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.
KFB SELECTS MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION SERIES
CA$245.00
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 SEPTEMBER 2021
LIZ HOWARD LETTERS IN A BRUISED COSMOS (M&S)
(NOTE: Subscribers receive this title immediately.)
KFB SELECTS OCTOBER 2021
DALE MARTIN SMITH FLYING RED HORSE (Talonbooks)
KFB SELECTS NOVEMBER 2021
R. KOLEWE THE ABSENCE OF ZERO (Book*hug)
NEW KFB SELECTS SUBSCRIBERS receive TRAVIS SHARP YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER as a BONUS GIFT [limited offer while supplies last]
SUBSCRIBE TODAY!
KFB SELECTS 2021 JAN | FEB | MAR | APR | MAY | JUN | JULY | AUG | SEPT
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)
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)
NOT YOUR BEST no. 2
CA$22.00 - CA$35.00
"This bitch is packn"
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. VARNUM
MATTHEW WALSH
OCTOBER 2021
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER
Purchase this item singularly or with
KIRBY POETRY IS QUEER (Palimpsest Press)
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BEN ROBINSON WITHOUT FORM
CA$60.00
Only a few left!
What to say about a work concerned with void, gap, and silence?
And the earth was without form, and void. - Genesis 1:2 (KJV)
Is a gap nothing? Or is it eloquent? Of what does a silence speak? - Erín Moure
Since the mid-1500s, the text of the Holy Bible has been subdivided into chapters and verses. These markings are all we see in Ben Robinson’s Without Form, a meticulous erasure of the Bible sparing only its notation. The resultant text drifts like atomized numerical clouds across the mathematical superstructure of the divine, hinting at a supreme silence before the word. This ambitious project encompasses all sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments combined—over seven hundred and fifty pages—co-published as a limited edition hardcover art book by The Blasted Tree and knife | fork | book.
knife | fork | book and The Blasted Tree
BEN ROBINSON
WITHOUT FORM
STRICTLY LIMITED EDITION
50 copies. Numbered.
766-pages.
Hardbound.
Linen-wrapped.
Foil stamped cover.
Dust jacketed.
2 COPIES REMAIN! EXCLUSIVE TO KFB.
BEN ROBINSON is a poet, musician, and librarian. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.
The Blasted Tree Publishing Co. is a small press based in Mohkinstsis promoting exceptional experimental writing by Canadian and international authors. I publish innovative poetry and visual poetry, short fiction, drama, graphic narrative, creative nonfiction, and multimedia art, with a special focus on the physical embodiment of unique practices and perspectives. Much of our content is available online, and I encourage you to browse the selection of print media in the online store. I even offer a subscription service if you like having chapbooks and leaflets appear in your mailbox. theblastedtree.com
With a passion for simple design and good work, Tkaronto-based knife | fork | book has been publishing poetry chapbooks since 2017. “Our aim,” says KFB’s publisher Kirby, “is to serve the book,” tending to the beauty of the book in hand. In 2019, KFB launched a second imprint, What Queer Reading [wQr], edited by Fan Wu, with a directive to publish queer/BIPOC poets. Also in 2019, KFB launched a NOT YOUR BEST series, the premiere issue edited by Eric Schmaltz. We have since branched out into broadsides, ephemera, and full-length collections. knifeforkbook.com
| ˈfəːtʌɪl | : KFB SUBSCRIPTION SERIES of New + Inventive Ideas
CA$175.00
| ˈfəːtʌɪl | fertile
• producing many new and inventive ideas: her fertile imagination. [OED]
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)
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: 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
On Sale
On Sale
AMANDA EARL MATTHEW
CA$25.00
CA$20.00
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.
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)
KYLE FLEMMER BARCODE POETRY
CA$20.00 - CA$175.00
Flemmer's debut is everything you might expect from The Blasted Tree innovator— conceptually playful, funny, meticulous—with a hook that's pack'n. A complete delight.
-KIRBY
Riffing on company slogans, song lyrics, protest chants, and writing advice, Kyle Flemmer’s Barcode Poetry is a 101-part sequence of typewritten visual poems taking up the complicated relationship between art and commerce. Though made on a 1940 Remington Rand Deluxe Model 5 typewriter, a relic of the analogue past, these poems masquerade as the hallmark of digitized consumerism—barcodes—to playfully critique the paradox of creativity under capitalism. This debut collection includes an afterword by the author on composing typewriter art that positions Barcode Poetry against the commercialization of the culture industry.
