{"product_id":"9781772012071","title":"Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb \u0026 Me","description":"\u003ci\u003eAlmost Islands\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA meticulous collection of poetic, political, and philosophical digressions, \u003ci\u003eAlmost Islands\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eAlmost Islands\u003c\/i\u003e 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.","brand":"Talonbooks, Limited","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47056738484464,"sku":"9781772012071","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781772012071_p0.jpg?v=1765233471","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781772012071","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}