MARK TRUSCOTT RAIN
CA$10.00
Winner of the inaugural Nelson Ball Prize (for Branches)
And where are you?
MARK TRUSCOTT
RAIN
OUT JANUARY 2022
Poetry. KFB Pamphlet Series.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-36-7
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).
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
OUT JANUARY 2022
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-37-4
R. Kolewe Layout/design
Kirby Cover
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.
KFB SELECTS MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION SERIES
CA$295.00
Join KFB SELECTS SUBSCRIPTION SERIES any time of the year for a full year. The latest and best in contemporary poetry selected by KFB. Delivered to your home.
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 support knife | fork | book in the process.
KFB SELECTS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 (This selection counts as two.)
R. KOLEWE THE ABSENCE OF ZERO (Book*hug)
NEW KFB SELECTS SUBSCRIBERS receive R. KOLEWE THE WILD FOX as a BONUS GIFT [limited offer while supplies last]
SUBSCRIBE TODAY!
Previous KFB Selections include: DALE MARTIN SMITH FLYING RED HORSE (Talonbooks) LIZ HOWARD LETTERS IN A BRUISED COSMOS (M&S) IAN WILLIAMS WORD PROBLEMS (Coach House) PHIL HALL TOWARD A BLACKER ARDOUR (Beautiful Outlaw) 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) JESSI MACEACHERN A NUMBER OF STUNNING ATTACKS (Invisible) BARDIA SINAEE INTRUDER (Anansi Poetry) 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)
| ˈfəːtʌɪl | : KFB SUBSCRIPTION SERIES of New + Inventive Ideas
CA$175.00
| ˈfəːtʌɪl | fertile
• producing many new and inventive ideas: her fertile imagination. [OED]
SECOND SEASON: 1. CACONRAD Amanda Paradise (Wave) SACHA ARCHER Jung Origami (Enneract Editions) KIRBY Poetry is Queer (Palimpsest Press) NOT YOUR BEST no. 2 "Queer Ass Fuck" Issue V/A (KFB)
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.
Note: Some items are subject to change based upon availability.
Premiere Season: 4th INSTALMENT CAMERON ANSTEE LINES (ST ANDREW) DEREK BEAULIEU THE MINUTE REVIEW VOL 2 NO 1 KYLE FLEMMER BARCODE POETRY (THE BLASTED TREE) AISHA SASHA JOHN TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED (UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE) JIM JOHNSTONE THE OUROBOROS (KFB) 3. LISA FISHMAN Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Poetry) NICOLE BROSSARD Museum of Bone and Water Translated and Introduction by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure (House of Anansi) +++ Selected ephemera. 2. 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
JENNIFER LOVEGROVE THE TINDER SONNETS
CA$15.00
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.
NOT YOUR BEST no. 2
CA$22.00 - CA$35.00
"This bitch is packn"
NOT YOUR BEST No 2
THE QUEER ASS FUCK ISSUE
Edited by KIRBY
The second instalment of KFB's NOT YOUR BEST Series.
FEATURING
JAKE BYRNE
BRIAN DEDORA
JOSHUA ESCOBAR
PHILIP HARE
DAVID LY
ANNICK MACASKILL
IAN MARTIN
KHASHAYAR MOHAMMADI
PEARL PIRIE
DON PYLE
ANGIE QUICK
JEAN-PHILLIPE RAÎCHE
MICHAEL RUSSELL
KATIE STOBBART
SASHA TORCHINSKY
K.S.Y. VARNAM
MATTHEW WALSH
OUT NOW!
Purchase this item singularly or with
KIRBY POETRY IS QUEER (Palimpsest Press)
SAVE $7!
AMANDA EARL MATTHEW
CA$25.00
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
On Sale
On Sale
TRAVIS SHARP YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER
CA$20.00
CA$15.00
"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.
SADIQA DE MEIJER
CA$16.00
2021 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD WINNER
KFB FERTILE SERIES SELECTION
I locate in his [Rilke's] words a socio-cultural instructiveness as well; the phrase "If they succeed in loving the expanse between them" is an invitation to respect the untranslatable where it is found; to let go of infusing it with the worst of assumptions; to consider it the sacred foundation of all relations, over which translation's intermittent sparks may astonish us. - Sadiqa de Meijer, alfabet/alphabet
SADIQA DE MEIJER
ALFABET/ALPHABET
A Memoir of a First Language
(Palimpsest Press)
Sadiqa de Meijer is the author of the poetry collections Leaving Howe Island and The Outer Wards. Her work has won the CBC Poetry Prize and Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest, and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario.
