{"title":"Stephen Collis","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"history-of-the-theories-of-rain-book-stephen-collis-9781772012880","title":"A History of the Theories of Rain","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eA History of the Theories of Rain\u003c\/i\u003e explores the strange effect our current sense of impending doom has on our relation to time, approaching the unfolding climate catastrophe through its dissolution of the categories of \"man-made\" and \"natural.\" How do we go on with our daily lives while a disastrous future impinges upon every moment?\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eStephen Collis provides no easy answers and offers no simple hope. Instead, he probes our current state of anxiety with care, humour, and an unflinching gazing into the darkness we have gathered around ourselves. Asking what form a resistance to the tenor of these out-of-joint times might take, \u003ci\u003eA History of the Theories of Rain\u003c\/i\u003e explores the links between climate's \"tipping points\" and the borders constraining the plants, animals, and peoples forcibly displaced by a radically altered world ecology.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49538506162449,"sku":"GOR012838535","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49740277285137,"sku":"NGR9781772012880","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51103962005777,"sku":"NIN9781772012880","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52690380390673,"sku":"NLS9781772012880","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1772012882.jpg?v=1750865778"},{"product_id":"commons-book-stephen-collis-9780889225800","title":"The Commons","description":"Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries the majority of the English common lands were enclosed, by decree and by force, depriving communities of their independence and self-sufficiency. The resistance to capitalism's primitive accumulation, registered in recurring peasant revolts and nighttime attacks on hedges and fences, failed to stem the tide of what we now call privatization - but it spilled over into Romanticism's own advocacy of a kind of literary commons. Underground in poetry since the nineteenth century, the fight against enclosure resurfaces today amidst continuing accumulation and a renascent sense of the commons under globalization. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eThe Commons\u003c\/i\u003e we wander the English countryside with the so-called mad peasant poet John Clare, pick wild fruit with Henry David Thoreau, and comb the Lake District with a host of authors of Romantic guides and tours, undermining William Wordsworth's proprietary claim to the region. Somewhere along the way Robert Frost's wall falls down, the Zapatistas make their appearance, and Gerrard Winstanley reclaims the\u003cbr\u003eearth as a Common Treasury. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThis second edition includes the essay Of Blackberries and the Poetic Commons.\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eStephen Collis\u003c\/b\u003e is a climate justice activist and a professor of poetry at Simon Fraser University.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49647467659537,"sku":"GOR006170765","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/088922580X.jpg?v=1750787427"},{"product_id":"dream-in-the-eye-book-stephen-collis-9781772014747","title":"A Dream in the Eye","description":"\u003cp\u003eFirst collection of visual work by renowed Canadian poet Phyllis Webb\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA Dream in the Eye presents colour reproductions of the paintings and photocollages of renowned poet Phyllis Webb. A Governor General's Award-winning poet and a member of the Order of Canada, Webb was a major Canadian cultural figure from the 1950s through the 1980s, publishing ten collections of poetry and prose and co-founding the CBC Radio program Ideas (in 1965). When \"words abandoned\" her in the early 1990s and she was no longer able to write, she took up photography, photocollage, and eventually painting. Webb's visual work - a surprising \"late style\" (the work of an independent artist in her sixties, seventies, and eighties) - is in many ways a response to and extension of concerns explored in her poetry: the natural world of the West Coast, global political strife, the artist's struggle to express themself. All of this is explored in her more formalist collages and expressive, abstract paintings.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn addition to Webb's seventy-four paintings and eighty collages, A Dream in the Eye includes introductory material by the book's editor Stephen Collis and art historian and curator Laurie White, as well as supplementary material including some of Webb's own reflections on her visual work, an essay by Betsy Warland, and a selection of poems written in response to Webb's paintings by her long-time friend Diana Hayes.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49740707463441,"sku":"NGR9781772014747","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52336626073873,"sku":"NLS9781772014747","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53352472543505,"sku":"NIN9781772014747","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1772014745.jpg?v=1751279392"},{"product_id":"decomp-book-stephen-collis-9781552452820","title":"Decomp","description":"Poets Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott left copies of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species  to decay in five distinct ecosystems in British Columbia. A year later, they photographed what remained, reading poetry into nature's \"rewriting\" process and documenting the gorgeous detritus in Decomp, a long poem in prose and color photographs.  Darwin is an eye amidst graphed genera seeing the web it is woven thereof. A matted scrap of printed material, shit, soil and leaf rot--all dried, bleached and curled up at small edges.  Stephen Collis is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of essays, Dispatches from the Occupation.  Jordan Scott is the author of Silt and Blert, which explores the poetics of stuttering.