TRAVIS SHARP YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER
CA$20.00
"THE QUEEREST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ IN MY LIFE." - KIRBY
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.
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KFB SELECTS JAN 2021 IAN WILLIAMS WORD PROBLEMS (Coach House)
KFB SELECTS FEB 2021 PHIL HALL TOWARD A BLACKER ARDOUR (Beautiful Outlaw)
KFB SELECTS 2021 MAR | APR | MAY | JUN | JULY | AUG
AARON TUCKER CATALOGUE D'OISEAUX (Book*hug)
HOA NGUYEN A THOUSAND TIMES YOU LOSE YOUR TREASURE (Wave)
STEPHEN COLLIS A HISTORY OF THE THEORIES OF RAIN (Talonbooks)
AIDEN CHAFE GOSPEL DRUNK (U of Alberta Press)
JESSI MACEACHERN A NUMBER OF STUNNING ATTACKS (Invisible)
BARDIA SINAEE INTRUDER (Anansi Poetry)
Previous KFB Selections include: KLARA DU PLESSIS HELL LIGHT FLESH (Palimpsest) KATE SUTHERLAND THE BONES ARE THERE (Book*hug) IAN WILLIAMS WORD PROBLEMS (Coach House) C.P. CAVAFY THE BARBARIANS ARRIVE TODAY Translated with an afterword by EVAN JONES (Carcanet Press, 2020) CODY-ROSE CLEVIDENCE "BEHOLD A MAN!" (Auric Press, 2020) SUE GOYETTE ANTHESIS: A MEMOIR (Gaspereau Press, 2020) A. F. MORITZ AS FAR AS YOU KNOW (Anansi Poetry, 2020) ROXANNA BENNETT UNMEANINGABLE (Gordon Hill Press, 2019) KAIE KELLOUGH MAGNETIC EQUATOR (M&S, 2019) ANNICK MACASKILL MURMURATIONS (Gaspereau Press, 2020) JOHN ELIZABETH STINTZI JUNEBAT (Anansi Poetry, 2020) ALICE NOTLEY FOR THE RIDE (Penguin Poets, 2020) SAM SAX Madness (Penguin), CANISIA LUBRIN Voodoo Hypothesis (Wolsak & Wynn), ANNE MICHAELS All We Saw (McClelland & Stewart), SINA QUEYRAS My Ariel (Coach House), GEORGE OPPEN 21 Poems (New Directions), KAVEH AKBAR Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Penguin UK Edition), BILLY RAY BELCOURT This Wound is a World (Frontenac), ROXANNA BENNETT Unseen Garden (knife fork book), KLARA DU PLESSIS Ekke (Palimpsest Press), ERIC SCHMALTZ Surfaces (Invisible)
| ˈfəːtʌɪl | : KFB SUBSCRIPTION SERIES of New + Inventive Ideas
CA$160.00
| ˈfəːtʌɪl | fertile
• producing many new and inventive ideas: her fertile imagination. [OED]
KFB is intensely interested in the new, new forms, ephemera, shapes, concrete, visual, sound, lexicon, their roots/lineage.
With this quarterly subscription, we'll package chapbooks, broadsides, essays on poetics, ephemera, vispo, concrete, collections that are certain to challenge and delight.
Second Instalment:
JOHN BEVIS Letter-Winged Kite (Penteract Press)
ANDREI MONASTYRSKI: Elementary Poetry Edited and Translated from the Russian by Yelena Kalinsky and Brian Droitcour (Ugly Duckling Presse)
FRED WAH Music at the Heart of Thinking (Talonbooks)
Premiere : SADIQA DE MEIJER alfabet/alphabet (Palimpsest Press) CATHERINE VIDLER oleander 7 (The Blasted Tree) KYLE FLEMMER Purple Rain (The Blasted Tree) DANI SPINOSA OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible)
+ new works coming from Ugly Duckling Presse, KFB, and various micro-presses local and abroad.
