KFB

SADIQA DE MEIJER Fieldwork

CA$15.00

starling burdock mullien clover dandelion

“In the back seat of my parents' car, I liked to put my finger on the window and write long cursive words on the pastures. I wanted the seat on the right, because then I was writing into what had passed, instead of what was coming, which felt like the proper orientation. Decades later, I stood at the edge of a field that was blank with snow, and I felt again that old urge to write on it."

SADIQA DE MEIJER

Fieldwork

Based upon her 2024 Page Lecture

Lecture/essay

ISBN: 978-1-989355-75-6

Co-published with Fieldnotes

Spring 2025

Available for preorder (price guarantee).

Winner of the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award alfabet/alphabet: a memoir of a first language (Palimpsest Press, 2020) Poet Laureate. Kingston, ON sadiqademeijer.com

JACOB ALVARADO I Can Make It All Up To You

CA$15.00 CA$12.00

"My legs were oaks. My knees; a forest-fire."

"His hand... slicked with sweat

from the shame of being unashamed"

"11:59 PM: a kiss away."

JACOB ALVARADO

I Can Make It All Up To You

Their poetry debut from KFB.

In his 'devotional' debut, I Can Make It All Up To You, Jacob Alvarado captures/frames desire like a tall glass of water, fresh in ways that are all at once recognizable and as new as a first kiss. The stuff of dreams itself. I keep returning to it, in love.

Now in it's Second Printing.

Jacob Alvarado is a writer, poet, and Executive Assistant for the Giller Prize. His book reviews can be found in The Ampersand Review. He lives and writes in Mississauga, Ontario.

Cover photo: Jacob Alvarado

Author photo: Kirby

DALE MARTIN SMITH The Size of Paradise

CA$24.00 CA$20.00

2025 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

There is a wound the size of paradise.

"With a kind of clipped historical shorthand, the use of the fragment in The Size of Paradise becomes a supercharged lyrical force that is also sprung with time. The momentum of this capacious book-length sequence keeps turning outward as it investigates an inward subjectivity, not all together Dale Smith per se, but maybe a collective interiority where we find, “Dead things collect in words.” And more importantly we discover “There will be love as memory.” Smith has written a high-stakes recounting of time and experience expanding the world we live within and that lives within us. This book is out of doors. I love it." —PETER GIZZI, author of Fierce Elegy

The new full-length collection from the author of Sons, Flying Red Horse, and Blur

There was a story. There was a time.

There was a distinct sense of measure.

There was a heat. But never calm. Messiness.

Wide oak. How plastic lids exhale carbon.

DALE MARTIN SMITH

The Size of Paradise

Poetry. ISBN: 978-1-989355-65-7

Cover: Kirby

Design/layout: r. kolewe

Printed by John De Jesus at Coach House (Toronto).

Booksellers, Libraries, US/International Sales:

Distributed by Asterism Books

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 Flying Red Horse (2021), Slow Poetry in America (2014), Black Stone (2007), American Rambler (2000), as well as the KFB chapbooks, Sons (2017), and Blur (2022). 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 Toronto Metropolitan University, in 2011. He is currently at work on an essay collection, That Tongue Be Time on the poetry and prosody of Norma Cole (2025).

dalemartinsmith.com

NORMA COLE Rainy Day

CA$16.00 CA$12.00

Norma Cole’s forms of expression are ambitious. Her poems often (though not always) take small forms; they are made of short lines, in small stanzas, so that the space of the page starts to play an active role in the reading of them. Subtly, surreptitiously, these small packages explode in delicate, or sometimes not so delicate, arrays of color and attitude. Norma is famous for her empathic connections to people, artists and others, living and dead. Many of her poems carry dedications. She builds community as part of her poetic practice. On the other hand, she reserves a razor-sharp and ice-cold anger for the abuses of power and depradations of the morally corrupt as she observes them in the halls of power, here and around the world. The world is always calling in these poems; sometimes it is being called away, as we are made to look, through Norma’s poems, from the perspective of the universe. It is then that the human quality really shines through. Norma is a visual artist, in addition to being a writer, and has often worked in collaboration with other artists. Not just the look of her poems, but the images she shows us in them, will carry us a long way. - Vincent Katz, March 16 2021, Tribute to Norma Cole

An ordinary evening

is to be in danger

NORMA COLE

Rainy Day

Poetry. Chapbook.