Part of KFB's FERTILE SUBSCRIPTION SERIES of NEW & INVENTIVE IDEAS
KYLE FLEMMER
BARCODE POETRY
The Blasted Tree
KYLE FLEMMER is an author, editor, and publisher from Mohkinstsis in Treaty 7 territory. He founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Co. in 2014 and studies digital poetics at the University of Calgary.
DALE MARTIN SMITH FLYING RED HORSE
CA$17.00
TORONTO LAUNCH w/JENNIFER LOVEGROVE SAT OCT 2ND 3PM KFB EAST
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.
VERSschmuggel / reVERSible: An Anthology of English Canadian Poetry / Poésie du Québec / Dichtung aus Deutschland
CA$25.00
"...demonstrating (as if that were needed) that poetry transposes into bodies and languages, imposing its luminous presence that no technology can diminish." - ALEXANDRE PATEAU
"A monumental testament to our times." - KIRBY
In 2020, the poetry translation project VERSschmuggel / reVERSible brought together six German poets, and twelve Canadian poets (six writing in English and six writing in French)— uniquely, all eighteen poets involved in the workshop [via Zoom] worked with all three languages—English, French, and German. The corresponding intimacy carried across into the digital world is strikingly palpable in the resulting volume, a remarkable document of lived possibilities.
Featuring original work and translations by 12 Canadian poets (6 English and 6 French) and 6 German poets, including:
CANADA (English)
Adam Dickinson
Aisha Sasha John
Canisia Lubrin
Sandra Ridley
Lisa Robertson
Armand Garnet Ruffo
CANADA (French)
Martine Audet
Monique Deland
François Guerrette
Natasha Kanapé Fontaine
Tristan Malavoy
Pierre Nepveu
GERMANY
Daniel Falb
Nancy Hünger
Martin Kames
Kerstin Preiwuß
Levin Westermann
Ron Winkler
VERSschmuggel / reVERSible: An Anthology of English Canadian Poetry / Poésie du Québec / Dichtung aus Deutschland
Co-published by Book*hug Press, Éditions du Noroît (Quebec), and Das Wunderhorn (Germany),
in collaboration with Haus für Poesie in Berlin.
8.5 x 5.5 inches | 471 pages
Trade Paperback | ISBN 9781771666695
reVERSIBLe: An Anthology of Canadian English Poetry / Poésie du Québec / Dichtung aus Deutschland is part of Canada’s literature programme as Guest of Honour at the 2020 Frankfurt Book Fair. The anthology is co-published by Das Wunderhorn (Germany), Editions du Noroît (Quebec), and Book*hug Press (Ontario). The project is supported by the Government of Canada, the Ministère des Relations internationales et de la Francophonie du Québec, the Embassy of Canada, and the Vertretung der Regierung von Québec in Deutschland (Representation of the Government of Québec in Germany).
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 forthcoming 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)
NOW AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER
PUB DATE 01 0CT 2021
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
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
AISHA SASHA JOHN TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED (Ugly Duckling Presse)
CA$18.00
Sold out
NEW AISHA SASHA JOHN from UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE!
Climb Aisha Sasha John's cliff and meet her energetic catalogue of daily life in the ruins of a disquieting world. John's cliff is language for recovering the ecstatic from the heights and depths of collapse. When a poet finds levity in the deadweight of hard revelations, with her signature wit and her eye scanning every direction from the summit, you go wherever she whispers toward. - Canisia Lubrin
AISHA SASHA JOHN
TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED
(Ugly Duckling Presse)
Written primarily over the course of four months in the fall of 2018, when Aisha Sasha John spent time in her native Vancouver, TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED sees the poet reckoning with narrative in the wake of returning to a place at once familiar and strange: “The other name for this work is DAUGHTERHOOD. What if instead of shaming your parents about their need to grow up, you went on ahead and did it yourself? I used the money I got from being shortlisted for this big poetry prize to spend what would become four months in Vancouver. I went to impose my will on the earth: to be secretary to my mom on a personal business matter. It was entirely my idea. I lived in three different sublets, was so confused, wished for something to fix me. I thought ok I’ll write a novel—or, like, the story of the day—so as to feel organized by occurrences. I did an Event at every university in the area. Centrally I was confronted with growth as a function of daughterhood. My parents lived separately in the suburban townhouse where I spent my adolescence and from which I was banned. Also they lived in a castle of my delusion as perpetual caterpillars—on the verge of transfiguring into the butterfly of new people, a change to be initiated by my careful and robust articulation of their flaws. My lucidity would save them and me; my intelligence would redeem us. I went to Vancouver I guess to more closely consider my exile. It was terrible: a beautiful time.” (UDP)
Aisha Sasha John‘s medium is energy. A poet and choreographer, Aisha is the author of I have to live. (McClelland & Stewart), finalist for the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize, THOU (Book*hug), finalist for the 2015 Trillium Book Award, and TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED (UDP). Aisha was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto (Scarborough) in 2018 and served as guest faculty for the 2019 Writing Studio residency program at The Banff Centre. Aisha is also the 2019-2022 Dancemakers’ Resident Artist—in 2021 she will commence research on an ensemble work DIANA ROSS DREAM. Her solo work the aisha of is premiered at the Whitney Museum in 2017.
