NEIL SURKAN Ruin
CA$15.00
Wanting grace so badly for myself, / I filled every opening.
From the author of Their Queer Tenderness, Unbecoming, and On High
NEIL SURKAN
RUIN
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-62-6
AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER
PUB DATE OCT 2023
ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM
NEIL SURKAN was born in Penticton, BC. He is the author of two full-length poetry collections — Unbecoming (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), which was selected as one of three finalists for the City of Calgary’s W.O. Mitchell Award, and On High (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018) — and the chapbooks Their Queer Tenderness (Knife-Fork-Book, 2020) and Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017). His award-winning poems have appeared in numerous Canadian magazines.
JAY BESEMER Your Tongue is as Long as a Tuesday
CA$22.50
1.C. [Your tongue is as long as a Tuesday.] I want to stop & make you visible, but I don't. I'm shy or perhaps too fond of that thrill of uncertainty. Without solidifying my gaze & my sense of you, I can keep you at liberty. If I can see you, others are sure to. I do want to see you but not explain, not share, not risk you. Not risk you & me. We are at risk.
JAY BESEMER
Your Tongue is as Long as a Tuesday
Poetry. 60 pages.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-60-2
AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER
PUB DATE OCT 2023
ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM
Poet and artist JAY BESEMER is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Men & Sleep (Meekling Press 2023); the double chapbook Wounded Buildings/Simple Machines (Another New Calligraphy 2022) and Theories of Performance (The Lettered Streets Press, 2020). He was a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Poetry, and a finalist for the 2017 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Find him online at www.jaybesemer.net and on Twitter and Bluesky @divinetailor.
WILL MANNING Joan Would Say
CA$15.00
Tonight I swear on Leaves of Grass, I am your girl.
WILL MANNING
JOAN WOULD SAY
NOW IN ITS SECOND PRINTING!
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-55-8
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER*
PUB DATE LATE SUMMER 2023
Will 'Sweetpea' Manning currently cuts at Town Barber, Toronto. Recently on tour this month in support of Don Pyle's Shot In A Mirror. Joan Would Say is their chapbook debut. Launches at Fertile Fest, 19 AUG. willmanning.ca
*All preorders come with a limited edition postcard of the title poem.
MICHAEL FLATT I CAN FOCUS IF I TRY
CA$22.50
Ferrying between viscera and the virtual, the iris and the lens, Michael Flatt commits his attention to the vertiginous business of seeing seeing itself. Across a quartet of glitchhappy sequences which accrete, contract, and fracture like iPhone glass, his lyric phenomenology seeks to parse reality from its spectral façade, “studying the practice of light” to expand the ways we envision our precarious, prismatic selves. Fascinated by how flesh and bone interface with .exe and eye, I Can Focus if I Try is a vivid excursion through “our embedded-edge / intrascape.”
— ANDREW ZAWACKI, Unsun
Michael Flatt’s I Can Focus If I Try demands a different way of seeing. Built on a frame of Euclidean lyrics, it ebbs and flows elastically, allowing for engagement from a wide array of vantage points. Squint and you’ll find that these poems are “a martyrdom to any light source.”
- JIM JOHNSTONE, author of The King of Terrors
Flatt's poems’ experiments, in vision, in envisioning, let language oscillate, as inhale-exhale, as waves forward then breaking, so that the reader senses structures before they notice them, understands geometries before they know them. The lyric expansions and contractions within this collection surprise, even as their logics create anticipations. - AARON TUCKER, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys and Catalogue d’oiseaux
Michael Flatt wrests nothing. Let the eye curve with them, an early line suggests, and so it does. In poems perceiving perception, we glide along the contours of things. Memories, images, ideas, actions, feelings. Nothing is settled, nothing so neat as to be totalizing or with reachable finitude, so unsettled this sensorium. To perceive, Flatt shows us, isn’t a matter of holding meaning in one’s hand, but of being buffeted by that onslaught. And the form follows the word. The language slowly fills in like the eye adjusting to shifting light, or the mind’s eye’s peeling revelation upon a flash of meaning. Like seeing an object whose horizon shifts as it turns, like reading a sentence whose meaning fills in as it slips away, like beach sand slipping through all our hands. These poems’ queer geometry defies expectation even as it reveals to us what we might expect when we simply open our eyes. TRAVIS SHARP, Yes, I Am A Corpse Flower
"What do we do with these gaps in our beauty?"