ISBN: 978-1-989355-68-8

Cover: Kirby

Design/layout: r. kolewe

Printed by John De Jesus at Coach House (Toronto)

Distributed by Asterism Books.

NORMA COLE was born in Toronto in 1945. She is a poet, painter, and translator. Her most recent books of poetry include Fate News (2018), Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside (2012), Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems, 1988–2008 (2009), and Spinoza in Her Youth (2002). Cole has also published the volumes To be at Music: Essays & Talks (2010) and Actualities (2015), a collaboration with painter Marina Adams. Her translations from French include Danielle Collobert’s It Then (1989) and Jean Daive’s A Woman with Several Lives (2009). Additionally, Cole edited and translated Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (2000). Her awards include the Fund for Poetry, Gertrude Stein Award, the Richardson Award for Non-Fiction Prose and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award for Poetry. She curated a show by Marina Adams at Cue Arts in NYC and collaborated with Adams in BOMB 114, Winter 2011. Her visual work has been shown at the Miami University Art Museum, [2nd floor projects] in San Francisco, “Way Bay,” at the Berkeley Art Museum and most recently her film, “By the Turning Bridge,” at Arion Press, San Francisco, and NIAD, Richmond, California. A book of her drawings, called DRAWINGS, with an introduction by Mary Ann Caws, just appeared from Further Other Book Works.

KIRBY "MOTHER'S DAY"

CA$25.00 - CA$40.00

Kirby reads SHE. Cover to cover. Live. In their living room. Where she wrote it.

In honour of Mother's Day and the collection's one year anniversary. Recorded before a live audience.

KIRBY reads

SHE Cover to Cover

MOTHER'S DAY

11 May 3pm

In their Living Room (in the Village, downtown Toronto).

STRICTLY LIMITED SEATING.

KIRBY she

CA$24.00 CA$18.00

"She is joy's pronoun!" —ERÍN MOURE

"She is a capacious city of rich human habitation, where elation is every day’s caring infusion. Her cityscapes are painted deftly—in few words, in pauses, in juxtapositions, in fond attentions, in breath and the difficulty of breath, by a poet who knows deeply that life is fragile and that age comes and alters us. She says: the world loves us back when we love it. Flowers, streets, lovers, skies, persons, walks, in/fusions. She is joy’s pronoun!" —ERÍN MOURE, Theophylline A Poetic Migration Via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo)

"She reaches for the skies, as an ambitious sequence of poems, yes, but also in its conceptual stretch upwards, in its candour, its veneration of beauty, and its delicate ventilation of imagery. Here Kirby’s poems exist in a prolonged present, in the complexity of an intergenerational embrace, defying temporality in favour of an experiential ekphrasis—moments exceed chronology and model still lifes, to hold and behold. She supports great tenderness between every line." —KLARA DU PLESSIS, author of I'mpossible Collab and Hell Light Flesh

"Kirby’s She offers up prayers for the quotidian that are at once tender and resilient. Reading this collection reminded me of the ceremony inherent in poetry. A delight."