Welcome to | ˈfəːtʌɪl |
UPCOMING 2022 KFB | ˈfəːtʌɪl | POETRY FESTIVAL OF NEW & INVENTIVE WORKS
On Sale
On Sale
JIM JOHNSTONE THE OUROBOROS
CA$10.00
CA$8.00
"In Jim Johnstone’s long poem, the city eats itself inch by inch... Appetite knows no bounds." - The Pamphleteer
If shouts were music
the whole world would be singing
Don’t ruin it.
Don’t ruin it.
Don’t ruin it.
JIM JOHNSTONE
THE OUROBOROS
KFB PAMPHLET SERIES 002
ISBN: 978-1-989355-32-9
Embossed Cover on Mohawk Loop Straw 80lb.
Translucent Endpapers.
Printed on Zephyr at Coach House.
Cover: Kirby
Design: R. Kolewe
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER
PUBLICATION JAN 2021
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.
On Sale
On Sale
R. KOLEWE THE WILD FOX
CA$15.00
CA$12.00
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
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER
PUBLICATION JAN 2021
On Sale
On Sale
SHANE NEILSON WALT
CA$10.00
CA$8.00
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
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER
PUB DATE JAN 2021
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.
BARDIA SINAEE INTRUDER (Anansi Poetry)
CA$20.00
“‘Attuned to discourses regarding the spectral nature of just about everything,’ Bardia Sinaee illuminates our modern gothic in his debut collection, Intruder. Haunted by the political history of the Middle East, by the precarity of the contemporary Canadian metropole, and by the spectre of death — ‘That slow ghost / pushing a drip stand / down the corridor / That’s me’ — this existential intruder questions just about everything, including himself. ‘Maybe you ask too many questions,’ writes the poet, ‘Maybe it’s time to let the wind have your clothes.’ Wondrously, Sinaee’s lyric interrogations hold us captive even as they invite us to imagine our escape.” — Srikanth Reddy, author of Underworld Lit
“Several peers: Aisha Sasha John, Phoebe Wang, Vladimir Lucien, Safiya Sinclair, Danez Smith, Solmaz Sharif, Juliane Okot Bitek, Bardia Sinaee, Ishion Hutchinson, and others. These poets are all holding dynamic spaces within their own rattled courtships with language and feeling and thought in poetry.” —Canisia Lubrin, What the Poets Are Doing
BARDIA SINAEE
INTRUDER
(Anansi Poetry)
This title is part of KFB SELECTS SUBSCRIPTION SERIES—Twelve monthly titles of the latest and best in contemporary poetry selected by knife | fork | book—SUBSCRIBE HERE
Bemused and droll, paranoid and demagogic, Sinaee’s much-anticipated debut collection presents a world beset by precarity, illness, and human sprawl. Anxiety, hospitalization, and body paranoia recur in the poems’ imagery — Sinaee went through two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy in his mid-twenties, documented in the vertiginous multipart prose poem “Twelve Storeys” — making Intruder a book that seems especially timely, notably in the dreamlike, minimalist sequence “Half-Life,” written during the lockdown in Toronto in spring 2020.
Progressing from plain-spoken dispatches about city life to lucid nightmares of the calamities of history, the poems in Intruder ultimately grapple with, and even embrace, the daily undertaking of living through whatever the hell it is we’re living through. [Anansi]
BARDIA SINAEE was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives in Toronto. He is the author of the chapbooks Blue Night Express and Salamander Festival. His poems have also appeared in magazines across Canada and in several editions of Best Canadian Poetry. In 2012 his poem “Barnacle Goose Ballad” was Reader’s Choice winner for The Walrus Poetry Prize, and in 2020 he was co-winner of the Capilano Review’s Robin Blaser Award. He holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Guelph University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Intruder is his first book.
