Description
Book SynopsisStructured 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, 4 × 4 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 ?ash on ?at screens / As 4 × 4s 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 ha