—ANNICK MACASKILL, author of Shadow Blight

By turns tender and trenchant, breathless and breathtaking, Kirby’s She recalls the small raptures and enduring resiliencies of a remarkable life. These poems—raucously wise and constellated by memory—guide us across decades and over borders, through devastating pandemics and a mother’s failing health, along streets cast with “quiet crisp blue light,” past an old family home surrounded by “trumpet vine shades” and “three kinds of lilacs,” into the intimacy of a morning spent with a beloved, all the while insisting on what matters: love, friendship, community, and a radical commitment to a better, kinder world.” These poems are filled with lines as hard-won as they are true: “who cares what spirits it took what / fates we face,” writes Kirby, “who cares it takes me a little / longer to get anywhere if at all...” —MICHAEL PRIOR, author of Burning Province

"Real joy lives in Kirby's She, joy that aches because it was earned, joy that rekindles itself—until it doesn't (and so must be savoured): "That recipe will go with her." A precious resource, these poems shimmer, and not just the ones I read through tears: grief, desire, inheritance, perseverance." —NEIL SURKAN, Unbecoming, On High

"In these everyday occasionals about friendship, mothers, the pandemic, aging, sex, and the body, Kirby opens themselves to a new hushed form that prioritizes their tender language. This is an intimate conversation you don't want to end. If this is your first time reading Kirby, I am jealous of you and you have picked an excellent starting point." —JAMES LINDSAY, author of Only Insistence

"She licks. She dances. She grieves. She doesn’t hold back. She watches a masturbator on a pandemic-empty street. On Mondays, She buys sameday meat to freeze. She remembers, and She forgets. She faces another day with dread. She night-walks. She acknowledges the half-life of a fluttering moth. She rails against the corporate co-opt. She ponders mortality. She naps at four. She is done. She is heartbreak. She is joy. She is beauty in all her glory. She lives. She is alive. She is Kirby. The book is SHE." —KATHRYN MOCKLER, author of Anecdotes

A REMARKABLE BOOK that is anti-corporate, anti-national, pro-queer body, and pro-queer sex is called SHE by my dear old friend Kirby from Knife Fork Book Press. Kirby has also lost many friends in the early years of the AIDS crisis, and you can feel the “I’m not taking shit from anybody” vibe all over these pages. —CACONRAD, Author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return

From the author of Poetry is Queer and This is Where I Get Off, their highly-anticipated new full-length collection.

“Hello my gorgeousness.”

KIRBY

she

KFB

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-989355-63-3

Distributed by Asterism Books

KIRBY’s work includes Behold (2023), a stage adaption of Poetry is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2021) What Do You Want to Be Called? (Anstruther Press, 2020) This Is Where I Get Off (Permanent Sleep Press, 2019) She’s Having a Doris Day (KFB, 2017) & editor NOT YOUR BEST No. 2, The Queer Ass Fuck Issue (KFB 2021). They’re at work on a follow-up to Poetry is Queer, MORE (2026). Their Substack column, “The First Time” can be found at Send My Love To Anyone. They are the publisher at knife | fork | book kirbyshe.com

STEVIE MANNING Joan Would Say

CA$15.00 CA$12.00

2024 bpNichol Chapbook Award Finalist

Tonight I swear on Leaves of Grass, I am your girl.

STEVIE MANNING

JOAN WOULD SAY

NOW IN ITS THIRD PRINTING!

Poetry. Chapbook.

ISBN: 978-1-989355-55-8

Stevie 'Sweetpea' Manning currently cuts at Town Barber, Toronto. Joan Would Say is their chapbook debut. steviemanning.rocks

KATE SUTHERLAND Nuptials

CA$15.00

"My dear, he can't decide which of the American ladies he would prefer to marry"

KATE SUTHERLAND

Nuptials

Fertile Festival of New & Inventive Works Selection

ISBN 978-1-989355-57-2 (print)

Poetry. Visual. Chapbook.

Typeset in Typeset in Avenir and Avenir Next Condensed.

Layout: Ralph Kolewe.

Cover image: Kate Sutherland

ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM

Kate Sutherland is a writer and a collage artist. She is the author of four books, most recently the poetry collection The Bones Are There. Her collages have been published in long con magazine, Canthius, and The Ex-Puritan.

