MICHAEL FLATT I CAN FOCUS IF I TRY
CA$22.50
Ferrying between viscera and the virtual, the iris and the lens, Michael Flatt commits his attention to the vertiginous business of seeing seeing itself. Across a quartet of glitchhappy sequences which accrete, contract, and fracture like iPhone glass, his lyric phenomenology seeks to parse reality from its spectral façade, “studying the practice of light” to expand the ways we envision our precarious, prismatic selves. Fascinated by how flesh and bone interface with .exe and eye, I Can Focus if I Try is a vivid excursion through “our embedded-edge / intrascape.”
— ANDREW ZAWACKI, Unsun
Michael Flatt’s I Can Focus If I Try demands a different way of seeing. Built on a frame of Euclidean lyrics, it ebbs and flows elastically, allowing for engagement from a wide array of vantage points. Squint and you’ll find that these poems are “a martyrdom to any light source.”
- JIM JOHNSTONE, author of The King of Terrors
Flatt's poems’ experiments, in vision, in envisioning, let language oscillate, as inhale-exhale, as waves forward then breaking, so that the reader senses structures before they notice them, understands geometries before they know them. The lyric expansions and contractions within this collection surprise, even as their logics create anticipations. - AARON TUCKER, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys and Catalogue d’oiseaux
Michael Flatt wrests nothing. Let the eye curve with them, an early line suggests, and so it does. In poems perceiving perception, we glide along the contours of things. Memories, images, ideas, actions, feelings. Nothing is settled, nothing so neat as to be totalizing or with reachable finitude, so unsettled this sensorium. To perceive, Flatt shows us, isn’t a matter of holding meaning in one’s hand, but of being buffeted by that onslaught. And the form follows the word. The language slowly fills in like the eye adjusting to shifting light, or the mind’s eye’s peeling revelation upon a flash of meaning. Like seeing an object whose horizon shifts as it turns, like reading a sentence whose meaning fills in as it slips away, like beach sand slipping through all our hands. These poems’ queer geometry defies expectation even as it reveals to us what we might expect when we simply open our eyes. TRAVIS SHARP, Yes, I Am A Corpse Flower
"What do we do with these gaps in our beauty?"
MICHAEL FLATT
I CAN FOCUS IF I TRY
ISBN: 978-1-989355-48-0
Poetry. Book. Full-length. Collection.
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER
PUB DATE 23 MAY 2023
MICHAEL FLATT is the author of Absent Receiver (SpringGun Press 2013) and, with derrick mund, Chlorosis (The Operating System 2018). He was named by J. Michael Martinez to the Poetry Society of America's list of New American Poets in 2013. He is the founder of Low Frequency Press, which publishes book-like objects of marginal aesthetics, and Threadsuns, a teaching press at High Point University, where he is an assistant professor of English.
AYAZ PIRANI Martyrs' Garden
CA$15.00
Imagine that:
to be put in your place.
Is there a greater gift
a bigger reward
a better high
a warmer embrace?
From the author of How Beautiful People Are
AYAZ PIRANI MARTYRS' GARDEN
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-54-1
Cover: Kirby
Design: R. Kolewe
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER
PUB DATE MID-MAY 2023
AYAZ PIRANI's books include Happy You Are Here, Kabir's Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets and How Beautiful People Are, along with recent work in The Malahat Review.
KIRBY Behold
CA$20.00 - CA$30.00
Only a few left!
"Let's have a gay moment, shall we?"
KIRBY
Behold
DUNDAS ON THE PRINTED WORD
25 MARCH 7PM
Few tickets remain at the bookstore only.
LONDON ON TWO NIGHTS!
31 MARCH & 01 APRIL 7PM
TICKETS $20*
HARBOURVILLE NS HARBOURVILLE HALL
14 APRIL 7PM
Tickets PWYC at the door
BARRIE ON BOHEMIA CAFE
28 APRIL 7PM
ALL TICKETS $30
An audience of twelve per performance in a downtown living room setting. Address, instructions will be shared with ticket holders on the morning of the performance; Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
UPCOMING DATES: 25 MAR DUNDAS ON | 31 MAR 1 APR LONDON ON | 14 APR HARBOURVILLE NS | 28 APR BARRIE
BOOKING INFO TO BRING KIRBY TO YOUR LIVING ROOM OR SMALL VENUE CONTACT knifeforkbook@gmail.com Subject line: Behold
*Please Note: No one is turned away for lack of funds. A number of tickets have been set aside PWYC. Email knifeforkbook@gmail.com
LANNII LAYKE OS
CA$12.00
I have never seen this happen in real life.