NICOLE BROSSARD MUSEUM OF BONE AND WATER Translation and Introduction by ROBERT MAJZELS and ERÍN MOURE
CA$17.00 - CA$160.00
“An exquisite translation … Brossard’s work is serious, yet not sombre, and sometimes deeply erotic.” — Quill & Quire
KFB FERTILE SUBSCRIPTION SERIES 2021
NICOLE BROSSARD
MUSEUM OF BONE AND WATER
Translation and Introduction by ROBERT MAJZELS and ERÍN MOURE
[Anansi]
Purchase this as part of KFB FERTILE SUBSCRIPTION SERIES and/or along with AVANT DESIRE A NICOLE BROSSARD READER (Coach House Books)
Available for the first time in more than fifteen years, this collection from celebrated poet, novelist, and essayist Nicole Brossard is a provocative investigation of the human body — our physical and spiritual museums of identity and desire.
Nicole Brossard’s Museum of Bone and Water delivers sensual and provocative investigations of the human body — our physical and spiritual museums of identity and desire — that pulse and surprise at every turn. In this collection, fingers, lips, fists, cheeks mingle in the palm trees of Dublin and Key West, the heat of Palermo and Madrid. With each dazzling turn and each “crazy” silence, Brossard speeds our breath and quickens our hearts, reminding us that poetry too is both a physical and spiritual reality.
Museum of Bone and Water, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, is recognized as a major work in the oeuvre of leading Québécoise poet, novelist, and essayist Nicole Brossard — recently honoured with the Lifetime Recognition Award by the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. The collection is now available in a handsome A List edition with a new introduction by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure. [Anansi]
NICOLE BROSSARD’s collections of poetry have twice won the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Grand Prix de la poésie de la Fondation des Forges. She has been honoured with the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize, the Prix Athanase David, the inaugural Blue Metropolis Violet Prize, and the Harbourfront Festival Prize, among other awards, and her work has been translated into ten languages. She is an officer of the Order of Canada, chevalière of the National Order of Quebec, and a member of l’Académie des lettres du Québec. In addition to her poetry, Brossard has written novels, plays, and essays; directed two films; and co-founded the literary journal La Barre du Jour. She lives in Montreal.
One of Canada’s most eminent and respected poets, ERÍN MOURE is a translator from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese, and the author of seventeen books of poetry. Moure has received the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the A.M. Klein Prize, and she has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Most recently, she has been a finalist for the 2018 Kobzar Literary Award. She lives in Montreal.
Robert Majzels
ROBERT MAJZELS won the Governor General’s Literary Award for his translation of France Daigle’s novel Just Fine, and he has been nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, and the Best Translated Book Award for his translations (with Erín Moure) of Nicole Brossard’s poetry. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Calgary.
AIDAN CHAFE GOSPEL DRUNK (UP Alberta)
CA$20.00 - CA$235.00
"At the heart of Aidan Chafe's impressive sophomore collection is a bare-knuckle interrogation of organized, patriarchal religion. Languishing in the space between faith and doubt, the speaker of Gospel Drunk gives himself over to awe and observation, exploring violence, masculinity, addiction, and structural injustice in lyrics that are sonorous, deliberate, and searching." - Annick MacAskill, author of Murmurations
KFB SELECTS SPRING 2021
AIDAN CHAFE
GOSPEL DRUNK
(UP ALBERTA)
Gospel Drunk follows a speaker’s journey to find clarity and identity as he contemplates his Catholic upbringing and struggles with loneliness and alcohol addiction. Sharp, intoxicating imagery and a minimalist aesthetic combine in these poems to explore some of our darkest and strongest belief systems, dismantling them with wit and wisdom. Poignant boyhood memories of hockey coaches as “dragons in suits” collide with critiques of “the broken bicycle of recovery.” A child’s fingers interlace to form a gun during mass and Hulk attends an AA meeting. Boldly honest, Gospel Drunk is for all who seek humanity in a world where the personal and the political are equally complicated. (UP Alberta)
Purchase this item singularly or as part of KFB SELECTS MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION SERIES
Aidan Chafe is the author of Short Histories of Light, which was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. He has also published two chapbooks, Right Hand Hymns and Sharpest Tooth. His poems and reviews have appeared in journals including Arc, CV2, PRISM international, EVENT, and Vallum. He lives on the ancestral unceded homelands of the Coast Salish peoples (Burnaby, BC).
