Stephen Collis: 5 books

Somewhere at the core of almost every intellectual discipline is an attempt to explain change – why and how things change, and how we negotiate these transformations. These are among the most ancient of philosophical questions. In this collection of essays, award-winning poet Stephen Collis investigates...

Phyllis Webb is a poet around whom archetypes tend to cluster: the reclusive artist; the distraught, borderline suicidal Sapphic woman poet. While on the surface she seems supremely disinterested in the public sphere, argues Stephen Collis in this celebration of her work, Webb is no domestic, as a creator or a critic. Her work sweeps across politics, philosophy, and economics.

To the Barricades moves 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. Avant-garde technique is donated to...

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries the majority of the English common lands were enclosed, by decree and by force, depriving communities of their independence and self-sufficiency. The resistance to capitalism’s “primitive accumulation,” registered in recurring peasant revolts and nighttime...

In the tradition of Borges, Nabakov, and Bolaño, The Red Album is a work of fiction that questions historical authenticity and authority. Divided into two parts, the book begins with an edited and footnoted narrative of dubious origins. In the second part, a section of "documents" (including...