KFB

MICHAEL PRIOR Shadows Under the Trees

CA$18.00 CA$16.00

from the award-winning author of Burning Province

Night falls, and I open the album

I’ve chosen not to open until now.

MICHAEL PRIOR

Shadows Under the Trees

Poetry. Chapbook.

ISBN 978-1-989355-80-0

OUT SPRING 2026

Part of KFB 10th Anniversary Season

Purchase now at a special PREORDER price.

(Note: we'll send a festive gift notice on Holiday orders.)

Cover: Kirby

Design/layout: R. Kolowe

MICHAEL PRIOR is a writer, teacher, and editor. His most recent book of poems, Burning Province (McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House, 2020), won the Canada-Japan Literary Award and the BC & Yukon Book Prizes' Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Model Disciple (Véhicule Press, 2016), which was named one of the best books of the year by the CBC.

Michael is the recipient of fellowships from the Amy Clampitt Residency, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Jerome Foundation, and Hawthornden Literary Retreat. His poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies across North America and the UK, including Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Narrative Magazine, Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review, PN Review, Ambit, Poetry Daily, Global Poetry Anthology, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series.

Michael holds graduate degrees from Cornell University and the University of Toronto. He is an Associate Professor of English and ACM Mellon Faculty Fellow at Macalester College, and also edits the Véhicule Press poetry imprint, Signal Editions.

JAMES LINDSAY

CA$17.50 CA$15.00

from the author of Only Insistence and The Lake

Generations of migrating robins have authored on the sky.

Translucent desire lines. Lapsed Catholics. What a sight

JAMES LINDSAY

Choral Coral Carol

Poetry. Chapbook.

ISBN: 978-1-989355-79-4

OUT SPRING 2026

Part of KFB 10th Anniversary Season

Purchase now at a special PREORDER price.

(Note: we'll send a festive gift notice on Holiday orders.)

Cover: Kirby

Design/layout: R. Kolowe

A single long poem that whips into a called upon frenzy of euphoria. Bliss.

JAMES LINDSAY is the author of the poetry collections Only Insistence (icehouse poetry, 2023 Longlisted for the Nelson Ball Prize), Double Self-Portrait, Our Inland Sea (both Wolsak &Wynn), and the chapbooks The Lake (KFB, 2022 Finalist bpNichol Chapbook Award), Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis! (Anstruther Press), and Labour Day. He lives in Toronto where he works in publishing.

AMANDA EARL + MATTHEW WALSH Slutflowers

CA$17.50 CA$15.00

from the authors of Matthew, Beast Body Epic / Terrarium, These Are Not the Potatoes of My Youth

AMANDA EARL + MATTHEW WALSH

Slutflowers

Poetry. Chapbook.

ISBN: 978-1-989355-81-7

OUT SPRING 2026

Part of KFB 10th Anniversary Season

Purchase now at a special PREORDER price.

(Note: we'll send a festive gift notice on Holiday orders.)

Cover: Kirby

Design/layout: R. Kolewe

Cover art: Angie Quick. "Addicted to the Bad Boys Part 1 & 2"

Springboarding from Genet's "Our Lady of the Flowers," Earl + Walsh seed/fashion queer their own erotic gardens in collaborative response. Part of KFB/wQr Fore4Play Series.

AMANDA EARL (she/her) is a queer writer, reviewer, visual poet, editor, and publisher who lives on Algonquin Anishinaabeg traditional territory, colonially known as Ottawa, Ontario. Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca, and editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry. Her latest book is Beast Body Epic, a collection of long poems provoked by her near-death health crisis (longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award). Her first poetry book, Kiki is ten years old. In 2024 Earl began an editing and literary events organization service. More at their Substack and AmandaEarl.com.

MATTHEW WALSH grew up in Nova Scotia and now lives in Toronto. Their celebrated book-length collection These Are Not the Potatoes of My Youth was a finalist for the Trillium and Gerald Lampert Awards. Previously their poems have appeared in Joyland the Capra Review the Antigonish Review the Malahat Review and Geist and in a chapbook entitled ICQ (Anstruther Press). Walsh's latest poetry collection Terrarium was published by icehouse poetry in Spring 2024, also a finalist for the Trillium and longlisted for the Nelson Ball Poetry Prize.

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

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

KIRBY she

CA$24.00 CA$20.00

"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

NORMA COLE Rainy Day

CA$16.00

Sold out

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.

TRAVIS SHARP YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER

CA$8.00

NOW AVAILABLE AS A DOWNLOAD HERE & at ASTERISM BOOKS.

"REMARKABLE. Sharp's YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER offers us a unique work of ill/queer goretesquerie, of body-embodying body-first verse that pairs nicely with a glass of something fruitfully heady like, say, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception … Polyvalent, webby, thrust in many directions at once to the reader’s delight." - bonnyCD, The Temz Review (Sept 2025)

"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

Print run sold out.

Digital Download (PDF Format)

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!

Published by knife | fork | book, March 2021, (now out of print) reissued here as an ePub (pdf download) in its entirety, with original design by r. kolewe.

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 is the author of the lyric documentary poem sequence Monoculture (Unicorn Press 2024) and the poetry collection Yes, I am a corpse flower (Knife Fork Book 2021). A former postdoctoral fellow at the University at Buffalo, he is currently a lecturer in the writing program at Howard University. Since 2019, he is the executive editor at Essay Press.

SUPPORT KFB

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"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.

JAY BESEMER Your Tongue is as Long as a Tuesday

CA$22.50 CA$18.00

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.

MICHAEL FLATT I CAN FOCUS IF I TRY

CA$22.50 CA$18.00

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.

KFB FINE DINING BUNDLE

CA$75.00 CA$55.00

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 $32 [In Canada Only]

Don't dawdle. While supplies last.

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.

STEVIE MANNING Joan Would Say

CA$15.00

Sold out

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

JAMES LINDSAY THE LAKE

CA$12.00

Sold out

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

Sold out

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).

KATE SUTHERLAND Nuptials

CA$15.00

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"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.

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

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"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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

tiwigo (official site)

CORY LAVENDER BALLAD OF BERNIE "BEAR" ROY

CA$6.00

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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.

JIM JOHNSTONE THE OUROBOROS

CA$10.00

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"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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