MICHAEL FLATT I CAN FOCUS IF I TRY

CA$22.50 CA$15.00

Ferrying between viscera and the virtual, the iris and the lens, Michael Flatt commits his attention to the vertiginous business of seeing seeing itself. Across a quartet of glitchhappy sequences which accrete, contract, and fracture like iPhone glass, his lyric phenomenology seeks to parse reality from its spectral façade, “studying the practice of light” to expand the ways we envision our precarious, prismatic selves. Fascinated by how flesh and bone interface with .exe and eye, I Can Focus if I Try is a vivid excursion through “our embedded-edge / intrascape.”

— ANDREW ZAWACKI, Unsun

Michael Flatt’s I Can Focus If I Try demands a different way of seeing. Built on a frame of Euclidean lyrics, it ebbs and flows elastically, allowing for engagement from a wide array of vantage points. Squint and you’ll find that these poems are “a martyrdom to any light source.”

- JIM JOHNSTONE, author of The King of Terrors

Flatt's poems’ experiments, in vision, in envisioning, let language oscillate, as inhale-exhale, as waves forward then breaking, so that the reader senses structures before they notice them, understands geometries before they know them. The lyric expansions and contractions within this collection surprise, even as their logics create anticipations. - AARON TUCKER, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys and Catalogue d’oiseaux

Michael Flatt wrests nothing. Let the eye curve with them, an early line suggests, and so it does. In poems perceiving perception, we glide along the contours of things. Memories, images, ideas, actions, feelings. Nothing is settled, nothing so neat as to be totalizing or with reachable finitude, so unsettled this sensorium. To perceive, Flatt shows us, isn’t a matter of holding meaning in one’s hand, but of being buffeted by that onslaught. And the form follows the word. The language slowly fills in like the eye adjusting to shifting light, or the mind’s eye’s peeling revelation upon a flash of meaning. Like seeing an object whose horizon shifts as it turns, like reading a sentence whose meaning fills in as it slips away, like beach sand slipping through all our hands. These poems’ queer geometry defies expectation even as it reveals to us what we might expect when we simply open our eyes. TRAVIS SHARP, Yes, I Am A Corpse Flower

"What do we do with these gaps in our beauty?"

MICHAEL FLATT

I CAN FOCUS IF I TRY

ISBN: 978-1-989355-48-0

Poetry. Book. Full-length. Collection.

ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM

READ AN EXCERPT at CLEVELAND REVIEW OF BOOKS

MICHAEL FLATT is the author of Absent Receiver (SpringGun Press 2013) and, with derrick mund, Chlorosis (The Operating System 2018). He was named by J. Michael Martinez to the Poetry Society of America's list of New American Poets in 2013. He is the founder of Low Frequency Press, which publishes book-like objects of marginal aesthetics, and Threadsuns, a teaching press at High Point University, where he is an assistant professor of English.

JAY BESEMER Your Tongue is as Long as a Tuesday

CA$22.50 CA$15.00

1.C. [Your tongue is as long as a Tuesday.] I want to stop & make you visible, but I don't. I'm shy or perhaps too fond of that thrill of uncertainty. Without solidifying my gaze & my sense of you, I can keep you at liberty. If I can see you, others are sure to. I do want to see you but not explain, not share, not risk you. Not risk you & me. We are at risk.

JAY BESEMER

Your Tongue is as Long as a Tuesday

Poetry. 64 pages.

ISBN: 978-1-989355-60-2

ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM

Poet and artist JAY BESEMER is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Men & Sleep (Meekling Press 2023); the double chapbook Wounded Buildings/Simple Machines (Another New Calligraphy 2022) and Theories of Performance (The Lettered Streets Press, 2020). He was a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Poetry, and a finalist for the 2017 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Find him online at www.jaybesemer.net and on Twitter and Bluesky @divinetailor.

NEIL SURKAN Ruin

CA$15.00 CA$10.00

Wanting grace so badly for myself, / I filled every opening.