SUE GOYETTE SOLSTICE 2020: AN ARCHIVE (Gaspereau Press)
CA$19.00
NEW GOYETTE/GASPEREAU PRESS BEAUTY
SUE GOYETTE
SOLSTICE 2020: AN ARCHIVE
Every morning for the first 21 days of the locked-down and uncertain month of December 2020, Sue Goyette wrote a new poem to be published in Halifax’s The Coast that afternoon. Goyette’s skilful use of poetry’s artful unruliness—of its facility for reconciling our emotional and imaginative lives with occurrences in the everyday world—results in poems that illuminate a dark moment, contributing to “the work of imagining a way forward so there’s a bowl for everyone.”
Sue Goyette has published a novel and six previous collections of poetry, including Ocean (winner of the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award and finalist for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize), The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl, and Penelope. She has won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the CBC Literary Prize for Poetry, the Earle Birney Prize, the ReLit Award, and the Bliss Carman Award. Goyette lives in Halifax, where she teaches creative writing at Dalhousie University. In 2020 she was appointed the city of Halifax’s eighth poet laureate.
JESSIE MACEACHERN A NUMBER OF STUNNING ATTACKS (Invisible)
CA$19.00
“In her amazing debut volume of poetry, Jessi MacEachern unfolds a panoply of encounters, some at points of intersection, others at moments of separation. They are uneasily situated in narratives, but who the subjects are is subject to interpretation. And to change. A Number of Stunning Attacks is tantamount to a broad set of disorientations and disturbances, often unsettling and always generative, for both the poet and the reader. We might think of this as a poetry of the romantic distance that always lies between two people, a poetry of lyric impossibility. The thrill and anguish of that impossibility has captivated us for thousands of years. It is as ancient as the poetry of Sappho and as contemporary as the work contained in this book—a record of the perennial quest to let love be heard and to make love known.”—Lyn Hejinian
“In her debut poetry collection Jessi MacEachern shows that for a woman to sing with lyric force is to try to express a thought before the inevitable interruption. How do women ever get anywhere? A Number of Stunning Attacks is itself a stunning attack: a winnowing of language as precise as it is gleaming.”—Sina Queyras
“Jessi MacEachern’s first book of poetry strikes almost as a journal of the pronounced interiority all of us are living these days. A construction of sequences in which each passage on its own is a feast and lark, its poems unfold small mysteries that are dangerously calm, exploring intimate relations lived by women in the space of the house. In the rhythmic arborescence of precise lyric images, there are no totalities. Self-examining but never self-absorbed, MacEachern’s poems are saucy and savvy; via a female gaze onto gender and spacings, they pulse with uneasy but hard-won life.”—Erín Moure
KFB SELECTS SPRING 2021 (Alternate)
JESSIE MACEACHERN
A NUMBER OF STUNNING ATTACKS
A raw and intimate testimony of the spatial and emotional difficulty of facing the self and the other
A Number of Stunning Attacks contributes to the ongoing association of fragmented forms and women’s writing, yet the insistent repetitions and crystallized imagery produce something more coherent than a fragment and more dynamic than a single whole. Drawing on a line of innovative women’s poetics in Canada, these poems recall the radical experiments of Lisa Robertson, Erìn Moure, and Gail Scott. Intoxicated by disorientation, the reader will ask: Which city is this? Which woman is this? Which reader am I? [Invisible]
Jessi MacEachern lives in Montreal, QC, where she teaches English literature. Her research has been published in Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Her poetry has been published in various places, including Poetry Is Dead, Vallum, MuseMedusa, Canthius, PRISM, and CV2.