JUNE JORDAN THE ESSENTIAL JUNE JORDAN
CA$21.00
“She has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept... I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art.”—Toni Morrison
THE ESSENTIAL JUNE JORDAN
Edited by JAN HELLER LEVI and CHRISTOPH KELLER
with an Afterword by JERICHO BROWN
Penguin Classics
Wide in scope and singular in their articulation of atrocities, Jordan’s poems shine in this thoughtfully curated volume. Ordered so that each era of her work speaks to the next, her poems contemplate war (“What will we do/ when there is nobody left/ to kill?”) on a national, interpersonal, and intergenerational scale, and suggest that struggle may be inextricable from the human experience. Jordan (1936–2002) stands against established power in poems that reckon with colonialism and the police state through her distinctive use of cataloging, repetition, and linguistic play. She implicates the self in depictions of historical violence as a basis for the cultivation of empathy: “I am a stranger/ learning to worship the strangers/ around me.” As she contemplates land, borders, race, and gender, the reader, too, is invited to look closely at the world around them. In these rich, generous poems, to hold and accept divisive truths is an act of love and solidarity. “I am black alive,” she writes, “and looking back at you.”
JUNE JORDON was born in Harlem in 1936 and was the author of ten books of poetry, seven collections of essays, two plays, a libretto, a novel, a memoir, five children’s books, andJune Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. As a professor at UC Berkeley, Jordan established Poetry for the People, a program to train student teachers to teach the power of poetry from a multicultural worldview. She was a regular columnist forThe Progressive and her articles appeared inThe Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms., Essence, and The Nation. After her death from breast cancer in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honour.
DIVYA VICTOR CURB [Nightboat]
CA$23.00
NEW from the author of KITH
Divya Victor’s Curb is extraordinary: it is a sobering poetic look at how white supremacy “curbs” the brown civilian who can slip between Muslim and Black, between terrorist and illegal. If they’re not targeted for what they are, they’re mistaken for what they’re not—with sometimes fatal consequences. Victor explores the murders of South Asians in America with piercing acumen, re-arranging historical documents into wholly original compositional strategies that draws me in but also pushes me back. I can never know what happened, only perceive the disquieting absence of lives annihilated by structural violence. Layered, rich, and epic, Curb is an incredible collection that must be read and re-read. -Cathy Park Hong
Divya Victor’s innovative lyrical exactness lays bare the US nationalist project and movingly documents and reenacts exact moments of diasporic bodies lived out in place and history. Curb maps out the exact locations of post-9/11 white-supremacist violence against South Asians with exact markings of dots, lines, squares, DMS coordinates, soundscapes, diacritical marks, Latin, Hindi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Tamil, and “No English.” Curb’s existential coordinates of exactitude cast a powerful spell against empire’s geography. -Don Mee Choi
Curb by Divya Victor is an astonishing new book of poems that raises anti-South Asian violence to the surface of awareness, urging a conversation about the way bodies are marked. Documenting a relationship to land, geography, and location, the mark becomes a kind of bull’s eye on bodies that are indecipherable and unnameable by America’s flat tongue, yet targeted nonetheless. The words for saying any of this are at the curb/the gutter, and it’s there, too, where the person is made object/inhuman. Victor’s poems won’t soothe you if that’s what you’re looking for. They do something far more necessary; they vibrate under your tongue like letters from the dead. -Dawn Lundy Martin
Fiercely lyric in tone, Curb simultaneously limns a documentary poetics of loss—of land, language, family, connections, dignity and life even. Making the reader her accomplice and co-creator, Victor enters language and languaging itself, including utterance, sound and translation, to wrest from the experience of displacement, racism and wrongful death a lambent work suffused with a poetics of relation and love, which resists systems designed to humiliate and degrade—a work of emboldened, embodied poetics that does the necessary labor that presages something new.
