At a gas pump, Stephen Collis notices an LED message crawl: Help Shell change the world. He collects such nuances for his amalgam of protest-driven poetry and "militant sincerity,"; Once in Blockadia (Talon $18.95), partly a response to being named in a $5.6 million lawsuit unsuccessfully launched by U.S. energy giant Kinder Morgan. Lawyers cited Collis' writing as a mobilizing force for protestors who stymied the company's exploratory boreholes on Burnaby Mountain.
It's hard to live up to being called "the most dangerous poet in Canada"; but Collis is doing his anti-capitalist darndest, documenting his travels from the Alberta Tar Sands to Wordsworth's Lake District for Once in Blockadia-a term coined by Naomi Klein. His combination of transcripts and memoir has been named as one of three finalists for this year's George Ryga Award for Social Awareness, to be presented in June. The other finalists are Wade Davis for Wade Davis: Photographs (D&M $39.95) and Eric Jamieson's The Native Voice: The Story of How Maisie Hurley and Canada's First Aboriginal Newspaper Changed a Nation (Caitlin $24.95).