KNOCK DOWN HOUSE
Stephen Collis

Pamenar Press, 2025
/////////180 Pages
14.8 x 21 cm
ISBN: 978-1-915341-23-5

Knock Down House incorporates memoir, cultural and literary studies, and poetry to explore the processes of colonization, war, environmental over-shoot and migration that have shaped, and been shaped by, modernity. Taking as its instigation the moment the author’s grandfather, a British aviator in the Great War, was given a copy of Kipling’s poems as he set off to do the Empire’s dirty work, Knock Down House is a work of historical recovery and poetic imagination. In something of a Sebaldian method, Collis visits sites significant to his grandfather’s war experience, records dreams, joins an annual walk with refugees and asylum seekers, explores works of art from Tiepolo to John Akomfrah, and ponders the oceans that separate present from past, and self from other.

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Stephen Collis is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons, the BC Book Prize winning On the Material, and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten—all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. His most recent book of poetry, The Middle, is the second volume of a trilogy begun with A History of the Theories of Rain. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.
 
 
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With Knock Down House, Stephen Collis gives us nothing less than a new form for the telling of histories. Weaving his narrative through short, intimately connected sections, where the medium is sometimes the essay but sometimes the poem, Collis presents what he calls a notation of movements: of modernity, of colonialism, of the contemporary refugee, of the walk as archival practice, of the migrations of birds. Sometimes drawing these threads together, sometimes allowing them to fall apart, Knock Down House becomes the record of a person in the present reflecting on, and taking responsibility for, the movements that have shaped him. What unfolds, as the stories intertwine, is a searching poetic inquiry into shared and unshared pasts – a profound, important, deeply affecting work.

– David Herd

Knock Down House traverses impossible distances—lending art history, literary theory, memoir, and poetic “fleeting and fluid” movement through time and memory. Personal and collective, this is a necessary work of great care, contemplation, and practice. Attending to the ongoing legacy of world wars and contemporary displacements “on whose migratory paths our lives are lived” as ever, an author most daring, incisive, and kind.

– Cecily Nicholson

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