Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten

Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten

Collis, Stephen

Paperback

ArtistsFiction AnthologiesCanadian Art

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1772012076
ISBN13: 9781772012071
Publisher: Talonbooks
Published: Oct 23 2018
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.40
Language: English

Almost Islands is a powerfully introspective memoir of the author's friendship with legendary Canadian poet Phyllis Webb - now in her nineties and long enveloped in silence - and his regular trips to see her. It is an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and chance, location, colonization, and climate change - the struggle that is writing, and the end of writing.

I go to see her because she is poetry's old crone and I am seeking. I go to her - usually three, four times a year - because it is a small ministration I can perform for her, and for her poetry, as she slowly reaches into the finite - a long, slow embrace of nothing ... If living is a process of learning how to die, then is writing a process of learning how to stop writing? I go in search of lost words, in search of the hoped-for defence against the loss of words, drawn to the shaping sounds of fate and mortality.

A meticulous collection of poetic, political, and philosophical digressions, Almost Islands weaves numerous themes together. At its crux lies a literary project: to build upon and extend Webb's exposition of a poetic sense of the political, by proposing a political agent, the Biotariat, a government of Life, that is both human and more than human - arrived at after following as many pathways as possible through Webb's own reading and thought. Ultimately, Almost Islands is a book obsessed with the problem of Webb's not writing, and the implications of this for a writer like Collis who, in his own words, may be writing too much - as well as the wider social, political, and world-historical implications of withdrawal, self-silencing, and not-doing.

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