AARON TUCKER CATALOGUE D'OISEAUX (Book*hug)
CA$20.00
“Tucker’s elegant lines, each a marvel, like the finest of lenses, draw us into exact focus, remind us of why we cascade trip fall head over heels at all. Here within the immensities of love we experience ourselves, trees, birds, streets, buildings, worlds, as bodies in every heightened, intricate detail, anew. My pilot light is aflame.” —Kirby, author of This is Where I Get Off
“Aaron Tucker’s Catalogue d’oiseaux fractures Olivier Messiaen’s music of the same name into poetic lenses through which to relive the past in a continuous and unfurling present. Nostalgia glows in romance, and is then activated through the vibrancy of art and the experience of bodies. This wondrous long poem creates a signature gesture of compound words, aligning the protagonists in their love and languagelove.” —Klara du Plessis, author of Hell, Light, Flesh
KFB SELECTS SPRING 2021
AARON TUCKER
CATALOGUE D'OISEAUX
(Book*hug)
Aaron Tucker was born and raised on traditional Syilx territory in Lavington B.C. and now lives in Toronto as a guest on the Dish With One Spoon Territory. His novel, Y (2018), was translated into French as Oppenheimer in 2020. He is also the author of two previous poetry collections, including Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Book*hug Press, 2017). He is currently a PhD candidate in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at York University where he is an Elia Scholar, a VISTA Doctoral Scholar, and 2020 recipient of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship.
MARGARET CHRISTAKOS DEAR BIRCH, (Palimpsest Press)
CA$20.00
“Dear reader, you will read Dear Birch, compulsively from start to finish, laying aside other urgencies to be gripped by these tender meditations and acute observations of the human and natural worlds. You will return for a second, slower reading to savour the intimacy of Christakos’s lyrical writing and the rigour of her self-inquiries. Afterwards, you will absorb the text’s compassionate witnessing of “waves of woundedness” through the combined lens of parent, daughter, city-dweller and lover. And you will learn to fall in love with a tree, with the wind, “with the interrelation of trees in wind, wind in trees.”
—MAUREEN HYNES, author of Sotto Voce
Aug 24
She is a diarist, & as such wants
to remember thoughts and events she has lived,
MARGARET CHRISTAKOS
DEAR BIRCH,
Three years after her mother’s death and on the brink of a break up, a bisexual writer sits in the company of an urban birch tree, auditing the odds of new loves entering her future. So begins Dear Birch, an intimate poem cycle that improvises within the permutability of grief, wind, reading, refusal and desire, listening for an ethos of ongoingness. Synthesizing memoir, votive and epistle, Margaret Christakos displays her trademark fidelity to writing as attentive process, imbuing her work with the polyamory of tender intelligence. (Palimpsest)
MARGARET CHRISTAKOS is a widely published award-winning poet, fiction author, critic, and creative writing instructor. Her work has won the ReLit Award for Poetry and the Bliss Carman Award, has been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award twice, and was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. She was appointed Canada Council Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor in 2004–2005, served as Canada Council Writer in Residence at Western University (London, Ontario) in 2016–2017 and at the University of Alberta in 2017–2018, and as Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University of Toronto (2018–2019). Her recent publications include Charger, a poetry collection published by Talon Books (2020) and an intergenre memoir, Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies, published by Book*hug (2016). In 2017, Wilfrid Laurier University Press published Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos.
TOLU OLORUNTOBA THE JUNTA OF HAPPENSTANCE (Palimpsest/Anstruther)
CA$20.00
NOW AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY at KFB!