LANNII LAYKE
OS
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-39-8 (print)
Cover: Kirby
Layout/design: Ralph Kolewe
Printed at Coach House by John DeJesus
Lannii Layke is a young, Black writer, editor, and interdisciplinary designer from Tkarón:to (Toronto). They attend to crafting memory and fine jewellery. In French, os is bone. This is their first physical collection of poems.
LANNII LAYKE
OS
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-39-8 (print)
Cover: Kirby
Layout/design: Ralph Kolewe
Printed at Coach House by John DeJesus
Lannii Layke is a young, Black writer, editor, and interdisciplinary designer from Tkarón:to (Toronto). They attend to crafting memory and fine jewellery. In French, os is bone. This is their first physical collection of poems.
PAOLA FERRANTE THE DARK UNWIND
CA$12.00
All my life I've danced with a wolf, a long / slow waltz in the dark unwind ...
PAOLA FERRANTE
THE DARK UNWIND
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-45-9 (print)
Cover: Kirby
Layout/design: Ralph Kolewe
Printed at Coach House [Toronto] by John DeJesus
Paola Ferrante’s debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack, (Mansfield Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her first short fiction collection, Her Body Among Animals, is forthcoming Spring 2024 from Book*hug Press. She is the Poetry Editor at Minola Review and lives in Toronto, Canada with her spouse Mat, and their son.
MAUREEN SCOTT HARRIS MORE THAN ONE HOMAGE
CA$12.00
Hello death, I heard your knock at the door. Shall I laud / your presence, puff your progress keen-sighted one?
MAUREEN SCOTT HARRIS
MORE THAN ONE HOMAGE
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-44-2 (print)
Cover: Kirby
Layout design: Ralph Kolewe
Printed by John DeJesus at Coach House [Toronto]
Poet and essayist Maureen Scott Harris was born in Prince Rupert, BC, grew up in Winnipeg, and has lived in Toronto since the 1960s. She’s worked as freelance writer and editor, librarian, bookstore clerk, and production manager for Brick Books. Her publications include three collections of poetry and three chapbooks, as well as work in Canadian, American, British, and Australian journals. Her essay on the Don River won the WildCare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize. With the River Poets she has developed poetry walks through Toronto’s ravines and parks.
MAUREEN SCOTT HARRIS
MORE THAN ONE HOMAGE
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-44-2 (print)
Cover: Kirby
Layout design: Ralph Kolewe
Printed by John DeJesus at Coach House [Toronto]
Poet and essayist Maureen Scott Harris was born in Prince Rupert, BC, grew up in Winnipeg, and has lived in Toronto since the 1960s. She’s worked as freelance writer and editor, librarian, bookstore clerk, and production manager for Brick Books. Her publications include three collections of poetry and three chapbooks, as well as work in Canadian, American, British, and Australian journals. Her essay on the Don River won the WildCare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize. With the River Poets she has developed poetry walks through Toronto’s ravines and parks.
DALE MARTIN SMITH BLUR
CA$12.00
When the rain starts / and a hair sticks / to the butter
DALE MARTIN SMITH
BLUR
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-40-4 (print)
Cover: Kirby
Layout design: Ralph Kolewe
Printed by John DeJesus at Coach House [Toronto]
Dale Martin Smith is the author most recently of Flying Red Horse and Sons (KFB, 2017). He teaches poetry at Toronto Metropolitan University. dalemartinsmith.com
KLARA DU PLESSIS & KADIE SALMON Skin & Meat Sky
CA$15.00
Only a few left!
I stumble over my love for the sea, rest my head on mountains.
I’d like to posit a theory that we’re all descendants
of headstones.