Read Curb for:
- its fierce lyricism
- its documentary poetics of loss
- its tender urgency and its urgent tenderness
- how it ferries language across crevasses created by the tongue
- how it bears witness to witnessing
- how (un)mothered tongues live under curb
- how love petitions the heart even as it breaks under the wait in time
- how story ‘stories’ and stores memory
- how it takes sides
- how it shines a light in dark times
Read Curb! -M. NourbeSe Philip
DIVYA VICTOR
CURB
[Nightboat]
DIVYA VICTOR is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books, forthcoming); KITH, a book of verse, prose memoir, lyric essay and visual objects (Fence Books/ Book*hug), ; NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow, Winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), and THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, and boundary2.
CHAD CAMPBELL NECTARINE (Signal Poetry)
CA$18.00
“Chad Campbell's poems are the guests that stay behind after the party long enough to "hear the silence sweep the voices back inside itself," the embers of a fire lit inside the mind where it refuses to be extinguished.” – D.A. Powell
"Imagine an image hitting the eye with rapid-fire description, as if it were projected through a television that allowed the viewer to delight in the flicker of each frame. This is the technique Campbell favors." –Jim Johnstone, Carousel
CHAD CAMPBELL
NECTARINE
(Signal Poetry)
Memory—how we retrieve and replenish it—is at the heart of Nectarine, Chad Campbell's visionary second collection. Figures, cities, and landscapes from the author's life shift in and out of these dreamlike poems that explore the “unaccountable, uncountable” ways in which our past keeps speaking to us: through objects, through paintings, through colours, and through the spectre of places that map themselves over the places we live in. Subtle, unsettling, compressed, and full of incandescently beautiful language, Nectarine is about lost things, stranded moments, and traces preserved in time like “a glass of frozen nectarine halves / on a table made of ice.” (Signal Poetry)
Chad Campbell is the author of the award-nominated debut collection Laws & Locks (Signal Editions 2015). His poems have appeared in journals across the U.K. and Canada, and are anthologized in The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry, The Best Canadian Poetry, and Carcanet New Poetries VIII. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Manchester where he studies and teaches at the Centre for New Writing.
TOLU OLORUNTOBA THE JUNTA OF HAPPENSTANCE (Palimpsest/Anstruther)
CA$20.00
Only a few left!
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.
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HOA NGUYEN A THOUSAND TIMES YOU LOSE YOUR TREASURE (Wave)
CA$23.00
"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.
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.
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AARON TUCKER CATALOGUE D'OISEAUX (Book*hug)
CA$20.00
CA$15.00
“Tucker’s elegant lines, each a marvel, like the finest of lenses, draw us into exact focus, remind us of why we cascade trip fall head over heels at all. Here within the immensities of love we experience ourselves, trees, birds, streets, buildings, worlds, as bodies in every heightened, intricate detail, anew. My pilot light is aflame.” —Kirby, author of This is Where I Get Off
“Aaron Tucker’s Catalogue d’oiseaux fractures Olivier Messiaen’s music of the same name into poetic lenses through which to relive the past in a continuous and unfurling present. Nostalgia glows in romance, and is then activated through the vibrancy of art and the experience of bodies. This wondrous long poem creates a signature gesture of compound words, aligning the protagonists in their love and languagelove.” —Klara du Plessis, author of Hell, Light, Flesh
KFB SELECTS SPRING 2021
AARON TUCKER
CATALOGUE D'OISEAUX
(Book*hug)
Aaron Tucker was born and raised on traditional Syilx territory in Lavington B.C. and now lives in Toronto as a guest on the Dish With One Spoon Territory. His novel, Y (2018), was translated into French as Oppenheimer in 2020. He is also the author of two previous poetry collections, including Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Book*hug Press, 2017). He is currently a PhD candidate in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at York University where he is an Elia Scholar, a VISTA Doctoral Scholar, and 2020 recipient of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship.