MICHAEL FLATT
I CAN FOCUS IF I TRY
ISBN: 978-1-989355-48-0
Poetry. Book. Full-length. Collection.
ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM
READ AN EXCERPT at CLEVELAND REVIEW OF BOOKS
MICHAEL FLATT is the author of Absent Receiver (SpringGun Press 2013) and, with derrick mund, Chlorosis (The Operating System 2018). He was named by J. Michael Martinez to the Poetry Society of America's list of New American Poets in 2013. He is the founder of Low Frequency Press, which publishes book-like objects of marginal aesthetics, and Threadsuns, a teaching press at High Point University, where he is an assistant professor of English.
SUBHANYA SIVAJOTHY Singing Fish Notation
CA$12.00
what I’m trying to say is
these waves are another kind of animal
SUBHANYA SIVAJOTHY
Singing Fish Notation
ISBN 978-1-989355-58-9 (print)
Poetry. Chapbook. wQr series.
Layout: Ralph Kolewe.
What Queer Reading
is an imprint of knife | fork | book.
Series editor: Lannii Layke.
ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM
Subhanya Sivajothy is a librarian and writer living in Tkarón:to. She uses poetry to think about ecologies, archives, and resistance. She completed her MFA at University of Guelph. She has been published in magazines such as
Adi Magazine, The Ex-Puritan and Filling Station, and has been supported by the Canada Council of Arts.
KATE SUTHERLAND Nuptials
CA$15.00
"My dear, he can't decide which of the American ladies he would prefer to marry"
KATE SUTHERLAND
Nuptials
Fertile Festival of New & Inventive Works Selection
ISBN 978-1-989355-57-2 (print)
Poetry. Visual. Chapbook.
Typeset in Typeset in Avenir and Avenir Next Condensed.
Layout: Ralph Kolewe.
Cover image: Kate Sutherland
ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM
Kate Sutherland is a writer and a collage artist. She is the author of four books, most recently the poetry collection The Bones Are There. Her collages have been published in long con magazine, Canthius, and The Ex-Puritan.
OANA AVASILICHIOAEI Improbable Theatres
CA$12.00
"You enter the theatre only to realize that you've always existed here."
OANA AVASILICHIOAEI
Improbable Theatres
ISBN 978-1-989355-59-6 (print)
Poetry. Performance. Theatre.
Fertile Festival of New & Inventive Works Selection
Layout: Ralph Kolewe.
ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM
Oana Avasilichioaei (www.oanalab.com) interweaves sound, performance, poetry, and translation to expand and trouble ideas of language, histories, polyphonic structures, and borders of listening. She has created many performance/sound works that mix electronics, ambient textures, noise, and vocal play, published six collections of poetry hybrids, including award-nominated Eight Track (Talonbooks, 2019) and Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015), and written a libretto for a one-act opera (Cells of Wind, 2022).
DEAN GARLICK Domestic Sublime
CA$15.00
Only a few left!
As Edmund Burke described when comparing the sublime and the beautiful, “sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small; ... beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid and even massive.” The ability of these images to simultaneously embody both the sublime and the beautiful, and the state of awe that this can awaken, are for me the essence of the domestic sublime. - Dean Garlick
DEAN GARLICK
Domestic Sublime
Fertile Festival of New & Inventive Works Selection
ISBN 978-1-989355-56-5 (print)
Photography. Poetry. Beauty. Sublime.
The digital photos in this volume were shot on a Fujifilm X100V in Montréal between the spring of 2021 and 2023.
Typeset in Avenir and Avenir Next Condensed.
Layout: Ralph Kolewe.