Klara du Plessis, Skin & Meat Sky
Part of KFB's Inaugural Fertile Festival of New & Inventive Works & KFB SELECTS
KLARA DU PLESSIS
& KADIE SALMON
SKIN & MEAT SKY
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN 978-1-989355-43-5 (print)
Cover: Kirby
Layout: R. Kolewe
Winner of the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Klara du Plessis’ debut collection, Ekke, was released from Palimpsest Press. Her second book is Hell Light Flesh, 2020. Klara is a poet, critic, and literary curator, developing Deep Curation as an experimental practice of poetry reading organization. She resides in Montreal.
Kadie Salmon has been exhibiting internationally for over a decade and has received support from Arts Council England to The Henry Moore Foundation. She is a photographer, sculptor, and moving image artist based in London, where she is represented by gallery New Art Projects. Kadie is currently working on her newest work Closing Bones supported by the Freelands Foundation.
JAMES LINDSAY THE LAKE
CA$12.00
I don’t know how to talk
about my biological father,
so instead I’m going
to describe the lake:
JAMES LINDSAY
THE LAKE
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-37-4
Typeset in Perpetua and Cooper Hewitt
Cover: Kirby.
Layout: Ralph Kolewe.
Printed by John DeJesus at Coach House Books, Toronto.
JAMES LINDSAY is the author of Double Self-Portrait, Our Inland Sea (Wolsak & Wynn) and the chapbook Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis! (Anstruther Press). He is the co-founder of Pleasence Records and works in book publishing.
MARK TRUSCOTT RAIN
CA$10.00
Winner of the inaugural Nelson Ball Prize (for Branches)
And where are you?
MARK TRUSCOTT
RAIN
Poetry. KFB Pamphlet Series.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-36-7
Typeset in Perpetua and Cooper Hewitt
Cover: Kirby.
Layout: Ralph Kolewe.
Printed by John DeJesus at Coach House Books, Toronto.
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).
JENNIFER LOVEGROVE THE TINDER SONNETS
CA$15.00
Sold out
Listen, sometimes the anti-depressants
mean I can’t get hard. It’s not you. Okay?
JENNIFER LOVEGROVE
THE TINDER SONNETS
Unabashedly confessional, radically vulnerable, hyper-visible Lovegrove's sonnets sally against the long-standing and subjugating demand that “women of a certain age” be rendered invisible, non-sexual, and accept this politely. These poems refuse invisibility; instead, they confront and subvert it, often uncomfortably so, while experimenting with traditional forms like the sonnet and the conventional lyric. The Tinder Sonnets is a refusal to recede from view, to cede sexual space, to be quiet and polite. It is a messy, dirty celebration of contemporary life – dating apps, sex, difficult conversations, pleasure, disappointment, betrayal, anger, family, identity, art and life.
Poetry. Chapbook. Sonnets.
ISBN 978-1-989355-34-3
knife | fork | book Toronto
Jennifer LoveGrove is the author of, most recently, the poetry collection Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes (Book*hug 2017). Her novel Watch How We Walk (ECW Press, 2013) was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She works at the University of Toronto, and divides her time between downtown Toronto and rural Ontario, Canada. She is learning to play the drums.
VICTORIA MBABAZI FLIP
CA$18.00
Sold out
"I'm accused of relating everything back
to her"
VICTORIA MBABAZI
FLIP
ISBN: 978-1-989355-38-1
Poetry. Book.
52 pages with Purple Foil on
Astrobrights Pulsar Pink 65lb Cover
Perfect Bound and trimmed 5 7/8" x 8 3/4"
with Black Endpapers
Cover: Kirby
Lay-out: Ralph Kolewe
Printed at Couch House Press [Toronto] by John DeJesus
Victoria Mbabazi is being gay in Brooklyn. This is their second [& third] chapbook. Their first chapbook, chapbook, is from Anstruther Press.
AMANDA EARL MATTHEW
CA$25.00
Only a few left!
When this gospel queen heard she had a vispo of Matthew, she said, "WE MUST!" ...and then she SAW IT. - KIRBY
From the creator of JUDITH: WOMEN MAKING VISUAL POETRY
AMANDA EARL
MATTHEW
TRAVIS SHARP YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER
CA$20.00
Sold out
"THE QUEEREST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ IN MY LIFE. And the most freeing." - KIRBY
"Sharp’s language is thick, racy, sensual, ruckous and uniquely physical, upturning tables with a flamboyance... YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER is an impressive debut" - @robmclennanblog
TRAVIS SHARP
YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER
KFB. Poetry.
