Structured in three parts, On the Material is a meditation on language, geography, socio-economics and the body, moving from the glut of fossil-fuelled consumer excess to the materiality of a single book.

Composed almost entirely of quatrains (each page being comprised of four four-line stanzas) and written while travelling through North America in 2008, "4x4"; navigates issues of space and movement in the global age. As economies crumble, ecosystems fail and peak oil approaches, Collis records the production of a disarticulation of social discourse that our consumer society has generated: "After all we made money out of matter here / Now condos shield us from the computer hum / Of on-line trading and wars flash on flat screens / As 4x4s cool and ping mud covered in double garages.";

In its bridging second section, "I Fought the Lyric and the Lyric Won,"; the desire to express wins out over the desire to possess. Beauty, contemplation and human communication seem to have abandoned the world, and their absence from the everyday has re-engaged the poet's struggle with language-has left a need to reinvent human discourse and its attendant relations.

The third section, "Gail's Books,"; is a sequence of poems in memory of Stephen Collis's sister, Gail Tulloch. A month after Gail's death from cancer in 2002, a fire destroyed her house, removing every material reminder of her from the earth. All that remained was one book recovered from a pool of water in the ruins after the fire. Dried in the air, this book, and those Collis had previously borrowed from his sister, become a way for the poet to read back into the elemental heart of absence and loss-the "material"; of the books displacing, and in some way recovering, how language holds the materiality of the physical world.

Available in April 2010.