From the author of Their Queer Tenderness, Unbecoming, and On High

NEIL SURKAN

RUIN

Poetry. Chapbook.

ISBN: 978-1-989355-62-6

ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM

NEIL SURKAN was born in Penticton, BC. He is the author of two full-length poetry collections — Unbecoming (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), which was selected as one of three finalists for the City of Calgary’s W.O. Mitchell Award, and On High (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018) — and the chapbooks Their Queer Tenderness (Knife-Fork-Book, 2020) and Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017). His award-winning poems have appeared in numerous Canadian magazines.

PAOLA FERRANTE THE DARK UNWIND

CA$12.00 CA$10.00

All my life I've danced with a wolf, a long / slow waltz in the dark unwind ...

PAOLA FERRANTE

THE DARK UNWIND

Poetry. Chapbook.

ISBN 978-1-989355-45-9 (print)

Cover: Kirby

Layout/design: Ralph Kolewe

Printed at Coach House [Toronto] by John DeJesus

ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM

Paola Ferrante’s debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack, (Mansfield Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her first short fiction collection, Her Body Among Animals, is forthcoming Spring 2024 from Book*hug Press. She is the Poetry Editor at Minola Review and lives in Toronto, Canada with her spouse Mat, and their son.

KFB FINE DINING BUNDLE

CA$75.00 CA$50.00

Our Newest KFB titles bundled for your pleasure at significant savings!*

Includes:

Jay BESEMER [Your tongue is as long as a Tuesday.]

Neil SURKAN Ruin

Michael FLATT I Can Focus If I Try

Ayaz PIRANI Martyrs' Garden

& a bonus prezzie!

Paola FERRANTE The Dark Unwind

*Full price $87 SAVE $37 [In Canada Only]

Don't dawdle. While supplies last.

KFB24 Cole. Kirby. Smith.

CA$60.00 CA$50.00

A dream offering of newKFB full-lengths from Kirby, Dale Martin Smith, & a new chapbook by Norma Cole.

Subscribe to the season and save $10!*

Praise for Norma Cole:

Norma Cole’s forms of expression are ambitious. Her poems often (though not always) take small forms; they are made of short lines, in small stanzas, so that the space of the page starts to play an active role in the reading of them. Subtly, surreptitiously, these small packages explode in delicate, or sometimes not so delicate, arrays of color and attitude. Norma is famous for her empathic connections to people, artists and others, living and dead. Many of her poems carry dedications. She builds community as part of her poetic practice. On the other hand, she reserves a razor-sharp and ice-cold anger for the abuses of power and depradations of the morally corrupt as she observes them in the halls of power, here and around the world. The world is always calling in these poems; sometimes it is being called away, as we are made to look, through Norma’s poems, from the perspective of the universe. It is then that the human quality really shines through. Norma is a visual artist, in addition to being a writer, and has often worked in collaboration with other artists. Not just the look of her poems, but the images she shows us in them, will carry us a long way. - Vincent Katz, March 16 2021, Tribute to Norma Cole

sooner or later, time
approaches, highly
volatile, almost asleep
and not get their footing

NORMA COLE
R A I N Y D A Y
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-68-8

Norma Cole was born in Toronto in 1945. She is a poet, painter, and translator. Her most recent books of poetry include Fate News (2018), Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside (2012), Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems, 1988–2008 (2009), and Spinoza in Her Youth (2002). Cole has also published the volumes To be at Music: Essays & Talks (2010) and Actualities (2015), a collaboration with painter Marina Adams. Her translations from French include Danielle Collobert’s It Then (1989) and Jean Daive’s A Woman with Several Lives (2009). Additionally, Cole edited and translated Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (2000). Her awards include the Fund for Poetry, Gertrude Stein Award, the Richardson Award for Non-Fiction Prose and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award for Poetry. She curated a show by Marina Adams at Cue Arts in NYC and collaborated with Adams in BOMB 114, Winter 2011. Her visual work has been shown at the Miami University Art Museum, [2nd floor projects] in San Francisco, “Way Bay,” at the Berkeley Art Museum and most recently her film, “By the Turning Bridge,” at Arion Press, San Francisco, and NIAD, Richmond, California. A book of her drawings, called DRAWINGS, with an introduction by Mary Ann Caws, just appeared from Further Other Book Works.

