Poetry. Stephen Collis's forebears emigrated from Scotland to work in the coal mines that flourished on Vancouver Island from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s. In this book-length poem, he plunges back in time to reconstruct the history of coal on the Island. Spanning the Cretaceous era to present-day downtown Nanaimo. Workers' struggles against the robber barons, the classism and racism faced by miners, issues of the theft of land from aboriginal peoples and the damage mining wreaks on the earth, are all explored with fine nuance and wit in MINE. Collis unearths the "memory table" of coal-mining, and it is upon this surface that he retraces the "unwritten lives of the poor and history-less / . This is their story. I mine it as I write it."

Stephen Collis was born in British Columbia and earned a B.A. from the University of Victoria. While in his first year of the master's program at Simon Fraser University, Collis was elevated directly into the Ph.D. program. He teaches poetry, poetics, modernism, and American literature at SFU and lives in Tsawwassen.