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BARDIA SINAEE INTRUDER (Anansi Poetry)
CA$20.00
CA$15.00
“‘Attuned to discourses regarding the spectral nature of just about everything,’ Bardia Sinaee illuminates our modern gothic in his debut collection, Intruder. Haunted by the political history of the Middle East, by the precarity of the contemporary Canadian metropole, and by the spectre of death — ‘That slow ghost / pushing a drip stand / down the corridor / That’s me’ — this existential intruder questions just about everything, including himself. ‘Maybe you ask too many questions,’ writes the poet, ‘Maybe it’s time to let the wind have your clothes.’ Wondrously, Sinaee’s lyric interrogations hold us captive even as they invite us to imagine our escape.” — Srikanth Reddy, author of Underworld Lit
“Several peers: Aisha Sasha John, Phoebe Wang, Vladimir Lucien, Safiya Sinclair, Danez Smith, Solmaz Sharif, Juliane Okot Bitek, Bardia Sinaee, Ishion Hutchinson, and others. These poets are all holding dynamic spaces within their own rattled courtships with language and feeling and thought in poetry.” —Canisia Lubrin, What the Poets Are Doing
BARDIA SINAEE
INTRUDER
(Anansi Poetry)
This title is part of KFB SELECTS SUBSCRIPTION SERIES—Twelve monthly titles of the latest and best in contemporary poetry selected by knife | fork | book—SUBSCRIBE HERE
Bemused and droll, paranoid and demagogic, Sinaee’s much-anticipated debut collection presents a world beset by precarity, illness, and human sprawl. Anxiety, hospitalization, and body paranoia recur in the poems’ imagery — Sinaee went through two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy in his mid-twenties, documented in the vertiginous multipart prose poem “Twelve Storeys” — making Intruder a book that seems especially timely, notably in the dreamlike, minimalist sequence “Half-Life,” written during the lockdown in Toronto in spring 2020.
Progressing from plain-spoken dispatches about city life to lucid nightmares of the calamities of history, the poems in Intruder ultimately grapple with, and even embrace, the daily undertaking of living through whatever the hell it is we’re living through. [Anansi]
BARDIA SINAEE was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives in Toronto. He is the author of the chapbooks Blue Night Express and Salamander Festival. His poems have also appeared in magazines across Canada and in several editions of Best Canadian Poetry. In 2012 his poem “Barnacle Goose Ballad” was Reader’s Choice winner for The Walrus Poetry Prize, and in 2020 he was co-winner of the Capilano Review’s Robin Blaser Award. He holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Guelph University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Intruder is his first book.
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SUE GOYETTE SOLSTICE 2020: AN ARCHIVE (Gaspereau Press)
CA$19.00
CA$15.00
NEW GOYETTE/GASPEREAU PRESS BEAUTY
SUE GOYETTE
SOLSTICE 2020: AN ARCHIVE
Every morning for the first 21 days of the locked-down and uncertain month of December 2020, Sue Goyette wrote a new poem to be published in Halifax’s The Coast that afternoon. Goyette’s skilful use of poetry’s artful unruliness—of its facility for reconciling our emotional and imaginative lives with occurrences in the everyday world—results in poems that illuminate a dark moment, contributing to “the work of imagining a way forward so there’s a bowl for everyone.”
Sue Goyette has published a novel and six previous collections of poetry, including Ocean (winner of the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award and finalist for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize), The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl, and Penelope. She has won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the CBC Literary Prize for Poetry, the Earle Birney Prize, the ReLit Award, and the Bliss Carman Award. Goyette lives in Halifax, where she teaches creative writing at Dalhousie University. In 2020 she was appointed the city of Halifax’s eighth poet laureate.
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JIM JOHNSTONE THE OUROBOROS
CA$10.00
CA$7.50
"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.
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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
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SHANE NEILSON WALT
CA$10.00
CA$7.50
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.
JESSIE MACEACHERN A NUMBER OF STUNNING ATTACKS (Invisible)
CA$19.00
“In her amazing debut volume of poetry, Jessi MacEachern unfolds a panoply of encounters, some at points of intersection, others at moments of separation. They are uneasily situated in narratives, but who the subjects are is subject to interpretation. And to change. A Number of Stunning Attacks is tantamount to a broad set of disorientations and disturbances, often unsettling and always generative, for both the poet and the reader. We might think of this as a poetry of the romantic distance that always lies between two people, a poetry of lyric impossibility. The thrill and anguish of that impossibility has captivated us for thousands of years. It is as ancient as the poetry of Sappho and as contemporary as the work contained in this book—a record of the perennial quest to let love be heard and to make love known.”—Lyn Hejinian
“In her debut poetry collection Jessi MacEachern shows that for a woman to sing with lyric force is to try to express a thought before the inevitable interruption. How do women ever get anywhere? A Number of Stunning Attacks is itself a stunning attack: a winnowing of language as precise as it is gleaming.”—Sina Queyras
“Jessi MacEachern’s first book of poetry strikes almost as a journal of the pronounced interiority all of us are living these days. A construction of sequences in which each passage on its own is a feast and lark, its poems unfold small mysteries that are dangerously calm, exploring intimate relations lived by women in the space of the house. In the rhythmic arborescence of precise lyric images, there are no totalities. Self-examining but never self-absorbed, MacEachern’s poems are saucy and savvy; via a female gaze onto gender and spacings, they pulse with uneasy but hard-won life.”—Erín Moure
KFB SELECTS SPRING 2021 (Alternate)
JESSIE MACEACHERN
A NUMBER OF STUNNING ATTACKS
A raw and intimate testimony of the spatial and emotional difficulty of facing the self and the other
A Number of Stunning Attacks contributes to the ongoing association of fragmented forms and women’s writing, yet the insistent repetitions and crystallized imagery produce something more coherent than a fragment and more dynamic than a single whole. Drawing on a line of innovative women’s poetics in Canada, these poems recall the radical experiments of Lisa Robertson, Erìn Moure, and Gail Scott. Intoxicated by disorientation, the reader will ask: Which city is this? Which woman is this? Which reader am I? [Invisible]
Jessi MacEachern lives in Montreal, QC, where she teaches English literature. Her research has been published in Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Her poetry has been published in various places, including Poetry Is Dead, Vallum, MuseMedusa, Canthius, PRISM, and CV2.