Praise for Dale Martin Smith:

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

Come heaven’s material poem, call
bony spirit step when I can hardly stand.

DALE MARTIN SMITH
THE SIZE OF PARADISE
Poetry. Book. 100 pages.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-65-7

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 Flying Red Horse (2021), Slow Poetry in America (2014), Black Stone (2007), American Rambler (2000), as well as the KFB chapbooks, Sons (2017), and Blur (2022). 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 Toronto Metropolitan University, in 2011. He is currently at work on an essay collection, ["That Tongue Be Time"] on the poetry and prosody of Norma Cole (2024).

Praise for Kirby:

A glorious rampage through glory holes to holy glory, This is Where I Get Off is an incandescent trip through time & place. With singing rage, ferocious wit, shy tenderness, and defiant heart, these poems kick against the pricks, even as they worship what wounds. This collection cuts through convention to command attention. A triumphant FUCK YOU to unfeeling. Sublimely smutty, these poems make radiant the articular pain of gay lust in a world that denies its existence. Love is not obscene, bodies are beauty, and belonging can be found even in the back row of an adult cinema. "Can you imagine all she's lived through?" Kirby questions, then answers by blowing open all closets, tossing skeletons aside to two-step on the bones. - Roxanna Bennett, Author of Unmeaningable & Unseen Garden

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

Advance praise for She:

She is a capacious city of rich human habitation, where elation is every day’s caring infusion. Her cityscapes are painted deftly—in few words, in pauses, in juxtapositions, in fond attentions, in breath and the difficulty of breath, by a poet who knows deeply that life is fragile and that age comes and alters us. She says: the world loves us back when we love it. Flowers, streets, lovers, skies, persons, walks, in/fusions. She is joy’s pronoun! — Erín Moure, Theophylline
A Poetic Migration Via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo)

KIRBY
She
Poetry. Book.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-63-3

KIRBY’s work includes Behold (2023), a stage adaption of Poetry is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2021) What Do You Want to Be Called? (Anstruther Press, 2020) This Is Where I Get Off (Permanent Sleep Press, 2019) She’s Having a Doris Day (KFB, 2017) & editor NOT YOUR BEST No. 2, The Queer Ass Fuck Issue (KFB 2021). They're working on a follow-up to Poetry is Queer, MORE (2026) and their Substack column, “The First Time” can be found at Send My Love To Anyone. They are the publisher at knife | fork | book and can be found at kirbyshe.com

*(Canada Only. KFB is distributed by Asterism Books).

SUPPORT KFB

CA$10.00 - CA$100.00

"What makes KFB possible?"

A former director of another poetry organization wrote, "there isn't a day I don't ask for money for poetry."

We know the truth in that statement.

You're continued generous support gives us just enough base to continue to springboard from, to create our signature poetry books, and mount our yearly Fertile Festival of New & Inventive Works. Thank you.

And to the many—poets/artists/readers—everywhere who volunteer their time and talents again and again, "doin' it for the poets." We see you and know we're never thanked nearly enough. All the flowers.

NOTE: You can also use the QR code posted here to donate any amount directly to our PayPal. Convenient.

POETRY. WELL-SERVED: A Photo History of knife | fork | book 2016-2021

CA$100.00 - CA$2,500.00

The poets. The readings. The socked-feet. The first five years.

"I simply cannot imagine the Toronto Lit scene without Kirby and knife | fork | book.” Jim Johnstone, Poet. Publisher, Anstruther Press

“Toronto is one lucky bitch.” Damian Rogers, Poet.

