To the Barricades moves back and forth between historical and contemporary scenes of revolt, from nineteenth-century Parisian street barricades to twenty-first-century occupations and street marches, shifting along the active seam between poetry and revolution. Avant-garde technique is donated to lyric ends, forming an anti-archive of the revolutionary record where words are bricks hurriedly thrown up as linguistic barricades.

Stephen Collis is the author of five books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize-winning On the Material and three titles in the ongoing Barricades Project. An activist and social critic, his writing on the Occupy movement is collected in Dispatches from the Occupation (Talonbooks, 2012).