TOLU OLORUNTOBA THE JUNTA OF HAPPENSTANCE (Palimpsest/Anstruther)
CA$20.00
2021 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD WINNER
TOLU OLORUNTOBA's THE JUNTA OF HAPPENSTANCE left me dazzled to the point of squinting. In every poem, some piece of gorgeous, quotable language glittered in my eye" : Wake up. It's the crescendo. / Here comes your / redaction from the world." The collection is neither burdened, victimized, nor apologetic about race. It does not out on race as a pair of glasses. Race is more like an eyeball. It remains a simple fact, even though, as he writes, "My mind has bent the facts, I know. / The facts have bent my mind." One gets the sense that Oloruntoba is the alluring stranger, scribbling into a steno, "submerged into words on the bus," seemingly absorbed in his world but really taking note of us. — IAN WILLIAMS, Author of Word Problems
TOLU OLORUNTOBA
THE JUNTA OF HAPPENSTANCE
(Palimpsest/Anstruther)
TOLU OLORUNTOBA is the author of the Anstruther Press chapbook Manubrium. His poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Columbia Journal, Entropy, and other publications, and his short fiction has appeared in translation in Dansk PEN Magazine. He founded Klorofyl, a magazine of literary and graphic art, and practiced medicine before his current work managing projects for health authorities in British Columbia. After a somewhat itinerant life in Nigeria and the United States, he emigrated to the Greater Vancouver Area, where he lives with his family.
CHANTAL NEVEU THIS RADIANT LIFE translated by ERíN MOURE (Book*hug Press)
CA$20.00
2021 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD WINNER
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.
canthius issue 09
CA$15.00
"Each and every issue enchants/delights. The single literary journal where subscribing is a no-brainer." - KIRBY
Sophie Crocker
Bahar Orang
Roshni Riar
Jody Chan
Erin Wilson
Alton Melvar M. Dapanas
John Elizabeth Stintzi
Hannah Senicar
Tara Borin
Kate Sutherland
Jennifer Alicia Murrin
Sofia Ezdina
Callum Angus
canthius
issue 09
with artwork by Caitlin McDonagh
R. KOLEWE THE ABSENCE OF ZERO
CA$28.00
from the author of silence, then & The Wild Fox
“R. Kolewe’s The Absence of Zero is a daring, daily progression that depends upon return as palimpsest. Call it what it is. Gorgeous. Steadfastly urgent. Patient as dawn.” —Margaret Christakos, author of charger and Dear Birch
R. KOLEWE
THE ABSENCE OF ZERO
(Book*hug Press, 2021)
BUY THE ABSENCE OF ZERO & receive a FREE COPY of R. KOLEWE'S KFB Chapbook THE WILD FOX (while supplies last).
R. Kolewe was born in Montreal and lives in Toronto. Educated in physics and engineering at the University of Toronto, he pursued a successful career in the software industry for many years. He now lives in Toronto, and writes full time. His work has appeared online at ditch, e-ratio, The Puritan, and (parenthetical), as well as in the Literary Review of Canada and PRISM International. He is the author of two previous poetry collections, including Afterletters (Book*hug Press, 2014) and Inspecting Nostalgia (2017).
LIZ HOWARD LETTERS IN A BRUISED COSMOS
CA$20.00
The latest from the author of the Griffin Poetry Prize Award-winning collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent.
“Liz Howard’s Letters in a Bruised Cosmos stands as yet another masterpiece of orality and temporality in the blossoming oeuvre that is her poetic arena. We traverse through webbed histories, a multiplicity of singing bodies: human, non-human, father, lover, lake, land, galactic. Howard’s ability to unearth creation and trickster from beneath the rubble of canonic and catatonic poetics is a miracle in the making. It is no surprise to be met with yet again grace and fury in Letters in a Bruised Cosmos—as Howard has demonstrated time and time again, she is a divining starwalker of a poet.” —Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed
“In Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, Liz Howard makes sentences with the elegance and mystery of a sculptor. Howard’s aesthetic mode is a beautiful synthesis of feminist, anti-colonial, and post-structural traditions of critique and re-imagination that is singularly hers. I read each poem with the faith that I would land somewhere I couldn’t have known existed until I opened this book. That’s the mark of poetic genius. I loved this book with my whole body.” —Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A History of My Brief Body
“Seeking abandon that is not abandonment, in an age when all ambient temperature seems bleak site of wind not warmth, these poems glow. Liz Howard’s cosmos is yes a difficult ongoingness, yet one that gifts bright with language. She creates poetry I can inhabit, touched by parents and their kilter of wildness, inheritor of caps and nail clippers, where spirit demeanours howl from streets and apartments in verbs from science and secular trees. If poetry’s red coals can’t help but expose life’s ashes, it’s in the light from stars. In Howard’s poems, visibility and viability enact an uncoded, recoded boreality, a DNA renewed. Here poems contain the possibility of all states of affairs. Even as the ‘natural’ of speech de-natures, grates, is rendered as remnant and ruin— with the poet we ‘pursue the future/ pulling dawn through/ through the needle/ point of compass north.’ Reading these poems, we are as rare and beautiful as Howard is, extending them to us.” —Erín Moure, author of The Elements
I have to believe my account will outpace its ending.