POETRY. WELL-SERVED: A Photo History of knife | fork | book 2016-2021

Edited by Kirby with a forward by Hoa Nguyen

ISBN: 978-1-989355-74-9

First five years. Thousands of poets, launches, readings, chapbooks—from humble beginnings as a old oak library cart in Kensington Market (Toronto) to an international beacon/centre of poetry in Canada—these photos (mostly taken by KFB's founder Kirby) tell the story of a poetry bookshop with no start-up monies that "came out of nowhere," to the publisher/poetry festival (fertilefest.com) it remains today.

This book will be released as part of an exhibition at Fertile Festival of New & Inventive Works, 2025.

We're raising funds for this book/festival project here:

Donations of any amount, here.

Donations of $100 to $249 Receive updates and signed copy of the book (upon release).

Donations of $250 to $499 Receive above + Fertile 2025 Pass + Invite-only Preview Party of the exhibit at Fertile 2025.

Donations of $500 to $999 Receive above + Contributor Listing in the book.

Donations of $1000 to $2499 Receive above + Private reading (or hosting) by Kirby TBA

Sponsors $2500 or more Receive above + Logo placement/listings on all Fertile/Exhibit/Book related promotions.

Thank you in advance for your kind support of KFB, Fertile 2025, and this project.

AYAZ PIRANI Martyrs' Garden

CA$15.00 CA$10.00

Imagine that:

to be put in your place.

Is there a greater gift

a bigger reward

a better high

a warmer embrace?

From the author of How Beautiful People Are

AYAZ PIRANI MARTYRS' GARDEN

Poetry. Chapbook.

ISBN: 978-1-989355-54-1

Cover: Kirby

Design: R. Kolewe

ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM

AYAZ PIRANI's books include Happy You Are Here, Kabir's Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets and How Beautiful People Are, along with recent work in The Malahat Review.

SUBHANYA SIVAJOTHY Singing Fish Notation

CA$12.00

what I’m trying to say is

these waves are another kind of animal

SUBHANYA SIVAJOTHY

Singing Fish Notation

ISBN 978-1-989355-58-9 (print)

Poetry. Chapbook. wQr series.

Layout: Ralph Kolewe.

What Queer Reading

is an imprint of knife | fork | book.

Series editor: Lannii Layke.

ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM

Subhanya Sivajothy is a librarian and writer living in Tkarón:to. She uses poetry to think about ecologies, archives, and resistance. She completed her MFA at University of Guelph. She has been published in magazines such as

Adi Magazine, The Ex-Puritan and Filling Station, and has been supported by the Canada Council of Arts.

JAMES LINDSAY THE LAKE

CA$12.00

Only a few left!

2023 bpNichol Chapbook Award Finalist

to be estranged from remembrance

like the lake appearing as solid ice,

like predators knowing to give off

the illusion of something dependable

while waiting to deliberately collapse.

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

Only a few left!

Winner of the inaugural Nelson Ball Prize (for Branches)

And where are you?

MARK TRUSCOTT

RAIN

Poetry. KFB Pamphlet Series.

ISBN: 978-1-989355-36-7

Typeset in Perpetua and Cooper Hewitt

Cover: Kirby.

Layout: Ralph Kolewe.

Printed by John DeJesus at Coach House Books, Toronto.

ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM

MARK TRUSCOTT is the author of three poetry books: Said Like Reeds or Things (Coach House, 2004), Nature (Book*hug, 2010), and Branches (Book*hug, 2018).

KLARA DU PLESSIS & KADIE SALMON Skin & Meat Sky

CA$15.00

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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.

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

AMANDA EARL

DEAN GARLICK Domestic Sublime

CA$15.00

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As Edmund Burke described when comparing the sublime and the beautiful, “sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small; ... beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid and even massive.” The ability of these images to simultaneously embody both the sublime and the beautiful, and the state of awe that this can awaken, are for me the essence of the domestic sublime. - Dean Garlick

DEAN GARLICK

Domestic Sublime

Fertile Festival of New & Inventive Works Selection

ISBN 978-1-989355-56-5 (print)

Photography. Poetry. Beauty. Sublime.