AYAZ PIRANI Martyrs' Garden
CA$15.00
Imagine that:
to be put in your place.
Is there a greater gift
a bigger reward
a better high
a warmer embrace?
From the author of How Beautiful People Are
AYAZ PIRANI MARTYRS' GARDEN
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-54-1
Cover: Kirby
Design: R. Kolewe
ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM
AYAZ PIRANI's books include Happy You Are Here, Kabir's Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets and How Beautiful People Are, along with recent work in The Malahat Review.
"What makes this possible."
CA$10.00 - CA$100.00
Poetry festivals don't come out of nowhere, nor pay for themselves. As one poet said, "You're clearly not in this for the money," while another says, "Let's do it for the poets." A former director of another large poetry project wrote, "there isn't a day I don't ask for money for poetry." We know the truth in that statement. You're continued generous support makes this possible.
And to the many—poets/artists/readers—everywhere who volunteer their time and talents again and again, "doin' it for the poets." We see you and know we're never thanked nearly enough. All the flowers.
NOTE: You can also use the QR code posted here to donate any amount directly to our PayPal. Convenient.
JAMES LINDSAY THE LAKE
CA$12.00
I don’t know how to talk
about my biological father,
so instead I’m going
to describe the lake:
JAMES LINDSAY
THE LAKE
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-37-4
Typeset in Perpetua and Cooper Hewitt
Cover: Kirby.
Layout: Ralph Kolewe.
Printed by John DeJesus at Coach House Books, Toronto.
JAMES LINDSAY is the author of Double Self-Portrait, Our Inland Sea (Wolsak & Wynn) and the chapbook Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis! (Anstruther Press). He is the co-founder of Pleasence Records and works in book publishing.
MARK TRUSCOTT RAIN
CA$10.00
Winner of the inaugural Nelson Ball Prize (for Branches)
And where are you?
MARK TRUSCOTT
RAIN
Poetry. KFB Pamphlet Series.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-36-7
Typeset in Perpetua and Cooper Hewitt
Cover: Kirby.
Layout: Ralph Kolewe.
Printed by John DeJesus at Coach House Books, Toronto.
ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM
MARK TRUSCOTT is the author of three poetry books: Said Like Reeds or Things (Coach House, 2004), Nature (Book*hug, 2010), and Branches (Book*hug, 2018).
PAOLA FERRANTE THE DARK UNWIND
CA$12.00
All my life I've danced with a wolf, a long / slow waltz in the dark unwind ...
PAOLA FERRANTE
THE DARK UNWIND
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-45-9 (print)
Cover: Kirby
Layout/design: Ralph Kolewe
Printed at Coach House [Toronto] by John DeJesus
ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM
Paola Ferrante’s debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack, (Mansfield Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her first short fiction collection, Her Body Among Animals, is forthcoming Spring 2024 from Book*hug Press. She is the Poetry Editor at Minola Review and lives in Toronto, Canada with her spouse Mat, and their son.
DALE MARTIN SMITH BLUR
CA$12.00
When the rain starts / and a hair sticks / to the butter
DALE MARTIN SMITH
BLUR
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-40-4 (print)
Cover: Kirby
Layout design: Ralph Kolewe
Printed by John DeJesus at Coach House [Toronto]
ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM
Dale Martin Smith is the author most recently of Flying Red Horse and Sons (KFB, 2017). He teaches poetry at Toronto Metropolitan University. dalemartinsmith.com
LANNII LAYKE OS
CA$12.00
I have never seen this happen in real life.
LANNII LAYKE
OS
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-39-8 (print)
Cover: Kirby
Layout/design: Ralph Kolewe
Printed at Coach House by John DeJesus
Lannii Layke is a young, Black writer, editor, and interdisciplinary designer from Tkarón:to (Toronto). They attend to crafting memory and fine jewellery. In French, os is bone. This is their first physical collection of poems.