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50129119150353,"sku":"CIN1552452824VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51037033038097,"sku":"NIN9781552452820","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52684910526737,"sku":"NLS9781552452820","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53369049612561,"sku":"CIN1552452824G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1552452824.jpg?v=1751150376"},{"product_id":"to-the-barricades-book-stephen-collis-9780889227477","title":"To the Barricades","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn To the Barricades we move back and forth between historical and contemporary scenes of revolt, from nineteenth-century Parisian street barricades to twenty-first-century occupations and street marches, shifting along the active seam between poetry and revolution. At once elegy (poems dedicated \"to\" past revolutionary figures and scenes) and a call for renewed struggle in the here and now, this collection of \"social lyrics\" and serial explosions seeks to drive apathy from the field and to recover forgotten \"radical ideas\" amidst our current \"amnesiac condition.\" Avant-garde technique is donated to lyric ends (the expression of social affects), as Arthur Rimbaud presides and the commune is reconvened in Vancouver's streets.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e To the Barricades continues Collis's \"life\" poem, \"The Barricades Project,\" which also includes Anarchive (2005) and The Commons (2008). Both the anti-archive of the revolutionary record and the dream of a once and future \"commons\" upon which all can equally dwell continue to shape these poems where words are hurried bricks thrown up as \"barricades\" in language.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"Dear effects of \/ tireless treason \/ the social only \/ shuffles if you \/ move your feet \/ we've learned this \/ in a place invaders \/ called Vancouver \/ even if we are only \/ a few and even if \/ it rains on the day \/ of the demo\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50373124522257,"sku":"CIN0889227470G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52689610244369,"sku":"NLS9780889227477","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740485710097,"sku":"NIN9780889227477","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0889227470.jpg?v=1750980602"},{"product_id":"commons-book-stephen-collis-9780889229150","title":"The Commons","description":"\u003cp\u003eBetween the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, most of the English common lands were enclosed--taken, by force, out of the hands of local collective use and privatized. The resistance to capitalism's \"primitive accumulation,\" registered in recurring peasant revolts, failed to stem this tide of what we now call \"privatization\"--but it spilt over into Romanticism's own advocacy of a kind of literary commons. Underground in \"the literary\" since the nineteenth century, the fight against enclosure resurfaces today amidst continuing capitalist accumulations and a renascent sense of the commons under globalization.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In \u003ci\u003eThe Commons\u003c\/i\u003e we wander the English countryside with the so-called mad peasant poet John Clare, just escaped from an Essex asylum and walking the more than eighty miles to his home in Helpston; we pick wild fruit with anarchist Henry David Thoreau, also newly escaped from jail (for not paying his poll tax); and we comb the English Lake District, undermining William Wordsworth's proprietary claim upon it, with a host of authors of Romantic Guides and Tours.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Resisting enclosure with each word, tearing down (intellectual) property's fencing, wandering in search of new commons, new spaces outside property's exclusive and excluding domain--\u003ci\u003eThe Commons\u003c\/i\u003e veers in and out of history to find spaces of linguistic hope. What we have named, in less inspired moments, \"allusion,\" \"borrowing,\" or even (pretentiously) \"intertextuality\" is just this fact that poetry proves again and again: our languages are common. Shared. Un-enclosable.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Commons\u003c\/i\u003e is another installment of what Collis has called (half in jest) \"The Barricades Project\"--a broadly based, historically ranging test of the old adage that \"poetry is the revolutionary act par excellence.\" It includes \u003ci\u003eAnarchive\u003c\/i\u003e (2005) and will eventually continue in \u003ci\u003eThe Red Album\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003ci\u003eThe Commons\u003c\/i\u003e includes an introduction to \"The Barricades Project,\" written by Collis' collaborators Alfred Noyes and Ramon Fernandez.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50726882803985,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50726883066129,"sku":"GOR008292200","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51868071821585,"sku":"NIN9780889229150","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52689801740561,"sku":"NLS9780889229150","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0889229155.jpg?v=1751077641"},{"product_id":"dream-in-the-eye-book-stephen-collis-9781772014334","title":"A Dream in the Eye","description":"\u003cp\u003eFirst collection of visual work by renowed Canadian poet Phyllis Webb\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA Dream in the Eye presents colour reproductions of the paintings and photocollages of renowned poet Phyllis Webb. A Governor General's Award-winning poet and a member of the Order of Canada, Webb was a major Canadian cultural figure from the 1950s through the 1980s, publishing ten collections of poetry and prose and co-founding the CBC Radio program Ideas (in 1965). When \"words abandoned\" her in the early 1990s and she was no longer able to write, she took up photography, photocollage, and eventually painting. Webb's visual work - a surprising \"late style\" (the work of an independent artist in her sixties, seventies, and eighties) - is in many ways a response to and extension of concerns explored in her poetry: the natural world of the West Coast, global political strife, the artist's struggle to express themself. All of this is explored in her more formalist collages and expressive, abstract paintings.