The poems in Un interrogate the subjectivity of a western revolutionary socialist’s 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 imperialism’s 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 as well as an 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 master’s degree in history from Simon Fraser University and teaches history and labour studies to international students. Un is his first book of poetry.

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