To the Barricades - Paperback

by Stephen Collis (Author)

In 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.

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.

"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"

Author Biography

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 ongoing "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).

Collis is also the author of two book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks, 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions, 2006), as well as the editor, with Graham Lyons, of Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation (Iowa University Press, 2012). He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University, where he was a 2011/12 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow.