JIM JOHNSTONE THE OUROBOROS
CA$10.00
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
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER
PUBLICATION JAN 2021
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.
R. KOLEWE THE WILD FOX
CA$15.00
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
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER
PUBLICATION JAN 2021
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
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER
PUB DATE JAN 2021
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.
| ˈfəːtʌɪl | : KFB SUBSCRIPTION SERIES of New + Inventive Ideas
CA$160.00
| ˈfəːtʌɪl | fertile
• producing many new and inventive ideas: her fertile imagination. [OED]
KFB is intensely interested in the new, new forms, ephemera, shapes, concrete, visual, sound, lexicon, their roots/lineage.
With this quarterly subscription, we'll package chapbooks, broadsides, essays on poetics, ephemera, vispo, concrete, collections that are certain to challenge and delight.
Second Instalment:
JOHN BEVIS Letter-Winged Kite (Penteract Press)
ANDREI MONASTYRSKI: Elementary Poetry Edited and Translated from the Russian by Yelena Kalinsky and Brian Droitcour (Ugly Duckling Presse)
FRED WAH Music at the Heart of Thinking (Talonbooks)
Premiere : SADIQA DE MEIJER alfabet/alphabet (Palimpsest Press) CATHERINE VIDLER oleander 7 (The Blasted Tree) KYLE FLEMMER Purple Rain (The Blasted Tree) DANI SPINOSA OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible)
+ new works coming from Ugly Duckling Presse, KFB, and various micro-presses local and abroad.
Welcome to | ˈfəːtʌɪl |
UPCOMING 2022 KFB | ˈfəːtʌɪl | POETRY FESTIVAL OF NEW & INVENTIVE WORKS
KFB SELECTS MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION SERIES
CA$235.00
Join KFB SELECTS SUBSCRIPTION SERIES any time of the year for a full year. Twelve monthly selections of the latest and best in contemporary poetry selected by knife | fork | book.
+++ NEW SUBSCRIBERS RECEIVE A FREE COPY of MICHAEL PRIOR's BURNING PROVINCE (McClelland & Stewart) with their order! [while supplies last]
The beauty of the subscription series is you can always opt for an alternate title to the one selected (similar price point) at the shop. This way, you get exactly what you want and continue to supporting knife | fork | book in the process.
KFB SELECTS JAN 2021 IAN WILLIAMS WORD PROBLEMS (Coach House)
KFB SELECTS FEB 2021 PHIL HALL TOWARD A BLACKER ARDOUR (Beautiful Outlaw)
KFB SELECTS SPRING 2021 MAR | APR | MAY | JUN
AARON TUCKER CATALOGUE D'OISEAUX (Book*hug)
HOA NGUYEN A THOUSAND TIMES YOU LOSE YOUR TREASURE (Wave)
STEPHEN COLLIS A HISTORY OF THE THEORIES OF RAIN (Talonbooks)
AIDEN CHAFE GOSPEL DRUNK (U of Alberta Press)
Previous KFB Selections include: KLARA DU PLESSIS HELL LIGHT FLESH (Palimpsest) KATE SUTHERLAND THE BONES ARE THERE (Book*hug) IAN WILLIAMS WORD PROBLEMS (Coach House). C.P. CAVAFY THE BARBARIANS ARRIVE TODAY Translated with an afterword by EVAN JONES (Carcanet Press, 2020) CODY-ROSE CLEVIDENCE "BEHOLD A MAN!" (Auric Press, 2020) SUE GOYETTE ANTHESIS: A MEMOIR (Gaspereau Press, 2020) | A. F. MORITZ AS FAR AS YOU KNOW (Anansi Poetry, 2020) ROXANNA BENNETT UNMEANINGABLE (Gordon Hill Press, 2019) | KAIE KELLOUGH MAGNETIC EQUATOR (M&S, 2019) ANNICK MACASKILL MURMURATIONS (Gaspereau Press, 2020) JOHN ELIZABETH STINTZI JUNEBAT (Anansi Poetry, 2020) ALICE NOTLEY FOR THE RIDE (Penguin Poets, 2020) SAM SAX Madness (Penguin), CANISIA LUBRIN Voodoo Hypothesis (Wolsak & Wynn), ANNE MICHAELS All We Saw (McClelland & Stewart), SINA QUEYRAS My Ariel (Coach House), GEORGE OPPEN 21 Poems (New Directions), KAVEH AKBAR Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Penguin UK Edition), BILLY RAY BELCOURT This Wound is a World (Frontenac), ROXANNA BENNETT Unseen Garden (knife fork book), KLARA DU PLESSIS Ekke (Palimpsest Press), ERIC SCHMALTZ Surfaces (Invisible)