NICOLE BROSSARD MUSEUM OF BONE AND WATER Translation and Introduction by ROBERT MAJZELS and ERÍN MOURE
CA$17.00 - CA$175.00
“An exquisite translation … Brossard’s work is serious, yet not sombre, and sometimes deeply erotic.” — Quill & Quire
KFB FERTILE SUBSCRIPTION SERIES 2021
NICOLE BROSSARD
MUSEUM OF BONE AND WATER
Translation and Introduction by ROBERT MAJZELS and ERÍN MOURE
[Anansi]
Purchase this as part of KFB FERTILE SUBSCRIPTION SERIES and/or along with AVANT DESIRE A NICOLE BROSSARD READER (Coach House Books)
Available for the first time in more than fifteen years, this collection from celebrated poet, novelist, and essayist Nicole Brossard is a provocative investigation of the human body — our physical and spiritual museums of identity and desire.
Nicole Brossard’s Museum of Bone and Water delivers sensual and provocative investigations of the human body — our physical and spiritual museums of identity and desire — that pulse and surprise at every turn. In this collection, fingers, lips, fists, cheeks mingle in the palm trees of Dublin and Key West, the heat of Palermo and Madrid. With each dazzling turn and each “crazy” silence, Brossard speeds our breath and quickens our hearts, reminding us that poetry too is both a physical and spiritual reality.
Museum of Bone and Water, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, is recognized as a major work in the oeuvre of leading Québécoise poet, novelist, and essayist Nicole Brossard — recently honoured with the Lifetime Recognition Award by the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. The collection is now available in a handsome A List edition with a new introduction by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure. [Anansi]
NICOLE BROSSARD’s collections of poetry have twice won the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Grand Prix de la poésie de la Fondation des Forges. She has been honoured with the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize, the Prix Athanase David, the inaugural Blue Metropolis Violet Prize, and the Harbourfront Festival Prize, among other awards, and her work has been translated into ten languages. She is an officer of the Order of Canada, chevalière of the National Order of Quebec, and a member of l’Académie des lettres du Québec. In addition to her poetry, Brossard has written novels, plays, and essays; directed two films; and co-founded the literary journal La Barre du Jour. She lives in Montreal.
One of Canada’s most eminent and respected poets, ERÍN MOURE is a translator from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese, and the author of seventeen books of poetry. Moure has received the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the A.M. Klein Prize, and she has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Most recently, she has been a finalist for the 2018 Kobzar Literary Award. She lives in Montreal.
Robert Majzels
ROBERT MAJZELS won the Governor General’s Literary Award for his translation of France Daigle’s novel Just Fine, and he has been nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, and the Best Translated Book Award for his translations (with Erín Moure) of Nicole Brossard’s poetry. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Calgary.
