Almost Islands is a powerfully introspective memoir of the author's friendship with legendary Canadian poet Phyllis Webb now in her nineties and long enveloped in silence and his regular trips to see her. It is an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and chance, location, colonization, and climate change the struggle that is writing, and the end of writing.

I go to see her because she is poetry's old crone and I am seeking. I go to her usually three, four times a year because it is a small ministration I can perform for her, and for her poetry, as she slowly reaches into the finite a long, slow embrace of nothing ... If living is a process of learning how to die, then is writing a process of learning how to stop writing? I go in search of lost words, in search of the hoped-for defence against the loss of words, drawn to the shaping sounds of fate and mortality.

is a book obsessed with the problem of Webb's not writing, and the implications of this for a writer like Collis who, in his own words, may be writing "too much" as well as the wider social, political, and world-historical implications of withdrawal, self-silencing, and not-doing.