LANNII LAYKE
OS
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-39-8 (print)
Cover: Kirby
Layout/design: Ralph Kolewe
Printed at Coach House by John DeJesus
Lannii Layke is a young, Black writer, editor, and interdisciplinary designer from Tkarón:to (Toronto). They attend to crafting memory and fine jewellery. In French, os is bone. This is their first physical collection of poems.
MAUREEN SCOTT HARRIS MORE THAN ONE HOMAGE
CA$12.00
Sold out
Hello death, I heard your knock at the door. Shall I laud / your presence, puff your progress keen-sighted one?
MAUREEN SCOTT HARRIS
MORE THAN ONE HOMAGE
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-44-2 (print)
Cover: Kirby
Layout design: Ralph Kolewe
Printed by John DeJesus at Coach House [Toronto]
Poet and essayist Maureen Scott Harris was born in Prince Rupert, BC, grew up in Winnipeg, and has lived in Toronto since the 1960s. She’s worked as freelance writer and editor, librarian, bookstore clerk, and production manager for Brick Books. Her publications include three collections of poetry and three chapbooks, as well as work in Canadian, American, British, and Australian journals. Her essay on the Don River won the WildCare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize. With the River Poets she has developed poetry walks through Toronto’s ravines and parks.
MAUREEN SCOTT HARRIS
MORE THAN ONE HOMAGE
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-44-2 (print)
Cover: Kirby
Layout design: Ralph Kolewe
Printed by John DeJesus at Coach House [Toronto]
Poet and essayist Maureen Scott Harris was born in Prince Rupert, BC, grew up in Winnipeg, and has lived in Toronto since the 1960s. She’s worked as freelance writer and editor, librarian, bookstore clerk, and production manager for Brick Books. Her publications include three collections of poetry and three chapbooks, as well as work in Canadian, American, British, and Australian journals. Her essay on the Don River won the WildCare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize. With the River Poets she has developed poetry walks through Toronto’s ravines and parks.
KLARA DU PLESSIS & KADIE SALMON Skin & Meat Sky
CA$15.00
Sold out
I stumble over my love for the sea, rest my head on mountains.
I’d like to posit a theory that we’re all descendants
of headstones.
Klara du Plessis, Skin & Meat Sky
Part of KFB's Inaugural Fertile Festival of New & Inventive Works & KFB SELECTS
KLARA DU PLESSIS
& KADIE SALMON
SKIN & MEAT SKY
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-43-5 (print)
Cover: Kirby
Layout: R. Kolewe
Winner of the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Klara du Plessis’ debut collection, Ekke, was released from Palimpsest Press. Her second book is Hell Light Flesh, 2020. Klara is a poet, critic, and literary curator, developing Deep Curation as an experimental practice of poetry reading organization. She resides in Montreal.
Kadie Salmon has been exhibiting internationally for over a decade and has received support from Arts Council England to The Henry Moore Foundation. She is a photographer, sculptor, and moving image artist based in London, where she is represented by gallery New Art Projects. Kadie is currently working on her newest work Closing Bones supported by the Freelands Foundation.
JENNIFER LOVEGROVE THE TINDER SONNETS
CA$15.00
Sold out
Listen, sometimes the anti-depressants
mean I can’t get hard. It’s not you. Okay?
JENNIFER LOVEGROVE
THE TINDER SONNETS
Unabashedly confessional, radically vulnerable, hyper-visible Lovegrove's sonnets sally against the long-standing and subjugating demand that “women of a certain age” be rendered invisible, non-sexual, and accept this politely. These poems refuse invisibility; instead, they confront and subvert it, often uncomfortably so, while experimenting with traditional forms like the sonnet and the conventional lyric. The Tinder Sonnets is a refusal to recede from view, to cede sexual space, to be quiet and polite. It is a messy, dirty celebration of contemporary life – dating apps, sex, difficult conversations, pleasure, disappointment, betrayal, anger, family, identity, art and life.
Poetry. Chapbook. Sonnets.
ISBN 978-1-989355-34-3
knife | fork | book Toronto
Jennifer LoveGrove is the author of, most recently, the poetry collection Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes (Book*hug 2017). Her novel Watch How We Walk (ECW Press, 2013) was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She works at the University of Toronto, and divides her time between downtown Toronto and rural Ontario, Canada. She is learning to play the drums.