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SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA CLUSTER
CA$20.00
CA$15.00
"[O]ne of the most striking voices to emerge in Canadian poetry in a generation." The Walrus
“Souvankham Thammavongsa has established a reputation as one of Canada’s leading minimalists and technicians of negative space. Rather than being some index of repression, Thammavongsa’s pregnant silences in Cluster evoke the erasure of language and history, flagrant manipulations of the public record, and events that can only be approached obliquely. Her fragments provide a shelter for the reader to dream without fear or censure of what lies beyond the page.” Quill & Quire
"A deep, searching dive into the ways we create meaning, personally and culturally—from how we see our relationships to how the financial sector operates—and an exploration of the values embedded in our perceptions. The poems often unfold as a series of quiet, simple observations that expand in import. This is particularly true of 'O,' a remarkable meditation that begins by contemplating the shape of the letter . . . and progresses through a series of associative leaps . . . to conclude by questioning the global political and economic order." Toronto Star
“Here’s where poems become site/sight, where poems contract and expand the head-heart sense, that eighth sense alive in language: here’s another and another and another and another in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Cluster. . . . her poems make fine work of the art of suggestion by rending, bolt by necessary bolt, the acute and the complex conditions in which language must do its work. Cluster hauls the detritus of years, offers us an otherwise of paths through family and loss and what is found in the eventides that flow from one time to another, in the thing that amounts to what we call ‘life.’” —Canisia Lubrin, Hamilton Review of Books
SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA
CLUSTER
(M&S)
SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Best American Non-Required Reading, The Journey Prize Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Her debut book of fiction, How to Pronounce Knife, won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN America Open Book Award, the Danuta Gleed Award, and the Trillium Book Award, and one of Time's Must-Read Books of 2020. The title story was a finalist for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Thammavongsa is also the author of four poetry books: Light, winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry; Found; Small Arguments, winner of the ReLit Award; and, most recently, Cluster. Born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, she was raised and educated in Toronto, where she is at work on her first novel.
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STEPHEN COLLIS A HISTORY OF THE THEORIES OF RAIN (Talonbooks)
CA$17.00
CA$15.00
"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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AIDAN CHAFE GOSPEL DRUNK (UP Alberta)
CA$20.00
CA$15.00
"At the heart of Aidan Chafe's impressive sophomore collection is a bare-knuckle interrogation of organized, patriarchal religion. Languishing in the space between faith and doubt, the speaker of Gospel Drunk gives himself over to awe and observation, exploring violence, masculinity, addiction, and structural injustice in lyrics that are sonorous, deliberate, and searching." - Annick MacAskill, author of Murmurations
KFB SELECTS SPRING 2021
AIDAN CHAFE
GOSPEL DRUNK
(UP ALBERTA)
Gospel Drunk follows a speaker’s journey to find clarity and identity as he contemplates his Catholic upbringing and struggles with loneliness and alcohol addiction. Sharp, intoxicating imagery and a minimalist aesthetic combine in these poems to explore some of our darkest and strongest belief systems, dismantling them with wit and wisdom. Poignant boyhood memories of hockey coaches as “dragons in suits” collide with critiques of “the broken bicycle of recovery.” A child’s fingers interlace to form a gun during mass and Hulk attends an AA meeting. Boldly honest, Gospel Drunk is for all who seek humanity in a world where the personal and the political are equally complicated. (UP Alberta)
Purchase this item singularly or as part of KFB SELECTS MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION SERIES
Aidan Chafe is the author of Short Histories of Light, which was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. He has also published two chapbooks, Right Hand Hymns and Sharpest Tooth. His poems and reviews have appeared in journals including Arc, CV2, PRISM international, EVENT, and Vallum. He lives on the ancestral unceded homelands of the Coast Salish peoples (Burnaby, BC).
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CANISIA LUBRIN THE DYZGRAPHXST
CA$21.00
CA$17.50
2021 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE WINNER
THE MOST HERALDED COLLECTION OF 2020
Windham-Campbell Prize, Winner
OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Winner
OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Poetry, Winner
Griffin Poetry Prize, Winner
Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, Finalist
Rebel Women Lit Caribbean Reader’s Awards, Finalist
Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, Finalist
Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Finalist
Raymond Souster Award, Longlist
Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Longlist
Quill & Quire 2020 Books of the Year: Editor’s Picks
CBC Best Canadian Poetry of 2020
Winnipeg Free Press Top 10 Poetry Picks of 2020
The Paris Review, Contributor’s Edition, Best Books of 2020
Canisia Lubrin returns with a mesmerizing new collection, the follow-up to her breakout book, Voodoo Hypothesis.
CANISIA LUBRIN
THE DYZGRAPHXST
(M&S)
The Dyzgraphxst presents seven inquiries into selfhood through the perennial figure Jejune. Polyvocal in register, the book moves to mine meanings of kinship through the wide and intimate reach of language across geographies and generations. Against the contemporary backdrop of intensified capitalist fascism, toxic nationalism, and climate disaster, the figure Jejune asks, how have I come to make home out of unrecognizability. Marked by and through diasporic life, Jejune declares, I was not myself. I am not myself. My self resembles something having nothing to do with me. (M&S)
CANISIA LUBRIN is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work is published widely and has been frequently anthologized, including translations into Italian and Spanish. Lubrin’s debut poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis, was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, longlisted for the Gerald Lambert Award, the Pat Lowther Award, and a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. She was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award for her fiction contribution to The Unpublished City: Vol 1 and 2019 Writer in Residence at Queen’s University. Lubrin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.
