Once in Blockadia

Stephen Collis

"In 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 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 Once in Blockadia 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 Once in Blockadia is made up of two long sequences evolving...