AMANDA EARL MATTHEW
CA$25.00
Only a few left!
When this gospel queen heard she had a vispo of Matthew, she said, "WE MUST!" ...and then she SAW IT. - KIRBY
From the creator of JUDITH: WOMEN MAKING VISUAL POETRY
AMANDA EARL
MATTHEW
TRAVIS SHARP YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER
CA$20.00
Sold out
"THE QUEEREST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ IN MY LIFE. And the most freeing." - KIRBY
"Sharp’s language is thick, racy, sensual, ruckous and uniquely physical, upturning tables with a flamboyance... YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER is an impressive debut" - @robmclennanblog
TRAVIS SHARP
YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER
KFB. Poetry.
ISBN 978-1-989355-27-5
Yes, I am a corpse flower composes a queer lyric meditation on body, identification, and subjectivity, proposing a queer poetics not just referential, limited to language’s meaning. These are not poems about queerness, but composed queerly: eccentric, off-centre, oblique, to twist. Poems that failingly and flailingly attempt to define the queer “I,” that skepticize any stable connection between queer self and body, narrate an unnarratable encounter with self-recognition outside of categorizable identity. These poems are composed from a feeling that to state queerness can never be to expound on a single journey, but to gather together a multitude of I’s of which this I, here, writing this paragraph, is only one iteration. I is not this one, but neither is I an other, but a we, perversely licked-linked through language, a sort of tongue: limn me, limn me!
Contents
Yes, I am a corpse flower
Sinister Queer Agenda
The body under valuation: a musical
I guess we should talk about our feelings
Protean Shakes: A Memoir
OrganGrindrTM
Acknowledgements/Bio
TRAVIS SHARP published the chapbook Sinister Queer Agenda (above/ground press 2018), the artist’s book one plus one is two ones (Recreational Resources 2018), and, with Aimee Harrison and Maria Anderson, co-edited a digital book, Radio: 11.8.16 (Essay Press 2017). He has an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington, Bothell, and is a PhD candidate in the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo. Travis is the editor and director of Essay Press.
CORY LAVENDER BALLAD OF BERNIE "BEAR" ROY
CA$6.00
THE DEBUT OF KFB's NEW PAMPHLET SERIES
Oh, dear backwards bear. Didn’t make it out to the house
that Christmas to visit huff and puff lawnmower bear.
No more gardener bear, no squash-a-year like from Grandpa bear
more of a piss off the back step, selling off the heirlooms bear
worn wheezy bear plopped in the easy chair before your shows.
CORY LAVENDER
BALLAD OF BERNIE "BEAR" ROY
KFB PAMPHLET 001
ISBN 978-1-989355-30-5
Cover: Kirby
Layout: R. Kolewe
Graphics: Jessica Hiemstra
Photos: Torben Robertson
CORY LAVENDER is a poet of mixed Black Loyalist and European descent settled in Mi’kma’ki. His chapbook Lawson Roy’s Revelation came out with Gaspereau Press in 2018. His work has appeared in journals such as Riddle Fence and The New Quarterly, and is anthologized in Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020).
ANDY VERBOOM DBL
CA$10.00
"Just cause the human beings are hanging doesn’t mean entertainment’s dead. The genre bends."
ANDY VERBOOM DBL
Poetry. Chapbook. ISBN: 978-1-989355-20-6
Andy Verboom is from subrural Nova Scotia and lives in K'jipuktuk (Halifax). He is the founder of Couplets, a lit & art collaboration series, and co-founder of long con, an online magazine for art about art.
His poetry has won Frog Hollow’s Chapbook Contest and Descant’s Winston Collins Prize, been shortlisted for CV2's Young Buck Prize and Arc's Poem of the Year, and appeared in Prism, The Puritan, Vallum, and elsewhere.
His sixth poetry chapbook will be DBL (knife | fork | book, 2020).