ISBN 978-1-989355-27-5
Yes, I am a corpse flower composes a queer lyric meditation on body, identification, and subjectivity, proposing a queer poetics not just referential, limited to language’s meaning. These are not poems about queerness, but composed queerly: eccentric, off-centre, oblique, to twist. Poems that failingly and flailingly attempt to define the queer “I,” that skepticize any stable connection between queer self and body, narrate an unnarratable encounter with self-recognition outside of categorizable identity. These poems are composed from a feeling that to state queerness can never be to expound on a single journey, but to gather together a multitude of I’s of which this I, here, writing this paragraph, is only one iteration. I is not this one, but neither is I an other, but a we, perversely licked-linked through language, a sort of tongue: limn me, limn me!
Contents
Yes, I am a corpse flower
Sinister Queer Agenda
The body under valuation: a musical
I guess we should talk about our feelings
Protean Shakes: A Memoir
OrganGrindrTM
Acknowledgements/Bio
TRAVIS SHARP published the chapbook Sinister Queer Agenda (above/ground press 2018), the artist’s book one plus one is two ones (Recreational Resources 2018), and, with Aimee Harrison and Maria Anderson, co-edited a digital book, Radio: 11.8.16 (Essay Press 2017). He has an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington, Bothell, and is a PhD candidate in the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo. Travis is the editor and director of Essay Press.
CORY LAVENDER BALLAD OF BERNIE "BEAR" ROY
CA$6.00
THE DEBUT OF KFB's NEW PAMPHLET SERIES
Oh, dear backwards bear. Didn’t make it out to the house
that Christmas to visit huff and puff lawnmower bear.
No more gardener bear, no squash-a-year like from Grandpa bear
more of a piss off the back step, selling off the heirlooms bear
worn wheezy bear plopped in the easy chair before your shows.
CORY LAVENDER
BALLAD OF BERNIE "BEAR" ROY
KFB PAMPHLET 001
ISBN 978-1-989355-30-5
Cover: Kirby
Layout: R. Kolewe
Graphics: Jessica Hiemstra
Photos: Torben Robertson
CORY LAVENDER is a poet of mixed Black Loyalist and European descent settled in Mi’kma’ki. His chapbook Lawson Roy’s Revelation came out with Gaspereau Press in 2018. His work has appeared in journals such as Riddle Fence and The New Quarterly, and is anthologized in Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020).
On Sale
On Sale
HAMISH BALLANTYNE Imitation Crab
CA$15.00
CA$5.00
was drunk not
dreaming and thought will write
to this
friend/to that
What arose next
day won’t smoke
Wild eye in the mens
who can remember
HAMISH BALLANTYNE IMITATION CRAB
Poetry. Chapbook. ISBN: 978-1-989355-26-8
Hamish Ballantyne's Imitation Crab is the speechlessness that settles three days into a road trip, the groan of human language tearing half apart from nature. Its pleasures have their lineage in Zen poetry's precision and Lorine Niedecker's vivid work of condensery; they tumble in cascades of tight unlikelinesses; they bite down hard on the tongue of the Moment in the mouth of Gabriola Island lingo. I invite you to "fall down the / flower of / THE WAY HE SPOKE."
Hamish Ballantyne (b. 1994) is a poet and translator from Vancouver Island. He works seasonally as a mushroom picker and works on the Downtown Eastside the rest of the year. Hamish recently completed a translation of Luis de Góngora's Solitudes.
Cover: Kirby
Design: r. kolewe
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On Sale
JOHN NYMAN The Devil
CA$15.00
CA$5.00
"at least I have something to take care of.
I wouldn’t say I’m heartless."
