Un
By (Author) Ivan Drury
Talon Books,Canada
Talon Books,Canada
20th September 2022
New edition
Canada
Paperback
112
Width 152mm, Height 228mm, Spine 11mm
120g
The poems in Un interrogate the subjectivity of a western revolutionary socialists early-twenty-first-century masculinity against a backdrop of revolutionary legacies of moderate gains and terrible defeats. Thematically, the poems draw from the U.S. War on Terror and the disappearances of people extrajudicially apprehended from the Middle East and North Africa as a lament for the failure of the promises of socialism to deliver formerly colonized people out of imperialisms terrible grasp. Throughout the text the metaphors of absence, negation, and unbeing repeat the negativity of a global class struggle now forty years in retreat. But because the philosophical method in Un is dialectical, negation does not mean hopelessness or final defeat. Instead, Un hints at new revolutionary possibilities, the emergence of old, tidal syntheses, through the combination of historical difficulty with the arrival of unknown days ahead.
Ivan Drury is a founding member of Red Braid Alliance for Decolonial Socialism and editor and writer with The Volcano newspaper. He has a long history in left communities on the unceded Territories of Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Wauthuth nations. Ivan has a masters degree in history from SFU and teaches history and labour studies to international students. Un is his first book of poetry.