LIZ HOWARD
LETTERS IN A BRUISED COSMOS
(M&S)
The danger and necessity of living with each other is at the core of Liz Howard’s daring and intimate second collection. Letters in a Bruised Cosmos asks who do we become after the worst has happened? Invoking the knowledge histories of Western and Indigenous astrophysical science, Howard takes us on a breakneck river course of radiant and perilous survival in which we are invited to “reforge [ourselves] inside tomorrow’s humidex”. Everyday observation, family history, and personal tragedy are sublimated here in a propulsive verse that is relentlessly its own. Part autobiography, part philosophical puzzlement, part love song, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos is a book that once read will not soon be forgotten. (M&S)
KIRBY POETRY IS QUEER
CA$20.00 - CA$35.00
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)
Purchase this item singularly or with
KFB NOT YOUR BEST No. 2 "THE QUEER ASS FUCK ISSUE" Edited by KIRBY
SAVE $7!
HEAR KIRBY READ FROM #PIQ I AM A PROFESSIONAL HOMOSEXUAL
KFB "KIRBSERV" BUNDLE
CA$65.00
"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.
DALE MARTIN SMITH FLYING RED HORSE
CA$17.00
NEW from the author of SONS
What is lyric’s relation to history, to a public today? In this poetry – the impossible heart beating intensities through every human murmur and whisper that manages to lift itself up into song into solace. In this poetry, the deep neon glow of America visible from across fake nations’ lines, pulsating broken geographies, rent histories, torn earth. Deep gratitude to Dale Smith for willing more beauty and more tenderness into the world.
– STEPHEN COLLIS, Latner Prize winner and author of A History of the Theories of Rain
In lines of great lyric discernment with an eye to atrocities of the past in the present, Dale Smith reimagines the song form as our consummate equipment for living. Flying Red Horse confirms his breathtaking artistry that – insofar as any time of innocence is over – holds at once a place, an exhortation, a persevering, a reverie, a promise.
– ROBERTO TEJADA, Guggenheim Fellow and author of Why the Assembly Disbanded
From the author of Slow Poetry in America & SONS
DALE MARTIN SMITH
FLYING RED HORSE
(Talonbooks)
A poet and literary scholar, DALE MARTIN SMITH was born in Dallas, Texas. He earned a BA and PhD in English from the University of Texas, and an MA in Poetics from New College of California. He is the author of the full-length poetry collections Slow Poetry in America (2014), Black Stone (2007), and American Rambler (2000). Smith’s scholarly contributions include Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 (2012) and two edited editions, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson (both 2017), for which he received Simon Fraser University’s Charles Olson Award. His essays and poetry have appeared in Poetry, The Walrus, LA Review of Books, Boston Review, and Lambda Literary. With Hoa Nguyen, he edited Skanky Possum, a literary zine and book imprint, 1998-2004. Smith joined the faculty of English at Ryerson University, Toronto, in 2011.
KEVIN ANDREW HESLOP THE CORRECT FURY OF YOUR WHY IS A MOUNTAIN
CA$20.00
'Does a more ravishing debut come to mind? Nope. 'What in the world is coming next?' This is it. Welcome to Heslop Mountain." - Kirby, author of Poetry is Queer
KEVIN ANDREW HESLOP
THE CORRECT FURY OF YOUR WHY IS A MOUNTAIN
(Gordon Hill Press)
Poet-critic Jim Johnstone has described Kevin Heslop's the correct fury of your why is a mountain as among “the most promising poetic projects to come out of Canada in recent years.” This debut collection communicates Heslop’s sense of balance as a visual artist, curator, and poet who weights the page with visual harmony. By turns experiment, lyric, and incantation, the book nods to its author’s training as an actor, combining a command of language, form, character, and polyphony to make something performatively unique. (Gordon Hill)
Kevin Andrew Heslop (b. 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist from London Township Treaty territory. In addition to two chapbooks—con/tig/u/us (Blasted Tree 2018) and there is no minor violence just as there is no negligible cough during an aria (Frog Hollow Press 2019)—his work as a poet, journalist, filmmaker, curator, and playwright has recently appeared or is forthcoming with The Fiddlehead and Anstruther Press (2020), The Devil’s Artisan (2021), Museum London (2021), McIntosh Gallery (2022), and TAP Centre for Creativity (2022).
