Overview

Almost Islands is a powerfully introspective memoir of the author's friendship with legendary Canadian poet Phyllis Webb now in her nineties and long enveloped in silence and his regular trips to see her. It is an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and chance, location, 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. is a book obsessed with the problem of Webb's not writing, and the implications of this for a writer like Collis who, in his own words, may be writing ""too much"" as well as the wider social, political, and world-historical implications of withdrawal, self-silencing, and not-doing.

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9781772012071

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My first read of [Almost Islands] was like a surprise party. With the turn of every page, I found another friend: Montaigne, Geoff Dyer, W. G. Sebald, Thoreau, C. D. Wright, Susan Howe, et alia. --Poetry NorthWest

"""My first read of [Almost Islands] was like a surprise party. With the turn of every page, I found another friend: Montaigne, Geoff Dyer, W. G. Sebald, Thoreau, C. D. Wright, Susan Howe, et alia.""—Poetry NorthWest"

Author Information

Stephen Collis's many books of poetry include The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008; 2014), On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010 awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), DECOMP (with Jordan Scott Coach House, 2013), and Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks 2016 nominated for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature). He has also written two books of literary criticism, a book of essays on the Occupy Movement, and a novel. Almost Islands is a forthcoming memoir, and a long poem, Sketch of a Poem I Will Not Have Written, is in progress. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

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