HAMISH BALLANTYNE Imitation Crab
CA$15.00
was drunk not
dreaming and thought will write
to this
friend/to that
What arose next
day won’t smoke
Wild eye in the mens
who can remember
HAMISH BALLANTYNE IMITATION CRAB
Poetry. Chapbook. ISBN: 978-1-989355-26-8
Hamish Ballantyne's Imitation Crab is the speechlessness that settles three days into a road trip, the groan of human language tearing half apart from nature. Its pleasures have their lineage in Zen poetry's precision and Lorine Niedecker's vivid work of condensery; they tumble in cascades of tight unlikelinesses; they bite down hard on the tongue of the Moment in the mouth of Gabriola Island lingo. I invite you to "fall down the / flower of / THE WAY HE SPOKE."
Hamish Ballantyne (b. 1994) is a poet and translator from Vancouver Island. He works seasonally as a mushroom picker and works on the Downtown Eastside the rest of the year. Hamish recently completed a translation of Luis de Góngora's Solitudes.
Cover: Kirby
Design: r. kolewe
JOHN NYMAN The Devil
CA$15.00
Sold out
"at least I have something to take care of.
I wouldn’t say I’m heartless."
JOHN NYMAN THE DEVIL
Poetry. Chapbook. ISBN: 978-1-989355-21-3
Originally from North York and currently living in Toronto, John Nyman is a writer, scholar, critic, and poet working in traditional verse as well as visual and conceptual forms. John’s first full-length collection of poetry, Players (Palimpsest Press), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award by the League of Canadian Poets. John is also a co-author of the &, poetry collective’s second chapbook, &, 2: this happened to one of us (Publication Studio Guelph), and the author of the manifesto chapbook Slogan, Substance, Dream: keywords for a responsible poetry (Anstruther Press), along with works of concrete poetry, literary and arts criticism, and short fiction. Links to some of John’s online publications can be found on the CV / Publications page, while selections from his visual, conceptual, and erasure projects are regularly featured on his Instagram, @selected.works.
JIM JOHNSTONE THE OUROBOROS
CA$10.00
Sold out
"In Jim Johnstone’s long poem, the city eats itself inch by inch... Appetite knows no bounds." - The Pamphleteer
If shouts were music
the whole world would be singing
Don’t ruin it.
Don’t ruin it.
Don’t ruin it.
JIM JOHNSTONE
THE OUROBOROS
KFB PAMPHLET SERIES 002
ISBN: 978-1-989355-32-9
Embossed Cover on Mohawk Loop Straw 80lb.
Translucent Endpapers.
Printed on Zephyr at Coach House.
Cover: Kirby
Design: R. Kolewe
JIM JOHNSTONE is a Toronto-based poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of five previous collections of poetry, most recently The Chemical Life (Véhicule Press, 2017) and
Dog Ear (Véhicule Press, 2014). He is also the winner of several awards including the Bliss Carmen Poetry Award, a CBC Literary Award, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, and
Poetry’s Editors Prize for Book Reviewing. Currently, Johnstone curates the Anstruther Books imprint at Palimpsest Press, where he published The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry in 2018.
On Sale
On Sale
R. KOLEWE silence, then [eBook]
CA$8.00
CA$5.00
Poetry. Electronic book.
ISBN 978-1-9959300-19-0
PDF download of r. kolewe's sold out KFB chapbook.
R. KOLEWE THE WILD FOX
CA$15.00
Sold out
from the author of silence, then and The Absence of Zero
picking up pieces scraps & torn
postcards & library cards &
typewriter ribbon & only now
seeing myself all wrapped in
my self “by aporia pure & simple”
then & now how can I forget?
“Clear a space for it” you said.
R. KOLEWE
THE WILD FOX
Poetry Chapbook.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-31-2
40 pages. Embossed Cover on Mohawk Loop Straw 80lb
Translucent Endpapers. Perfect Bound.
Printed on Zephyr at Coach House.