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn addition to Webb's seventy-four paintings and eighty collages, A Dream in the Eye includes introductory material by the book's editor Stephen Collis and art historian and curator Laurie White, as well as supplementary material including some of Webb's own reflections on her visual work, an essay by Betsy Warland, and a selection of poems written in response to Webb's paintings by her long-time friend Diana Hayes.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51049110929681,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51049113321745,"sku":"NIN9781772014334","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52339352600849,"sku":"NLS9781772014334","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1772014338.jpg?v=1750897535"},{"product_id":"once-in-blockadia-book-stephen-collis-9781772010152","title":"Once in Blockadia","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn this collection of long and serial poems, Stephen Collis returns to the commons, and to his ongoing argument with romantic poet William Wordsworth, to rethink the relationship between human beings and the natural world in the Anthropocene. Collis circumambulates Tar Sands tailings ponds and English lakes--and stands in the path of pipelines, where on Burnaby Mountain in 2014 he was sued for $5.6 million dollars by energy giant Kinder Morgan, whose lawyers glossed Collis's writing in court by noting that \"underneath the poetry is a description of how the barricade was constructed.\" Called by Eden Robinson \"the most dangerous poet in Canada,\" in \u003ci\u003eOnce in Blockadia\u003c\/i\u003e Collis is in search of how we can continue to resist--as we only begin to understand the extent of our complicity and the depths of the predicament we are in. The bulk of \u003ci\u003eOnce in Blockadia\u003c\/i\u003e is made up of two long sequences evolving from found texts, and two long poems that engage with Wordsworth. The two found texts relate to two blockades Collis was involved in: one blocking the flood of commodities into the Port of Vancouver, and the other blocking the potential flood of oil out of Vancouver. In both cases the poetry and \"notes\" that follow offer glimpses into the documentary \"fact\" of events, the resistance behind the blockade, the reasons for them, and the complex of resistant affects driving the events. The two Wordsworthian long poems involve two walks--one in the Alberta Tar Sands, and the other in Wordsworth's beloved Grasmere. In the first instance Wordsworthian description is applied to the impossible to aestheticize Tar Sands; in the second, Wordsworth's own beloved home is revealed not as an alternative to the destruction of extraction, but as conditioned, surrounded, and structured by it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51051316248849,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51051319525649,"sku":"NIN9781772010152","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1772010154.jpg?v=1751122189"},{"product_id":"middle-book-stephen-collis-9781772016420","title":"The Middle","description":"\u003cp\u003eWritten amid wildfires and atmospheric rivers, The Middle extends Stephen Collis's investigation of threatened climate futures into a poetics of displacement and wandering. The fulcrum of a trilogy begun with A History of the Theories of Rain, The Middle hikes the shifting treelines of our warming world to reflect on the way all life is on the move. Focusing on the human-plant relationship, each of The Middle's linked sequences employs various forms of citational practice, rooted in the idea of a \"poetic commons,\" a kind of literary seed dispersal where words are blown, carried, and scattered from one textual field to another, akin to all the plants and animals in motion on our dangerously heating planet.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51679690981649,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51679691178257,"sku":"NIN9781772016420","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51885292618001,"sku":"NGR9781772016420","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52588871811345,"sku":"NLS9781772016420","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/177201642X.jpg?v=1750897535"},{"product_id":"almost-islands-book-stephen-collis-9781772012071","title":"Almost Islands","description":"Almost Islands is a memoir of Collis's friendship with and regular visits to legendary poet Phyllis Webb--now in her nineties and long enveloped in the silence which followed her last published book in 1990--as well as an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and chance, place, colonization, and climate change--the struggle that is writing, and the end of writing. I go to see her because she is poetry's old crone and I am seeking. I go to her--usually three, four times a year--because it is a small ministration I can perform for her, and for her poetry, as she slowly reaches into the finite--a long, slow embrace of nothing. If living is a process of learning how to die, then is writing a process of learning how to stop writing? I go in search of lost words, in search of the hoped for defence against the loss of words, drawn to the shaping sounds of fate and mortality. This is a book of poetic, political, and philosophical digressions--a book that weaves numerous themes together in a non-linear fashion. In part, it makes a literary argument: that Webb's turn, in the 1970s, from a failed poet about a European radical to the indigenous artworks literally etched into the rocks of her local environment has both literary and political meaning and importance. Beyond this, Collis seeks to build upon and extend Webb's expansion of her poetic sense of the political, by proposing a political agent, the biotariat, that is both human and more than human--this after following as many pathways as he can through Webb's own reading and thought. Finally, this is a book obsessed with the problem of Webb's not writing, its implications for a writer (me) who--compulsively--probably writes too much, and the wider social, political, and world historical implications of withdrawal, self-silencing, and not-doing.