HOA NGUYEN A THOUSAND TIMES YOU LOSE YOUR TREASURE (Wave)
CA$23.00
2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY FINALIST
2021 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FINALIST
"A THOUSAND TIMES YOU LOSE YOUR TREASURE IS REMARKABLE not only for its unrelenting evisceration of clichés about Vietnam and its people, but also for the variety of forms in which this re-visioning is told." - David Starkey, California Review of Books
"BRILLIANT, ADVENTUROUS This is a book of anti-gravitational forces where the reader experiences the slamming of celestial and earthly realms into one another: moons crashing into earth, colonizer maps turned upside down, rivers parting like lovers, sonnets tied to the sky, and stars spilling womb-song. I am drawn to what Nguyen leaves inscrutable, untranslatable ... the way she refuses cartographies laid out by men, by nation-states, by form, by colonizer, and even by the fatalistic dynamics between mother and child. The poet is furiously loving about her mother’s boldness (“The running blue shock of her”), warping formulaic social expectations of womanhood and motherhood, and allowing her own mother to exist, untethered. - Megan Fernandes, Poetry Foundation
KFB SELECTS SPRING 2021
HOA NGUYEN
A THOUSAND TIMES YOU LOSE YOUR TREASURE (Wave Books)
A poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon” with verse biography on the poet's mother, Diệp Anh Nguyễn, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-women Vietnamese circus troupe. Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. By turns lyrical and unsettling, Hoa Nguyen's poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts. [Wave]
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 judge for the 2020 Griffin Prize for Poetry, and 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, she has received grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her writing has garnered attention from such outlets as The PBS News Hour, Granta, The Walrus, New York Times, and Poetry, among others. Born in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated in the United States, Nguyen has lived in Canada since 2011.
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JIM JOHNSTONE THE OUROBOROS
CA$10.00
"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.
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.
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On Sale
R. KOLEWE THE WILD FOX
CA$15.00
CA$10.00
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
ROXANNA BENNETT THE UNTRANSLATABLE I (Gordon Hill Press)
CA$20.00
FINALIST GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD 2021
from the award-winning author of Unseen Garden & Unmeaningable
"Through emphatic, headlong diction and images, Bennett documents the struggles of illness and isolation, armed with battered faith and searing introspection. Both despairing and brave, these poems are unforgettable." – Trillium Book Award for Poetry Jury
ROXANNA BENNETT
THE UNTRANSLATABLE I
(Gordon Hill Press)
The disabled poem-making entity known as Roxanna Bennett gratefully resides on aboriginal land. They are the author of The Untranslatable I (Gordon Hill Press, 2021) and the award-winning Unmeaningable (Gordon Hill Press, 2019).
STEPHEN COLLIS A HISTORY OF THE THEORIES OF RAIN (Talonbooks)
CA$17.00
FINALIST GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD 2021
"Stephen Collis has achieved something remarkable: an invigorating body of work that convincingly addresses both the urgency of the present moment and the long echoes of our historical and lyrical past ... The depth and scope of Collis' vision is startling and impressive; so are the courage, precision, and care he brings to the poems he creates." - HOA NGUYEN + MARGO WHEATON, Writer's Trust of Canada jury citation
KFB SELECTS SPRING 2021
STEPHEN COLLIS
A HISTORY OF THE THEORIES OF RAIN
also available by subscribing to KFB SELECTS
HEAR STEPHEN COLLIS HERE WITH BARDIA SINAEE 11 MAY 2021 7PM EST KFB
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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
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
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).
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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
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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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
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).
GARY BARWIN + KATHRYN MOCKLER ME THEN YOU THEN ME THEN
CA$15.00
“Grandma says regret is like having sex with a ghost,” the book opens. By the end, we’ve met support group loudmouths, hope the size of a grain of rice, Céline Dion, various undulations, and one thousand donkeys. No regrets here. - The Pamphleteer
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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NEIL SURKAN THEIR QUEER TENDERNESS
CA$15.00
CA$10.00
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.
MICHAEL CAVUTO Country Poems
CA$20.00
Sold out
Our first full-length. A poet's extraordinary debut.
MICHAEL CAVUTO
COUNTRY POEMS
Poetry. ISBN: 978-1-989355-06-0
with an introduction by DALE SMITH
SOLD OUT
"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
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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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.
HOA NGUYEN Ask About Language As If It Forgets
CA$15.00
Poetry. Chapbook. ISBN 978-1-989355-10-7
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.
brandy ryan + Kerry Manders AFTER PULSE
CA$15.00
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.
brandy ryan + Kerry Manders
AFTER PULSE
Poetry. Chapbook. ISBN 978-1-989355-04-6
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).
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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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