Cover: Kirby
Design: R. Kolewe
SHANE NEILSON WALT
CA$10.00
We would not be good enough for Whitman but he would be good to us.
Poets, have you had words electrocute you? If no, then you are not poets.
Words must do more than chasten you, force you to conform.
They stun you into care.
SHANE NEILSON
WALT
KFB PAMPHLET SERIES 003
ISBN: 978-1-989355-33-6
Embossed Cover on Mohawk Loop Straw 80lb.
Translucent Endpapers.
Printed on Zephyr at Coach House.
Cover: Kirby
Design: R. Kolewe
SHANE NEILSON is a poet from New Brunswick who can never repay the debt he owes Walt Whitman. This unpayable debt makes for the conditions of a perfect love: nothing is asked for, nothing is required, and yet everything would be given.
On Sale
On Sale
JONATHAN GARFINKEL "BOCIANY (STORKS)" [eBook]
CA$8.00
CA$5.00
Poetry. Electronic Book. ISBN: 978-1-989355-12-1
AVAILABLE AS AN eBook ONLY.
JONATHAN GARFINKEL’s multi-genre writing has been translated into twelve languages, and his plays have been produced throughout Canada, Germany, Russia and Ukraine. He is the author of the book of poems Glass Psalms (Turnstone Press) and has written numerous plays including The Trials of John Demjanjuk: A Holocaust Cabaret and the Governor-General shortlisted House of Many Tongues. His memoir Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel/Palestine Divide was published in five countries to critical acclaim (Penguin Canada and Norton and Norton US). Jonathan is also an award-winning non-fiction writer; his journalism has appeared in places like The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Eighteen Bridges, Tablet and PEN International. In 2015 he was commissioned to adapt Rawi Hage’s Cockroach for the stage, which premiered at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary in 2016. Currently it is in development with Soulpepper. Named by the Toronto Star as “one to watch”, he teaches playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal.
On Sale
On Sale
DALE SMITH Sons Broadside
CA$25.00
CA$20.00
k|f|b BROADSIDE 001 Poet DALE SMITH SONS Artist ANTHONY DIFAZIO Design NORMAN NEHMETALLAH Master Printer KYLE SCHLESINGER at CUNEIFORM PRESS
LIMITED EDITION of 50 19 x 12. Two-colour. Letterpress. Numbered. Signed.
On Sale
On Sale
DALE SMITH "SONS" [eBook]
CA$8.00
CA$5.00
Poetry. Electronic Book. ISBN: 978-1-989355-13-8
AVAILABLE AS AN eBook ONLY.
DALE SMITH is a poet, critic, and scholar of poetry and rhetorical theory on the faculty of English at Ryerson University, Toronto. He is the editor with Robert J. Bertholf of An Open Map: The Robert Duncan / Charles Olson Correspondence and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson. A critical study of poetry and public culture, Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960, was published in 2012. His writing has appeared in The Baffler, Best American Poetry 2002, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Walrus, and elsewhere. A recent book of poetry, Slow Poetry in America, was published by Cuneiform in 2014; other poetry includes American Rambler (2000); The Flood & the Garden (2002); Black Stone (2007); and Susquehanna (2008). His reviews and essays have appeared in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Brick. Born in Dallas, Texas, Smith has resided in Ontario since 2011 with the poet Hoa Nguyen and their children, Keaton and Waylon.
KIRBY POETRY IS QUEER
CA$20.00 - CA$30.00
Kirby’s Poetry Is Queer is a work that refuses to be contained, boxed-in, defined by any terms that might seek to diminish or limit its insistence on possibility. A manifesto for life as art, art as life, one that witnesses, repairs, and defends the self in all its time-spanning facets — beauty, liberation, grief, survival, transcendence — Poetry is Queer is a gift from a rebel elder who is willing to look back with honesty and to reach forward with hope.
DAMIAN ROGERS, Author of An Alphabet for Joanna
In Kirby’s devastating and erotic redress of queerness, the beloved poet maps their homosexual body/world set around poems by queer contemporaries across decades. What emerges is Poetry Is Queer, beautiful, sexual, and flamboyantly, unapologetically gay. “Thank you Saturday Night Cock God!” This is the best kind of museum.
JOSHUA ESCOBAR, author of Bareback Nightfall
"Kirby’s Poetry is Queer. There’s a wisdom in it that is rare and so, so vibrant (courage)." - NEIL SURKAN, poetry mini interviews, author of Unbecoming, and Their Queer Tenderness
Has Cavafy’s ghost entered my body?
If so, it did at a very early age. I’ve often wondered what was meant by ‘old souls,’ but regarding mine, I have no doubt.
That and/or, gay teenage longing is very similar to that of an elder’s. Everything but want slightly out of reach.
KIRBY
POETRY IS QUEER
(Palimpsest Press)
Poetry is Queer is a kaleidoscope of sexual outlaws, gay icons, Sapphic poets, and great lovers, real and imagined, conjured like gateway drugs to a queer world. Claiming the word QUEER for those “who self-proclaim the authority of their own bodies in defiance of church and state,” Kirby pays tribute to gay touchstones while embodying both their work and joy. From gazing upon street boys with constant companion C.P. Cavafy, to end of day observances with Frank O’Hara, to mowing Walt Whitman’s grass, Poetry Is Queer is a hybrid-genre memoir like no other. (Palimpsest)
HEAR KIRBY READ FROM #PIQ I AM A PROFESSIONAL HOMOSEXUAL
GET KIRBY's PIQ + THIS IS WHERE I GET OFF FOR LESS THAN A QUICKIE!
On Sale
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KIRBY "THIS IS WHERE I GET OFF"
CA$18.00
CA$15.00
Beneath the laundry list of bacchanal (mesmerizing to the most denied voyeur) TIWIGO serves as both a tender eulogy for a bygone Toronto (and Anywhere) and a remedy for a sexually terrified, polarized, loveless and re-repressed 2019, absolutely unprotected in word and deed. - CHRIS COLOHAN Negative Space
"She'd kill for a fresh bottle of poppers."
KIRBY
THIS IS WHERE I GET OFF
Permanent Sleep Press
Poetry.
First edition. SOLD OUT
2nd Printing
ISBN 978-0-9936107-9-0
Forward: LYNN CROSBIE
Cover photo: unknown
Layout: SCOTT WADE
KIRBY's previous chapbooks are Simple Enough, The World Is Fucked and Sometimes Beautiful, Cock & Soul, Bob's boy, She's Having a Doris Day (knife fork book, 2017) and What Do You Want To Be Called? (Anstruther Press, 2020) They've appeared in The Rusty Toque, Matrix Magazine, Carousel, Long-Con, Guest and numerous anthologies beginning with the letter Q. Kirby is the founder/publisher of knife | fork | book, Toronto.
https://thisiswhereigetoff.com/
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On Sale
KIRBY "SHE'S HAVING A DORIS DAY" [eBook]
CA$8.00
CA$5.00
Poetry. Electronic Book. ISBN: 978-1-989355-11-4
"Where was she?"
JEFF KIRBY She's Having a Doris Day
Poetry. Electronic Book. ISBN: 978-1-989355-11-4
Each day she wakens / wonders what day is / this? what, if anything, she / has to do, or even if / she has to
In She's Having a Doris Day, we find ourselves lost in pinkness, genderqueerness, whiteness, madness, sadness, gladness, and the beauty that keeps us here. From an entire morning finding her coffee, waking to the news of today's massacre, to still having to deal with men. This is classic Kirby.
KIRBY's earlier chapbooks include Simple Enough, Cock & Soul, Bob's boy, and The world is fucked and sometimes beautiful. Their work appears in numerous anthologies beginning with the letter Q, and most recently online at The Rusty Toque, Matrix Magazine and bandcamp/jeffkirby. Kirby's full-length debut, THIS IS WHERE I GET OFF, comes out 22/04/19 from Permanent Sleep Press. Kirby is the owner/publisher of knife | fork | book.
Cover: Drew Shannon
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