On the Material

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

The long poem "4x4" 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 4x4s cool and ping mud covered in double garages."

In its second section. "I Fought the Lyric and the Lyric Won," the poet's 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 Collis' struggle with language---has left him with a need to reinvent human discourse and its attendant relations.

The book's closing section, "Gail's Books," is a resonantly beautiful sequence of poems in memory of the poet's sister, Gail Tulloch.

Our poetic economy is in crisis. Knowledge is reduced to ironic sound bytes till our attention disattenuates. The assembly language for our books is in another tongue.... You hungry? Read this book.... I'm lovin' it.---Garry Thomas Morse, author of Death in Vancouver and After Jack

Oh yes, Stephen Collis' On the Material is a fine, smart book, indeed. But it is the concluding section. "Gail's Books," that I will read again and again, for that section is a profound testing of the ability of an innovative poetry (and innovative poet) to address the most urgent and emotional of subjects, the death of the poet's sister. In what Collis calls "body of books / flesh of texts" we find the memorial and elegy for his sister whose death from cancer is followed shortly thereafter by a house fire that destroys her collection of books---"In the fire / A window opened." It is in the investigation and reinscription of beloved books---a site of intimacy and deep connection---that his sister Gail is remembered, "Each being a society / object the centre of paradise." In the pollen gathered, in the hive of re-sounding texts, Collis' writing proves that "what thou lovest well remains."---Hank Lazer, author of The New Spirit