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LISA FISHMAN MAD WORLD, MAD KINGS, MAD COMPOSITION (Wave)
CA$25.00
CA$20.00
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LISA FISHMAN
MAD WORLD, MAD KINGS, MAD COMPOSITIONS
Wave Books
Spanning 16 years of notebooks, teaching notes, and improvisations, Lisa Fishman's Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition upends time itself in lyric, prose, and visual forms. Sharing Paul Klee's intuition that "the eye travels along the path cut out for it in the work," this deeply multifaceted book moves between observational directness and maddened speech, places and persons, humor and alarm. Tempted by Laura Riding's renunciation of poetry yet rich with life-forms of all kinds (vegetable, animal, processual), it is a work of immediate presence and continuous change, enacting an ever-renewing ecology of connection in peril.
Lisa Fishman’s seventh book was recently released: Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020). She is also the author of 24 Pages and other poems (Wave, 2015); F L O W E R C A R T (Ahsahta Press, 2011); Current (Parlor Press, 2011); The Happiness Experiment (Ahsahta, 2007); Dear, Read (Ahsahta, 2002) and The Deep Heart’s Core is a Suitcase (New Issues Press, 1996). Chapbooks by Fishman include at the same time as scattering (Albion Books, 2010), Lining (Boxwood Editions, 2009), KabbaLoom (Wyrd Press, 2008), and ‘The Holy Spirit does not deal in synonimes: a Transcription of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Marginalia in Her Greek and Hebrew Bibles’ (Parcel Press, 2008). A pamphlet, Deer 1, was published by Oxeye Press, 2015, and Note on Niedecker’s Takuboku was published as a pamphlet by The Brother in Elysium in 2015 (expanded in The Wave Papers, 2016).
Fishman’s work is anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing (Omnidawn, 2014), The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013), The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012), Not For Mothers Only (Fence Books, 2007), American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2000) and elsewhere. New work by Fishman appears in 6x6, Denver Quarterly, The Fairy Tale Review, touch the donkey, Aurochs and other journals. Fishman was a performer with Young Shakespeare Players (Madison, WI) from 2015-2018, the Lorine Niedecker Poet-in-Residence on Blackhawk Island in 2009, and recent Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, where she is Professor of English and Creative Writing. A Pushcart Prize nominee and PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers nominee, Fishman continues to live on the farm she and her husband started in 1999 in Orfordville, Wisconsin, dividing her time between Wisconsin, Chicago, and Nova Scotia. She is a dual US/Canadian and is a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.
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JOSHUA BECKMAN ANIMAL DAYS (Wave Poetry)
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CA$20.00
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Readers interested in the fragment as a form, or in the relationship of the body to perception will appreciate how Beckman unfolds and rearranges the physical phenomena he describes.
JOSHUA BECKMAN
ANIMAL DAYS
Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of many books, including Animal Days (Wave, 2021), The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks (Wave Books, 2018), The Inside of an Apple, Take It, Shake, Your Time Has Come, and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is editor-in-chief at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Micrograms, by Jorge Carrera Andrade, 5 Meters of Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) by Carlos Oquendo de Amat, and Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008) by Tomaž Šalamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He also co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books, 2015).
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DOUGLAS KEARNEY SHO (Wave Books)
CA$23.00
CA$18.00
Kearney's prosody is miraculous. Explosive double beats launch the lines or hit the break like a hi-hat. Slant rhymes suggest infinite puns, but Kearney sometimes downshifts from complexity and just cruises around the neighborhood. Formalism as syncopation and signification: I can't think of another writer as gifted as Kearney is at sound.
Sho exemplifies the daring possibilities for poetry today. Despite the devastation held within our lexicon, words hold the dazzling potential that we can rise through language to "come up clutching what is under— / come back striking / what’s above.”
—CD Eskilson, The Arkansas International
DOUGLAS KEARNEY
SHO
(Wave Books)
Eschewing performative typography, Douglas Kearney’s Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular strategies, while examining histories and current events through the lyric, brand new dances, and other performances. Both dazzling and devastating, Sho is a genius work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. In his “stove-like imagination,” Kearney has concocted poems that destabilize the spectacle, leaving looky-loos with an important uncertainty about the intersection between violence and entertainment. (Wave)
Douglas Kearney has published six collections, including Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and the California Book Award's silver medal in poetry. M. NourbeSe Philip calls Kearney’s collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues. (Subito, 2016), “a seismic, polyphonic mash-up.” Kearney’s Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution handpicked selection that Publishers Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” He has received a Whiting Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, residencies and fellowships from Cave Canem, the Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and lives in St. Paul with his family.
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