JOHN NYMAN THE DEVIL
Poetry. Chapbook. ISBN: 978-1-989355-21-3
Originally from North York and currently living in Toronto, John Nyman is a writer, scholar, critic, and poet working in traditional verse as well as visual and conceptual forms. John’s first full-length collection of poetry, Players (Palimpsest Press), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award by the League of Canadian Poets. John is also a co-author of the &, poetry collective’s second chapbook, &, 2: this happened to one of us (Publication Studio Guelph), and the author of the manifesto chapbook Slogan, Substance, Dream: keywords for a responsible poetry (Anstruther Press), along with works of concrete poetry, literary and arts criticism, and short fiction. Links to some of John’s online publications can be found on the CV / Publications page, while selections from his visual, conceptual, and erasure projects are regularly featured on his Instagram, @selected.works.
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On Sale
ANDY VERBOOM DBL
CA$10.00
CA$5.00
"Just cause the human beings are hanging doesn’t mean entertainment’s dead. The genre bends."
ANDY VERBOOM DBL
Poetry. Chapbook. ISBN: 978-1-989355-20-6
Andy Verboom is from subrural Nova Scotia and lives in K'jipuktuk (Halifax). He is the founder of Couplets, a lit & art collaboration series, and co-founder of long con, an online magazine for art about art.
His poetry has won Frog Hollow’s Chapbook Contest and Descant’s Winston Collins Prize, been shortlisted for CV2's Young Buck Prize and Arc's Poem of the Year, and appeared in Prism, The Puritan, Vallum, and elsewhere.
His sixth poetry chapbook will be DBL (knife | fork | book, 2020).
NEW! KFB FERTILE FEST BUNDLE
CA$60.00
Sold out
KFB FERTILE FESTIVAL OF NEW & INVENTIVE WORKS BUNDLE
Created to celebrate our inaugural festival!
includes
KLARA DU PLESSIS + KADIE SALMON Skin & Meat Sky
SACHA ARCHER Kim
BRIAN DEDORA Get Lost
BILLY MAVREAS tenderness
TRAVIS SHARP Behind the Poet Reading Their Poem Is a Sign Saying Applause
AARON TUCKER The Passage Bird's Farewell
NEXT
FERTILE FESTIVAL OF NEW & INVENTIVE WORKS
11-20 AUGUST 2023
REMOTE GALLERY 568B RICHMOND ST W
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On Sale
R. KOLEWE silence, then [eBook]
CA$8.00
CA$5.00
Poetry. Electronic book.
ISBN 978-1-9959300-19-0
PDF download of r. kolewe's sold out KFB chapbook.
On Sale
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
JIM JOHNSTONE THE OUROBOROS
CA$10.00
Sold out
"In Jim Johnstone’s long poem, the city eats itself inch by inch... Appetite knows no bounds." - The Pamphleteer
If shouts were music
the whole world would be singing
Don’t ruin it.
Don’t ruin it.
Don’t ruin it.
JIM JOHNSTONE
THE OUROBOROS
KFB PAMPHLET SERIES 002
ISBN: 978-1-989355-32-9
Embossed Cover on Mohawk Loop Straw 80lb.
Translucent Endpapers.
Printed on Zephyr at Coach House.
Cover: Kirby
Design: R. Kolewe
JIM JOHNSTONE is a Toronto-based poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of five previous collections of poetry, most recently The Chemical Life (Véhicule Press, 2017) and
Dog Ear (Véhicule Press, 2014). He is also the winner of several awards including the Bliss Carmen Poetry Award, a CBC Literary Award, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, and
Poetry’s Editors Prize for Book Reviewing. Currently, Johnstone curates the Anstruther Books imprint at Palimpsest Press, where he published The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry in 2018.
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SHANE NEILSON WALT
CA$10.00
CA$5.00
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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JONATHAN GARFINKEL "BOCIANY (STORKS)" [eBook]
CA$8.00
CA$5.00
Poetry. Electronic Book. ISBN: 978-1-989355-12-1
AVAILABLE AS AN eBook ONLY.
JONATHAN GARFINKEL’s multi-genre writing has been translated into twelve languages, and his plays have been produced throughout Canada, Germany, Russia and Ukraine. He is the author of the book of poems Glass Psalms (Turnstone Press) and has written numerous plays including The Trials of John Demjanjuk: A Holocaust Cabaret and the Governor-General shortlisted House of Many Tongues. His memoir Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel/Palestine Divide was published in five countries to critical acclaim (Penguin Canada and Norton and Norton US). Jonathan is also an award-winning non-fiction writer; his journalism has appeared in places like The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Eighteen Bridges, Tablet and PEN International. In 2015 he was commissioned to adapt Rawi Hage’s Cockroach for the stage, which premiered at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary in 2016. Currently it is in development with Soulpepper. Named by the Toronto Star as “one to watch”, he teaches playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal.
