Table of Contents

I. At the Fence of Poetry The Frostworks Dear Common II. The Commons Clear as Clare Blackberries The Lakes III. Right of Shack Dear Common: Letter from Being Dear Common: !Ya Basta! Of Blackberries and the Poetic Commons Acknowledgements Sources

About the Author

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, 2014), and To the Barricades (Talonbooks, 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.

Reviews

"Words like beauty, pleasure, and liberty do not sound hackneyed. Instead, their writing sounds synonymous with persistence. Collis is slightly off-step/beat, just out of range of any comfortable assumption, and a good shuffle away from clear understanding. This is not poetry that leads, but includes. It is a welcome philosophical divergence in popular culture." -- Prairie Fire Review of Books "For Collis, the world of poetry is a place in which '"the commons,'" a free place of exchange and mutual association, still maintains a parlous grip on imagination." "Stephen Collis is like Woody Allen laying down his favorite scenarios in European outfits. " -- Kevin Killian