TOLU OLORUNTOBA's THE JUNTA OF HAPPENSTANCE left me dazzled to the point of squinting. In every poem, some piece of gorgeous, quotable language glittered in my eye" :Wake up. It's the crescendo. / Here comes your / redaction from the world." The collection is neither burdened, victimized, nor apologetic about race. It does not out on race as a pair of glasses. Race is more like an eyeball. It remains a simple fact, even though, as he writes, "My mind has bent the facts, I know. / The facts have bent my mind." One gets the sense that Oloruntoba is the alluring stranger, scribbling into a steno, "submerged into words on the bus," seemingly absorbed in his world but really taking note of us. — IAN WILLIAMS, Author of Word Problems
TOLU OLORUNTOBA
THE JUNTA OF HAPPENSTANCE
(Palimpsest/Anstruther)
TOLU OLORUNTOBA is the author of the Anstruther Press chapbook Manubrium. His poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Columbia Journal, Entropy, and other publications, and his short fiction has appeared in translation in Dansk PEN Magazine. He founded Klorofyl, a magazine of literary and graphic art, and practiced medicine before his current work managing projects for health authorities in British Columbia. After a somewhat itinerant life in Nigeria and the United States, he emigrated to the Greater Vancouver Area, where he lives with his family.
CHAD CAMPBELL NECTARINE (Signal Poetry)
CA$18.00
“Chad Campbell's poems are the guests that stay behind after the party long enough to "hear the silence sweep the voices back inside itself," the embers of a fire lit inside the mind where it refuses to be extinguished.” – D.A. Powell
"Imagine an image hitting the eye with rapid-fire description, as if it were projected through a television that allowed the viewer to delight in the flicker of each frame. This is the technique Campbell favors." –Jim Johnstone, Carousel
CHAD CAMPBELL
NECTARINE
(Signal Poetry)
Memory—how we retrieve and replenish it—is at the heart of Nectarine, Chad Campbell's visionary second collection. Figures, cities, and landscapes from the author's life shift in and out of these dreamlike poems that explore the “unaccountable, uncountable” ways in which our past keeps speaking to us: through objects, through paintings, through colours, and through the spectre of places that map themselves over the places we live in. Subtle, unsettling, compressed, and full of incandescently beautiful language, Nectarine is about lost things, stranded moments, and traces preserved in time like “a glass of frozen nectarine halves / on a table made of ice.” (Signal Poetry)
Chad Campbell is the author of the award-nominated debut collection Laws & Locks (Signal Editions 2015). His poems have appeared in journals across the U.K. and Canada, and are anthologized in The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry, The Best Canadian Poetry, and Carcanet New Poetries VIII. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Manchester where he studies and teaches at the Centre for New Writing.
ROXANNA BENNETT THE UNTRANSLATABLE I (Gordon Hill Press)
CA$20.00
25 APRIL 2021 3PM EASTERN Gordon Hill Press 2021 Spring Launch with ROXANNA BENNETT KHASHAYAR MOHAMMADI A. F. MORITZ CONCETTA PRINCIPE at KFB
from the award-winning author of Unseen Garden & Unmeaningable
"Through emphatic, headlong diction and images, Bennett documents the struggles of illness and isolation, armed with battered faith and searing introspection. Both despairing and brave, these poems are unforgettable." – Trillium Book Award for Poetry Jury
ROXANNA BENNETT
THE UNTRANSLATABLE I
(Gordon Hill Press)
The disabled poem-making entity known as Roxanna Bennett gratefully resides on aboriginal land. They are the author of The Untranslatable I (Gordon Hill Press, 2021) and the award-winning Unmeaningable (Gordon Hill Press, 2019).