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DALE SMITH Sons Broadside
CA$25.00
CA$20.00
k|f|b BROADSIDE 001 Poet DALE SMITH SONS Artist ANTHONY DIFAZIO Design NORMAN NEHMETALLAH Master Printer KYLE SCHLESINGER at CUNEIFORM PRESS
LIMITED EDITION of 50 19 x 12. Two-colour. Letterpress. Numbered. Signed.
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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.
KIRBY POETRY IS QUEER
CA$20.00 - CA$30.00
Kirby’s Poetry Is Queer is a work that refuses to be contained, boxed-in, defined by any terms that might seek to diminish or limit its insistence on possibility. A manifesto for life as art, art as life, one that witnesses, repairs, and defends the self in all its time-spanning facets — beauty, liberation, grief, survival, transcendence — Poetry is Queer is a gift from a rebel elder who is willing to look back with honesty and to reach forward with hope.
DAMIAN ROGERS, Author of An Alphabet for Joanna
In Kirby’s devastating and erotic redress of queerness, the beloved poet maps their homosexual body/world set around poems by queer contemporaries across decades. What emerges is Poetry Is Queer, beautiful, sexual, and flamboyantly, unapologetically gay. “Thank you Saturday Night Cock God!” This is the best kind of museum.
JOSHUA ESCOBAR, author of Bareback Nightfall
"Kirby’s Poetry is Queer. There’s a wisdom in it that is rare and so, so vibrant (courage)." - NEIL SURKAN, poetry mini interviews, author of Unbecoming, and Their Queer Tenderness
Has Cavafy’s ghost entered my body?
If so, it did at a very early age. I’ve often wondered what was meant by ‘old souls,’ but regarding mine, I have no doubt.
That and/or, gay teenage longing is very similar to that of an elder’s. Everything but want slightly out of reach.
KIRBY
POETRY IS QUEER
(Palimpsest Press)
Poetry is Queer is a kaleidoscope of sexual outlaws, gay icons, Sapphic poets, and great lovers, real and imagined, conjured like gateway drugs to a queer world. Claiming the word QUEER for those “who self-proclaim the authority of their own bodies in defiance of church and state,” Kirby pays tribute to gay touchstones while embodying both their work and joy. From gazing upon street boys with constant companion C.P. Cavafy, to end of day observances with Frank O’Hara, to mowing Walt Whitman’s grass, Poetry Is Queer is a hybrid-genre memoir like no other. (Palimpsest)
HEAR KIRBY READ FROM #PIQ I AM A PROFESSIONAL HOMOSEXUAL
GET KIRBY's PIQ + THIS IS WHERE I GET OFF FOR LESS THAN A QUICKIE!
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KIRBY "THIS IS WHERE I GET OFF"
CA$18.00
CA$15.00
Beneath the laundry list of bacchanal (mesmerizing to the most denied voyeur) TIWIGO serves as both a tender eulogy for a bygone Toronto (and Anywhere) and a remedy for a sexually terrified, polarized, loveless and re-repressed 2019, absolutely unprotected in word and deed. - CHRIS COLOHAN Negative Space
"She'd kill for a fresh bottle of poppers."
KIRBY
THIS IS WHERE I GET OFF
Permanent Sleep Press
Poetry.
First edition. SOLD OUT
2nd Printing
ISBN 978-0-9936107-9-0
Forward: LYNN CROSBIE
Cover photo: unknown
Layout: SCOTT WADE
KIRBY's previous chapbooks are Simple Enough, The World Is Fucked and Sometimes Beautiful, Cock & Soul, Bob's boy, She's Having a Doris Day (knife fork book, 2017) and What Do You Want To Be Called? (Anstruther Press, 2020) They've appeared in The Rusty Toque, Matrix Magazine, Carousel, Long-Con, Guest and numerous anthologies beginning with the letter Q. Kirby is the founder/publisher of knife | fork | book, Toronto.
https://thisiswhereigetoff.com/
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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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