigates issues of space and movement in the global age. As economies crumble, ecosystems fail and peak oil approaches, Collis records the production of a disarticulation of social discourse that our consumer society has generated: “After all we made money out of matter here / Now condos shield us from the computer hum / Of on-line trading and wars flash on flat screens / As 4 × 4s cool and ping mud covered in double garages.”

In its bridging second section, “I Fought the Lyric and the Lyric Won,” the desire to express wins out over the desire to possess. Beauty, contemplation and human communication seem to have abandoned the world, and their absence from the everyday has re-engaged the poet’s struggle with language—has left a need to reinvent human discourse and its attendant relations.

The third section, “Gail’s Books,” is a sequence of poems in memory of Stephen Collis’s sister, Gail Tulloch. A month after Gail’s death from cancer in 2002, a fire destroyed her house, removing every material reminder of her from the earth. All that remained was one book recovered from a pool of water in the ruins after the fire. Dried in the air, this book, and those Collis had previously borrowed from his sister, become a way for the poet to read back into the elemental heart of absence and loss—the “material” of the books displacing, and in some way recovering, how language holds the materiality of the physical world.

ISBN 13: 9780889226326 | ISBN 10: 889226326
6 W x 9 H inches | 128 pages
$17.95 CAN / $17.95 US
Rights: World
Backlist | Poetry | Bisac: POE011000

QUOTES OF NOTE

“Collis’s poetry draws a direct line from Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra….[He] is a force, a vector in modern Canadian Poetry. He writes in front of opinion, but never too far in front to lose engagement…. Words like beauty, pleasure, and liberty do not sound hackneyed. Instead, their writing sounds synonymous with persistence.”
— Prairie Fire

AWARDS

Winner of the 2011 BC Book Prize: Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize

About the Contributors

Stephen Collis is the author of five books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize winning On the Material (Talonbooks 2010) and three parts of the on-going “Barricades Project”: Anarchive (New Star 2005), The Commons (Talonbooks 2008), and the forthcoming To the Barricades (2013). An activist and social critic, his writing on the Occupy movement is collected in Dispatches from the Occupation (Talonbooks 2012). He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University, where he was a 2011/12 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow.

> Go to biography…