The digital photos in this volume were shot on a Fujifilm X100V in Montréal between the spring of 2021 and 2023.

Typeset in Avenir and Avenir Next Condensed.

Layout: Ralph Kolewe.

OANA AVASILICHIOAEI Improbable Theatres

CA$12.00

"You enter the theatre only to realize that you've always existed here."

OANA AVASILICHIOAEI

Improbable Theatres

ISBN 978-1-989355-59-6 (print)

Poetry. Performance. Theatre.

Fertile Festival of New & Inventive Works Selection

Layout: Ralph Kolewe.

ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM

Oana Avasilichioaei (www.oanalab.com) interweaves sound, performance, poetry, and translation to expand and trouble ideas of language, histories, polyphonic structures, and borders of listening. She has created many performance/sound works that mix electronics, ambient textures, noise, and vocal play, published six collections of poetry hybrids, including award-nominated Eight Track (Talonbooks, 2019) and Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015), and written a libretto for a one-act opera (Cells of Wind, 2022).

LANNII LAYKE OS

CA$12.00

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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.

DALE MARTIN SMITH BLUR

CA$12.00

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When the rain starts / and a hair sticks / to the butter

DALE MARTIN SMITH

BLUR

Poetry. Chapbook.

ISBN 978-1-989355-40-4 (print)

Cover: Kirby

Layout design: Ralph Kolewe

Printed by John DeJesus at Coach House [Toronto]

ATTN: BOOKSELLERS US/INTL ORDERS KFB is now distributed by ASTERISM

Dale Martin Smith is the author most recently of Flying Red Horse and Sons (KFB, 2017). He teaches poetry at Toronto Metropolitan University. dalemartinsmith.com

MAUREEN SCOTT HARRIS MORE THAN ONE HOMAGE

CA$12.00

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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.

KIRBY: THREESOME

CA$62.00 CA$40.00

Why not make it a threesome?

The Kirby Trilogy

Kirby's newest, she, alongside their brilliant hybrid-memoir, Poetry is Queer, and gloryholic debut, This Is Where I Get Off, for your own bedside reading pleasures or a super gift! Consider adding something magical from our friends at Venus Envy.

kirbyshe.com

CORY LAVENDER BALLAD OF BERNIE "BEAR" ROY

CA$6.00

Sold out

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).

SHANE NEILSON WALT

CA$10.00

We would not be good enough for Whitman but he would be good to us.

Poets, have you had words electrocute you? If no, then you are not poets.

Words must do more than chasten you, force you to conform.

They stun you into care.

SHANE NEILSON

WALT

KFB PAMPHLET SERIES 003

ISBN: 978-1-989355-33-6

Embossed Cover on Mohawk Loop Straw 80lb.

Translucent Endpapers.

Printed on Zephyr at Coach House.

Cover: Kirby

Design: R. Kolewe

SHANE NEILSON is a poet from New Brunswick who can never repay the debt he owes Walt Whitman. This unpayable debt makes for the conditions of a perfect love: nothing is asked for, nothing is required, and yet everything would be given.

DALE SMITH Sons Broadside

CA$35.00

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.

Rare. Few copies remain. Get yours now.

DALE SMITH "SONS" [eBook]

CA$8.00

Poetry. Electronic Book. ISBN: 978-1-989355-13-8

One of our earliest beauties by Dale Martin Smith, now available here as an e-Book (for a limited time).

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.

TRAVIS SHARP YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER

CA$20.00

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"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.

JIM JOHNSTONE THE OUROBOROS

CA$10.00

Only a few left!

"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.

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.

jonathan-garfinkel.com

JENNIFER LOVEGROVE THE TINDER SONNETS

CA$15.00

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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.

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