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52452053647633,"sku":"NLS9781772012071","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781772012071.jpg?v=1759363443"},{"product_id":"on-the-material-book-stephen-collis-9780889226326","title":"On the Material","description":"Structured in three parts, \u003ci\u003eOn the Material\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eComposed 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 ?ash on ?at screens \/ As 4   4s cool and ping mud covered in double garages. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe 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 ?re 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 ?re. 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52516405477649,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52516406034705,"sku":"NLS9780889226326","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780889226326.jpg?v=1760502807"},{"product_id":"dispatches-from-the-occupation-book-stephen-collis-9780889226951","title":"Dispatches from the Occupation","description":"\u003cp\u003eSomewhere at the core of almost every intellectual discipline is an attempt to explain change - why and how things change, and how we negotiate these transformations. These are among the most ancient of philosophical questions. In this collection of essays, award-winning poet Stephen Collis investigates how the Occupy movement grapples with these questions as it once again takes up the cause of social, economic and political change.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eDispatches from the Occupation opens with a meditation on the Occupy movement and its place in the history of recent social movements. Strategies, tactics and the experiments with participatory democracy and direct action are carefully parsed and explained. How a movement for social, economic and political change emerges, and how it might be sustained, are at the heart of this exploration.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eComprising the second section of the book is a series of \"dispatches\" from the day-to-day unfolding of the occupation in Vancouver's city centre as the author witnessed it - and participated in it - first hand: short manifestos, theoretical musings and utopian proposals. The global Occupy movement has only just begun, and as such this book presents an important first report from the frontlines.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFinally, Dispatches from the Occupation closes with a reflection on the city of Rome, written in the shadows of the Pantheon (the oldest continually-in-use building in the world). In something of a long prose-poem, Collis traces the trope of Rome as the \"eternal (unchanging?) city,\" from its imperial past (as one of the \"cradles of civilization\") to the rebirth of Roman republicanism during the French Revolution and the era of modern social movements - right up to the explosive riots of October 2011. Woven throughout is the story of the idea of change as it moves through intellectual history.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52670791745809,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52670792466705,"sku":"NLS9780889226951","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780889226951.jpg?v=1762290699"},{"product_id":"phyllis-webb-and-the-common-good-book-stephen-collis-9780889225596","title":"Phyllis Webb and the Common Good","description":"Phyllis Webb is a poet around whom archetypes tend to cluster: the reclusive artist; the distraught, borderline suicidal Sapphic woman poet. While on the surface she seems someone supremely disinterested in the public sphere, argues Stephen Collis in this brilliant and revealing new celebration of her work, Webb is no domestic, as a creator or a critic. Her work sweeps into the wilds of politics, philosophy, economics and her slim books speak volumes. If there is a sense of abandoned projects hovering as ghosts on the margins of her books it is a purposeful abandonment, an anarchist's abdication of positions of power and authority.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Webb's work points steadily towards the idea that the poem is not a commodity to be hoarded, but a response-ability to be shared, an aspect of the commons and our \"common good.\" The gradual dissolution of the lyric I traceable over the course of her writing career mirrors both the development of avant-garde poetics across the century and the anarchist inflected notion of the poem as a common property --an effect of language (the commons) and not the self (the private).\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In this sense Collis reads Webb's poetry as it conjoins (and simultaneously diverges from) various twentieth-century literary movements and moments--it is this tension in her work which makes Webb a modernist whose writing nevertheless provides an opening into postmodernism. Her work constructs bridges across numerous conceptual divides: the (porous) boundaries between poetry and painting, poetry and politics, modernism and postmodernism, the lyric and the long poem, the ontologies of the self and the other.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The changes across decades of Webb's writing, Collis argues, mirror changes in the approaches of the twentieth-century avant-garde to questions of responsibility and abstraction, locating her work in the Image-Nation of radical, philosophically engaged poetries that have flourished throughout twentieth-century North America.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52689939792145,"sku":"NLS9780889225596","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53562092126481,"sku":"NIN9780889225596","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780889225596.jpg?v=1762336575"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-ie\/collections\/author-books-by-stephen-collis.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}