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THE COMPLETE KFB 2020 "ORANGE COLLECTION" BUNDLE
CA$100.00
CA$70.00
KFB 2021 WINTER SPECIAL SAVE $30
KFB 2020 ORANGE COLLECTION [COMPLETE]
SPRING 2020
HAMISH BALLANTYNE IMITATION CRAB
MICHAEL CAVUTO COUNTRY POEMS
JOHN NYMAN THE DEVIL
ANDY VERBOOM DBL
FALL 2020
GARY BARWIN + KATHRYN MOCKLER ME THEN YOU THEN ME THEN
CORY LAVENDER BALLAD OF BERNIE "BEAR" ROY
NEIL SURKAN THEIR QUEER TENDERNESS
PURCHASE ALL SEVEN KFB TITLES SAVE 30%
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NEW FROM KFB! GARY BARWIN + KATHRYN MOCKLER ME THEN YOU THEN ME THEN
CA$15.00
CA$12.00
KFB WINTER SPECIAL SAVE $3
"Hope is the perfect thing / if you have no money and / want 2000 of something"
KATHRYN MOCKLER + GARY BARWIN
ME THEN YOU THEN ME THEN
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-24-4
Cover: Kirby
Layout: R. Kolewe
GARY BARWIN is a writer and multidisciplinary artist and the author of twenty-four books of poetry and fiction. His latest books include Ampers&thropocene (Penteract, 2020), A Cemetery for Holes with Tom Prime (Gordon Hill, Fall 2019) and For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco (Wolsak and Wynn, Fall 2019.) His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates (Random House Canada) won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour as well as the Canadian Jewish Literary Award (Fiction) and the Hamilton Book Award (Fiction). It was also a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. A new novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy will appear from Random House in 2021. He lives in Hamilton and at garybarwin.com
KATHRYN MOCKLER is a poet, writer, and screenwriter. She is the editor of Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020) and her debut collection of stories is forthcoming from Book*hug in 2022. @themockler
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NEW! CORY LAVENDER BALLAD OF BERNIE "BEAR" ROY
CA$6.00
CA$3.50
KFB WINTER SPECIAL SAVE $2.50
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).
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NEW FROM KFB! NEIL SURKAN THEIR QUEER TENDERNESS
CA$15.00
CA$12.00
KFB WINTER SPECIAL SAVE $3
Yet, as is often the case with desire,
it swerves suddenly,
got shy.
NEIL SURKAN
THEIR QUEER TENDERNESS
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-29-9
Cover: Kirby
Layout R. Kolewe
NEIL SURKAN is the author of the poetry collection On High (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and the chapbook Super, Natural (Anstruther Press). His most recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, THIS Magazine, Prairie Fire, The Literary Review of Canada, PRISM international, and Riddle Fence, among others. He lives in Calgary.
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JOHN NYMAN The Devil
CA$15.00
CA$10.00
Poetry. Chapbook. ISBN: 978-1-989355-21-3
"at least I have something to take care of.
I wouldn’t say I’m heartless."
JOHN NYMAN THE DEVIL
FREE SHIPPING IN CANADA! COUPON CODE: SHIPFREE
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.
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HAMISH BALLANTYNE Imitation Crab
CA$15.00
CA$10.00
Poetry. Chapbook. ISBN: 978-1-989355-26-8
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
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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
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ANDY VERBOOM DBL
CA$15.00
CA$10.00
Poetry. Chapbook. ISBN: 978-1-989355-20-6
Verboom is a wordfucker and DBL finds him at his most playful. - Kirby
"Just cause the human beings are hanging doesn’t mean entertainment’s dead. The genre bends."
ANDY VERBOOM DBL
FREE SHIPPING IN CANADA! COUPON CODE: SHIPFREE
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).
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MICHAEL CAVUTO Country Poems
CA$20.00
CA$15.00
Poetry. ISBN: 978-1-989355-06-0
with an introduction by DALE SMITH
"I’ve come to realize that telling stories is at the forefront of all of my poetry. Of course, narrative and stories aren’t the same thing, but it’s been a surprise." - MICHAEL CAVUTO, Touch the Donkey
Our first full-length. A poet's extraordinary debut.
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Michael Cavuto is a poet living in Queens. With Dale Smith & Hoa Nguyen, he edits the Slow Poetry in America Newsletter. Country Poems is his poetry debut.
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HOA NGUYEN Ask About Language As If It Forgets
CA$15.00
CA$10.00
Poetry. Chapbook. ISBN 978-1-989355-10-7
FREE SHIPPING IN CANADA! COUPON CODE: SHIPFREE
Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books of poetry, including As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice, and Violet Energy Ingots, which received a 2017 Griffin Prize nomination. As a public proponent and advocate of contemporary poetry, she has served as guest editor for The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2018 and she has performed and lectured at numerous institutions, including Princeton University, Bard College, Poet’s House, and the Banff Centre’s Writers Studio. Recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize and a 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature nomination, Nguyen was born in the Mekong Delta, raised and educated in the United States, and has lived in Canada since 2011.
TRAVIS SHARP YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER
CA$20.00
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
AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER
OUT SPRING 2021
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.
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NEW! PHILIP HARE | KIRBY "YOU'RE WELCOME" BANDANA
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CA$12.00
KFB WINTER SPECIAL SAVE $3
Artist PHILIP HARE lovingly created this exquisite rendition of KIRBY'S "You're Welcome" from their best selling chapbook She's Having a Doris Day.
Colour: Black on Light Pink
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KFB "KIRBSERV" BUNDLE
CA$50.00
"KIRBSERV" Let poet/shopkeeper KIRBY pick what they would recommend from the shop, including at least 1 current KFB HOT bestseller, 1 chapbook, and 2 titles from the thousands of poetry collections we have in stock, topped with some ephemera only to be found at KFB.
KIRBSERV CURBSIDE PICKUP IN THE VILLAGE (Church/Alexander). We ship.
SARAH DOWLING ENTERING SAPPHO (Coach house Books)
CA$22.00
The title poem in SARAH DOWLING's new book is the most on fire long love poem since Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems. Amazing! - Stephen Collis
An abandoned town named for the classical lesbian leads to questions about history and settlement.
Driving along the Pacific Coast Highway, you come to a road sign: Entering Sappho. Nothing remains of the town, just trash at the side of the highway and thick, wet bush. Can Sappho’s breathless eroticism tell us anything about settlement—about why we’re here in front of this sign? Mixing historical documents, oral histories, and experimental translations of the original lesbian poet’s works, this book combines documentary and speculation, surveying a century in reverse. This town is one of many with a classical name. Take it as a symbol: perhaps in a place that no longer exists, another kind of future might be possible. (Coach House)
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brandy ryan + Kerry Manders AFTER PULSE
CA$15.00
CA$10.00
There is a vigil planned at the 519 community centre and I / must bring my camera the event will offer some good photo / ops (us queers are always good for that) and this would be / good documentary practice and good witnessing so I ready my / Nikon DSLR and pack my lenses and make sure I have / memory cards and juiced batteries.
But I leave my camera at home.
These are pictures I cannot take.
Poetry. Chapbook. ISBN 978-1-989355-04-6
FREE SHIPPING IN CANADA! COUPON CODE: SHIPFREE
Kerry Manders is a Toronto-based writer, editor, and photographer whose personal projects focus on queer memory and mourning. Current work includes articles on queer photography for the New York Times, a monthly interview series for Women Photograph, and oral histories for Toronto's West End Phoenix.
brandy ryan works, lives, and walks in Toronto. she writes about objects and women and sex and anger. she takes photos of flowers in the gutter. she is currently navigating a manuscript of unruly BRs, an exploration of queer domesticity, and some thoughts on Buffy. there is always a cat on her lap(top).
AVANT DESIRE A NICOLE BROSSARD READER (Coach House Books)
CA$27.00
The definitive survey of an essential feminist poet.
Edited by SINA QUEYRAS, GENEVIEVE ROBICHAUD, and ERIN WUNKER
In June 2019, Nicole Brossard was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Trust. Rarely has a prize been so richly deserved. For five decades she has been writing ground-breaking poetry, fiction, and criticism in French that has always been steadfastly and unashamedly feminist and lesbian.
Avant Desire moves through Brossard’s body of work with a playful attentiveness to its ongoing lines of inquiry. Like her work, this reader moves beyond conventional textual material to include ephemera, interviews, marginalia, lectures, and more. Just as Brossard foregrounds collaboration, this book includes new translations alongside canonical ones and intertextual and responsive work from a variety of artist translators at various stages of their careers.
Through their selections, the editors trace Brossard’s fusion of lesbian feminist desire with innovation, experimentation, and activism, emphasizing the more overtly political nature of her early work and its transition into performative thinking.
Devotees of Brossard will be invigorated by the range of previously unavailable materials included here, while new readings will find a thread of inquiry that is more than a mere introduction to her complex body of work. Avant Desire situates Brossard’s thinking across her oeuvre as that of a writer whose sights are always cast toward the horizon. (Coach House Books)
DON MEE CHOI DMZ COLONY (Wave Books)
CA$26.50
2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY WINNER [USA]
DON MEE CHOI
DMZ COLONY
(Wave Books)
Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said’s notion of “the intertwined and overlapping histories” in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind. (Wave Books)
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020) Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and several chapbooks and pamphlets of poems and essays. She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, Lucien Stryk Translation Prize, and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon's poetry, including Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), which received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
JOHN BEVIS LETTER-WINGED KITE (Penteract Press)
CA$20.00
"Not only memorable, but simply nothing else like it. Buy at least two to gift, this one's a keeper." - @itsakirby
“What a find: this is a lovely, inventive, bio-lexico-diverse gem of a book.”
- Paul Farley
“A small masterpiece of invention and understated wit from one of the UK's brightest writers on birds and words. Bevis has a fine ear for language and a flair for form, and takes infectious joy in ransacking the World Bird List for its poetry and serendipitous wordplay. A marvellous book.”
- Richard Smyth
“Birds and poetry have long gone together. Here Bevis has made something that speaks to this twined thread but which is wholly new as well – bird poems which glisten and sing and which are made out of the very things they are about. It is lovely, fun and thought provoking at once.”
- Tim Dee
KFB "MOST MEMORABLE BOOKS OF 2020"
JOHN BEVIS LETTER-WINGED KITE
Full-colour, Perfect-bound Paperback, 210 x 148mm, 44pp
Penteract Press
Every species of bird in the world has a common English name. John Bevis uses this glossary of labels, strange and commonplace, with their surprising skeins of meanings and sounds, as the building blocks of poems that are variously formal, lyrical, and narrative. They are presented as providential finds, field notes from an antique and richly illustrated journal. Letter-Winged Kite explores the tropes of naming, and the reaches of poetic language, as it celebrates birds in all their wonderful diversity. (Penteract Press)
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FRED WAH MUSIC AT THE HEART OF THINKING
CA$25.00
CA$20.00
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KFB 2021 WINTER SPECIAL SAVE $5
READING WAH’s MUSIC AT THE HEART OF THINKING
A Pair of Winter Writing Workshops with HOA NGUYEN
in support of knife | fork | book READ MORE
“Verse, prose, verse-prose: multi-referential yet playful. It is a book of poetics as poem as reality-expanding creative possibility. In a sequence written across books and forty years, MHT is a poetics of process—as opposed to a poetics of knowledge—that directs our attention to the play of reality and time, as being led by words to where “the wickerwack of wonder prevails”.
— Hoa Nguyen on Fred Wah’s Music at the Heart of Thinking (Talonbooks 2020)
The music of thinking. The thinking of music. Music at the Heart of Thinking is a poetry that works through language as the true practice of thought and improvisation as the tool that listens to and notates thinking. From jazz, the unpredictable ad lib driving itself from itself. From a drunken Shaolin monk, the poem as imbalanced tai chi. From Keats’s negative capability, the half-closed eye, the estrangement of language. All intended to bump beyond the end of the word into focus. As a response to readings in contemporary texts, art, and ideas. Music at the Heart of Thinking relocates critical language and thinking to the poetic bavardage at the heart of such endeavours. The poetics that generates these texts arises out of a lifelong poem project that has its roots in the long poem genre of the ’80s and its interest in the resistance to closure and the containment of meaning characteristic of the lyric. This book continues the work of two previous out-of-print publications, Music at the Heart of Thinking (1987) and Alley, Alley Home Free (1990). The poems are generated as textual responses in the reading, looking, and listening of the poet’s attention to his cultural milieu. Thus the writing addresses contemporary texts and art over the past forty years. Within this poetry of estrangement lie possible coherences for some sense of writing as a notation for thinking as feeling. The difficulty of this writing is literal and intentional, wary of any attempt to make thinking simple, easy, or predictable. (Talonbooks)
FRED WAH was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, in 1939, and he grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. Studying at UBC in the early 1960s, he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. After graduate work with Robert Creeley at the University of New Mexico and with Charles Olson at SUNY, Buffalo, he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960s, founding the writing program at DTUC before moving on to teach at the University of Calgary. A pioneer of online publishing, he has mentored a generation of some of the most exciting new voices in poetry today.
Of his seventeen books of poetry, is a door received the BC Book Prize, Waiting For Saskatchewan received the Governor-General’s Award and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry. Diamond Grill, a biofiction about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café won the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction, and his collection of critical writing, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, received the Gabrielle Roy Prize.
Wah was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2012. He served as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2013.
To learn more about his work, visit The Fred Wah Digital Archive
IAN WILLIAMS WORD PROBLEMS (Coach House)
CA$22.00
suppose you are supposed to be white in other words suppose you are supposed to be a white being suppose being white in most spaces would be easier than being yourself by spaces here I mean
IAN WILLIAMS
WORD PROBLEMS
(Coach House Books)
Ian Williams is the author of the Giller Prize-winning novel Reproduction . His last poetry collection Personals was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award. His short story collection, Not Anyone's Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. His first book, You Know Who You Are, was a finalist for the ReLit Poetry Prize. Williams holds a Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto and is currently an assistant professor of poetry in the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. He was the 2014-2015 Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary's Distinguished Writers Program. Ian Williams currently resides in Vancouver, BC.
WATCH YOUR HEAD: WRITERS AND ARTISTS RESPOND TO THE CLIMATE CRISIS (Coach House Books)
CA$24.00
A warning.
A movement.
A collection borne of protest.
85 Contributors
15 Editors
1 Visionary Publisher
In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it.
Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical.
This is a call to climate-justice action.
Edited by Madhur Anand, Stephen Collis, Jennifer Dorner, Catherine Graham, Elena Johnson, Canisia Lubrin, Kim Mannix, Kathryn Mockler, June Pak, Sina Queyras, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Rasiqra Revulva, Yusuf Saadi, Sanchari Sur, and Jacqueline Valencia
Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN and Climate Justice Toronto.
KATE SUTHERLAND THE BONES ARE THERE (Book*hug)
CA$18.00
KATE SUTHERLAND
THE BONES ARE THERE
(Book*hug)
“Listen: The Bones Are There is lament. Siren. An alarm clocking witness to pasts fraught with loss in the name of discovery and patriarchy. Lists of extinct species. Legal-case lists of women executed for witchcraft. A list of de-extinction instructions. Lists of syntactic similarities insist the reader sees the correlative imperialist violence of what was—
These bones were found…
These bones were found…
These bones were found…
—not so long ago. With an archivist’s touch and a lawyer’s eagle eye, Kate Sutherland plunders historic texts to rip colonialism asunder.” —a. rawlings
>>> KFB EXCLUSIVE
Purchase KATE SUTHERLAND'S THE BONES ARE THERE and receive a FREE COPY of her beauteous KFB Chapbook BEASTS OF THE SEA [while supplies last]
KATE SUTHERLAND was born in Scotland, immigrated to Canada as a child, and grew up in Saskatoon. She studied first at the University of Saskatchewan, then at Harvard Law School. She is the author of two collections of short stories, Summer Reading (winner, Saskatchewan Book Award for Best First Book) and All in Together Girls, and the poetry collection, How to Draw a Rhinoceros (shortlisted for a Creative Writing Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). Her stories and poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies including Best Canadian Poetry and Best American Experimental Writing. She has done residencies at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland and at the Leighton Artist Studios in Banff. She lives in Toronto where she is a professor and conducts research in the fields of Tort Law, Feminist Legal Theory, and Law and Literature at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University.
JULIE JOOSTEN NAUGHT (Book*hug)
CA$20.00
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“This tenderly porous poetry is a philosophical excursion into ancient and still-vast questions: how are dogs, grasses, crickets, anemones always becoming thought? Joosten composes a phenomenology of care, brings me to the sill of an attentive stillness where I am free to not be myself. It’s a little frightening and a little exhilarating. But in these poems I am welcomed and supported by the shared minutiae of perceiving.” —Lisa Robertson
It is the evening.
It is the morning, the noon, a new
evening.
It is the night. It is the night. It is
the night.
JULIE JOOSTEN
NOUGHT
(Book*hug)
Julie Joosten’s first book, Light Light, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and the Goldie Award. She won the Malahat Review Long Poem Contest in 2011. She lives and writes in Toronto on the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.
KLARA DU PLESSIS HELL LIGHT FLESH (Palimpsest Press)
CA$19.00
"KFB is a very special bookstore that makes you feel like a poet." - KLARA DU PLESSIS
KFB SELECTS 2020
Winner of the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award for Ekke
KLARA DU PLESSIS
HELL FLESH LIGHT
In her second collection of poetry, Hell Light Flesh, Klara du Plessis returns with a Dantesque trilogy on family, punishment, and the ferocity and brilliance of creation. Hell Light Flesh drops the reader into a narrative claustrophobically entwined in unquestioned systemic violence where art and art criticism act as a consistent glimmer of hope. Over and over, the poem lends itself to allegory, and yields to layers of interpretation. Hell Light Flesh is mandatory reading for devotees of the long poem and fans of du Plessis’ thrilling brand of essayistic poetry alike. (Palimpsest)
KLARA DU PLESSIS is a poet, critic, and literary curator. Her debut collection of multilingual long poems, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and garnered much critical acclaim. She lives in Montreal and Cape Town.
SACHIKO MURAKAMI RENDER (Arsenal Pulp Press)
CA$19.00
"Trauma, abuse, anxiety, loss. Love and endurance. Survival. In Sachiko Murakami's deft hands these slippery materials are rendered one into the other until the reader is left shaking, thirsty, and breathless. This collection is both timeless and necessary for these times. I read it in a fever, and then read it through again." - Erin Wunker, author of Notes from a Feminist Killjoy
Render (v. tr. ): to submit, as for consideration; to give or make available; to give what is due or owed; to give in return, or retribution; to surrender; to yield. To represent; to perform an interpretation of; to arrange. To express in another language or form; to translate. To deliver or pronounce formally; to cause to become; to reduce, convert, or melt down, by heating.
Searing, intimate poems that render a history of trauma, addiction, and recovery through dreams and waking experience.
Journey through dreamscapes in Sachiko Murakami's intimate and unflinching poetic memoir as she travels the non-linear path of addiction to recovery, how it shifts over time, and what happens when it is translated through poetry. Looking beyond the straightforward, happily-ever-after narrative, Murakami wades through the aftermath of her addiction and questions what happens to trauma when it is put down on the page - and all the ways in which it can be rendered. Recovery is a jagged line, but hope lives and crystallizes in every moment we can mark ourselves "#stillhere. "
Render inhabits the intersection of dreams, memory, and consciousness in a searing exploration of addiction, recovery, and trauma. Open these pages and surrender yourself to Murakami's tender and ferocious verse. (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Sachiko Murakami is the author of three previous poetry collections, including The Invisibility Exhibit (shortlisted for the Governor Generalâ??s Literary Award). As a literary worker, she has edited poetry, worked for trade organizations, hosted reading series, organized conferences, sat on juries, and judged prizes.
JESSIE JONES THE FOOL (icehouse poetry)
CA$20.00
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"For all their darkness and encroaching chill, Jones's poems are exhilarating, a quickening in the pulse rate that happens in the presence of music. She has mastered the power of vowels and sets them loose on the nervous system, on the language, on our soft assumptions." — Ken Babstock
JESSIE JONES grew up on the Prairies, spent a decade on Vancouver Island, and now calls Montreal home. Her work has been shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s Open Season Poetry Award, Arc’s Poem of the Year contest, and PRISM International’s Poetry Contest. The Fool is her debut collection.
CHANTAL NEVEU THIS RADIANT LIFE translated by ERíN MOURE (Book*hug Press)
CA$20.00
Very few words are hosted on each of these aerated pages. Turning the page in itself confirms the implicit need for breathing space, or for trying to make some sense of it all, while being carried along the currents of one’s own time. Everything intermingled. Inescapable as the butterfly effect. Words work like knots of awareness down the rope of lines.” —Caroline Bergvall
“As Chantal Neveu and Erín Moure mine the mono-dimensional sediment of language they liberate a vocabulary of synaesthetic perception. This Radiant Life crushes narrative and reference, not into parts of speech but into illuminated particles, “words as such.” In this trans-collaboration, words reciprocate the speed and spaces on the perimeter of public sensibility. Gangues of language like “eye to eye” “word flow” in the face of the Arab Springs, “the sound of paper,” “coffee/ reheated/ on the hob,” “zig…zag” float by as radiant flecks and syllables on a perceptual horizon. Each turn of the page carries an echo of isolate light, the answer to what happens next.” —Fred Wah
“Oscillating between various subatomic particles, spaces, and word matter that make life life—i.e. the stuff and messiness of being, the macro and the micro, the chemistry, biology, geology, language of experience/experiment—This Radiant Life entreats us to slow down, attend to, and cherish the elemental. In so doing, we will have access to an inexhaustible force for resistance and resilience; we will be able to truly see and be seen by others. Powerfully embodied and chiselled by Chantal Neveu and deftly and intricately translated by Erín Moure, This Radiant Life is urgent, alive, and absolutely present.” —Oana Avasilichioaei
Chantal Neveu is the author of five books of poetry, including La vie radieuse (This Radiant Life, Book*hug); coït (Coït, Book*hug); mentale, Une spectaculaire influence (A Spectacular Influence, Book*hug), and èdres (É=É). She has created numerous interdisciplinary literary works, presented in Canada and abroad. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies: Cyclages/Grupmuv, Espaces de savoir, Laboratoire parcellaire. She has held residencies at Maison de la poésie de Nantes (France), Passa Porta and Villa Hellebosch (Belgium), and Villa Waldberta (Germany). Neveu lives in Montreal.
Erín Moure has published over forty books, including poetry, essays, memoir, and translations/co-translations from French, Spanish, Galician, Portuguese, Portunhol, and Ukrainian. Recent translations: In Leaf by Rosalía de Castro, The Uplands: Book of the Courel by Uxío Novoneyra, and Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism by Juan Gelman. Moure holds two honorary doctorates from universities in Canada and Spain, was a 2017 Creative Fellow at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, and the 2019 International Translator in Residence at Queen’s College, Oxford. Moure lives in Montreal.
ANGELA CARR WITHOUT CEREMONY (Book*hug)
CA$18.00
Only a few left!
“Angela Carr’s words in Without Ceremony point their arrows toward a ledge where communication knows “both failure and perfection at once.” Her poetry isn’t invested in naming things (perhaps this is what is unceremonious) because things, even thingness, and their energies change so rapidly. Carr creates a field of verb-rich arriving where confessional exasperations are tried and transformed in pleasurable abstraction. She summons other women poets and artists (Hesse, Dickinson, Mitchell) not to revere them but to create a queer chorus of those who can bring us to see that what seems holy is simply ordinary.” —Stacy Szymaszek, author of A Year From Today
Centred on the everyday, and crafted without preamble or pretension, the poems in Without Ceremony are a literary pastiche— a thematic mosaic not unlike tracks on an album. Amidst a timeless cast of characters from Lucretius and Eva Hesse to Joan Mitchell and St. Augustine, Carr illuminates what it means to truly know something and questions how certain knowledge becomes valued over others. Without Ceremony spotlights the gendered division of ideas and the inherent strength of language to harm and oppress, as well as elevate. Within these pages, passing encounters become rare spectacles, and the ordinary, without ambitions of grandeur or ceremony, is celebrated, making Carr’s new collection a clarifying elixir for our time. (Book*hug)
KEN BABSTOCK SWIVELMOUNT (Coach House Books)
CA$22.00
“To experience his poetry is to feel, suddenly, while falling from a high place, a firm hand on the scruff of your neck. Startling, pain-filled, life-saving.” —Miriam Toews
A swivel mount is a device that allows an object to be turned or tilted at different angles; it’s an apt metaphor for the poems in Ken Babstock’s sixth collection, which slide deftly through shifts in focus. The Toronto poet, who won the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection “Methodist Hatchet,” is prodigiously eclectic and draws on a range of subjects, including literature, art and science, as he muses on the social, technological and economic structures we live within — and on our connection to others. His wording is tight and rhythmic, and his imagery is resoundingly evocative: in a poem that subtly touches on grief, he writes of terns, “nicking the horizon with dark blades”; elsewhere, he describes the exertion of cycling with “quads/of bagged cement.” In one poem, he refers to the art critic John Berger, and wanting to “unstitch habitual//sight.” In these deeply searching poems, Babstock himself constantly strives to expand perception. - BARB CAREY, The Toronto Star, 12 November 2020.
KEN BABSTOCK won Canada's inaugural Latner Writer's Trust Poetry Prize in 2014 for a body of work in mid-career. His fourth collection, Methodist Hatchet (Anansi, 2011), won The Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry and was a finalist for The Trillium Book Award. His previous collections of poetry include, Mean (1999), winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Milton Acorn People's Poet Award, Days into Flatspin (2001), winner of a K.M. Hunter Awardand finalist for the Winterset Prize, and Airstream Land Yacht (2006), finalist for The Griffin Prize for Poetry, The Governor General's Literary Award, and The Winterset Prize, and winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poems have won Gold at the National Magazine Awards, been widely anthologized in Canada, the UK, the US, and Ireland, most recently in The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature in English, and translated into Dutch, German, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, and French. All five previous titles were named Globe and Mail Top 100 Books of the Year. Recent poems have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, and in Best of The Best Of Canadian Poetry. A book length poem, On Malice, written while in Berlin as one of DAAD's International Artist Residents in 2011/12, was published in fall 2014 by Coach House Books to wide critical acclaim. Ken Babstock was born in Newfoundland and now lives in Toronto with his son.
CARMINE STARNINO DIRTY WORDS: Selected Poems 1997-2016 (Gaspereau Press, 2020)
CA$27.00
"Carmine Starnino is one of the most important writers and readers of poetry in the contemporary English-speaking world." - CONTEMPORARY POETRY REVIEW
CARMINE STARNINO has published five collections of poetry, including This Way Out, which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award in 2009 and recently translated into French by Éditions Hashtag under the title Par Ici La Sortie. His most recent collection is Leviathan. His other books include The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry and Lazy Bastardism, a collection of essays on contemporary poetry. He has received numerous awards, including the CAA Prize for Poetry, the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and the F.G. Bressani Prize, in addition to being shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Prize for the best first book of poetry. He lives in Montreal with his wife and three children.
RICHARD SANGER FATHERS AT HOCKEY
CA$10.00 - CA$28.00
Only a few left!
Poetry. Chapbook. Signal Poetry, 2020.
“Fathers at Hockey shows RICHARD SANGER at the top of his game: formally inventive and various, eloquent, unsentimental, funny, unconventionally beautiful. Everything this reader looks for in poetry.” — Steven Heighton
How does he encompass so much—from the numinous mystery of ice to a rink side chat with Umberto Eco—in a clutch of relaxed, mind-stretching, gut-punching poems about taking your kid to his games? I love this collection.” — Rick Salutin
RICHARD SANGER
FATHERS AT HOCKEY
Richard Sanger is the author of Shadow Cabinet and Calling Home as well as numerous plays and essays. His most recent collection, Dark Woods, was named one of the top ten poetry books of 2018 by the New York Times.
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