Mine

Stephen Collis’s forebears emigrated from Scotland to work in the coal mines that flourished on Vancouver Island from the mid?1800s to the early 1900s. In this book?length poem, he plunges back in time to reconstruct the history of coal on the Island. Spanning the Cretaceous era to presentday downtown Nanaimo, this is dynamic, richly textured work.Workers’ struggles against the robber barons, the classism and racism faced by miners, issues of the theft of land from aboriginal peoples and the damage mining wreaks on the earth, are all explored with fine nuance and wit. Mine recounts the hunger and extreme privation that miners’ families endured, as well as the dangers of the mineshafts. Collis unearths the “memory table” of coal?mining, and it is upon this surface that he retraces the “unwritten lives of the poor and history?less / ? This is their story. I mine it as I write it.” A tribute to all coal miners and to the very substance itself.

AUTHOR

Stephen Collis

Stephen Collis is an award winning poet, activist, and professor of contemporary literature at Simon Fraser University. His poetry books include Anarchive (2005), The Commons (2008), On the Material (2010, awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), and To the Barricades (2013). He has also written two books of criticism, including Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (2007). His collection of essays on the Occupy movement, Dispatches from the Occupation (2012), comes out of his activist experiences and is a philosophical meditation on activist tactics, social movements, and change. A Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University in 2011/12, Collis has read and lectured across Canada, the United States, and Europe. The Red Album is his first novel.