KHASHAYAR MOHAMMADI ME, YOU, THEN SNOW (Gordon Hill Press)
CA$20.00
25 APRIL 2021 3PM EASTERN Gordon Hill Press 2021 Spring Launch with ROXANNA BENNETT KHASHAYAR MOHAMMADI A. F. MORITZ CONCETTA PRINCIPE at KFB
"Queer punk pubs, porn, philosophy, and cinema are dissected & refracted with exquisite tenderness in the coldly brilliant fire that is Khashayar Mohammadi’s You, Me, Then Snow. From the quotidian to the cosmic, like a kestrel in a turquoise sky, Mohammadi’s poems soar in dizzying, dazzling ecstasy. Vulnerable, intimate, darkly comedic, and terrifyingly intelligent, this collection of the “borderline metaphysical” will get you wet, erect, then break your heart, leaving you desperate for more." — Roxanna Bennett, author of Unmeaningable
"Cinematic, sensuous, and deeply perceptive, Me, You, Then Snow turns assumptions of language inside out and celebrates the curiosity of the translingual. Seemingly straightforward language is made to recoil from meaning, then transgress, expand, and flourish across linguistic, geographic, and interior landscapes. Khashayar Mohammadi is an exceptional new voice, and a poet whose writing excites me." — Klara du Plessis, author of Unfurl
KHASHAYAR MOHAMMADI
YOU, ME, THEN SNOW
(Gordon Hill)
Khashayar Mohammadi is an Iranian-born, Toronto-based writer and translator. He is the host of knife| fork | book’s monthly Chapbook Club and the author of chapbooks Moe’s Skin with ZED PRESS and Dear Kestrel with knife | fork | book. He is currently working on a full length translation anthology of contemporary female Persian poets.
STEPHEN COLLIS A HISTORY OF THE THEORIES OF RAIN (Talonbooks)
CA$17.00
"Stephen Collis has achieved something remarkable: an invigorating body of work that convincingly addresses both the urgency of the present moment and the long echoes of our historical and lyrical past ... The depth and scope of Collis' vision is startling and impressive; so are the courage, precision, and care he brings to the poems he creates." - HOA NGUYEN + MARGO WHEATON, Writer's Trust of Canada jury citation
KFB SELECTS SPRING 2021
STEPHEN COLLIS
A HISTORY OF THE THEORIES OF RAIN
also available by subscribing to KFB SELECTS
HEAR STEPHEN COLLIS HERE WITH BARDIA SINAEE 11 MAY 2021 7PM EST KFB
HOA NGUYEN A THOUSAND TIMES YOU LOSE YOUR TREASURE (Wave)
CA$23.00
CANADIAN LAUNCH
21 APRIL 2021
with LISA FISHMAN
KFB SAL/ONline
KFB SELECTS SPRING 2021
HOA NGUYEN
A THOUSAND TIMES YOU LOSE YOUR TREASURE (Wave Books)
A poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon” with verse biography on the poet's mother, Diệp Anh Nguyễn, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-women Vietnamese circus troupe. Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. By turns lyrical and unsettling, Hoa Nguyen's poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts. [Wave]
Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books of poetry, including As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice, and Violet Energy Ingots, which received a 2017 Griffin Prize nomination. As a public proponent and advocate of contemporary poetry, she has served as guest editor for The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2018 and judge for the 2020 Griffin Prize for Poetry, and has performed and lectured at numerous institutions, including Princeton University, Bard College, Poet’s House, and the Banff Centre’s Writers Studio. Recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize and a 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature nomination, she has received grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her writing has garnered attention from such outlets as The PBS News Hour, Granta, The Walrus, New York Times, and Poetry, among others. Born in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated in the United States, Nguyen has lived in Canada since 2011.
LISA FISHMAN MAD WORLD, MAD KINGS, MAD COMPOSITION (Wave)
CA$25.00
HEAR LISA FISHMAN
with fellow Wave Poet
HOA NGUYEN
LISA FISHMAN
MAD WORLD, MAD KINGS, MAD COMPOSITIONS
Wave Books
Spanning 16 years of notebooks, teaching notes, and improvisations, Lisa Fishman's Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition upends time itself in lyric, prose, and visual forms. Sharing Paul Klee's intuition that "the eye travels along the path cut out for it in the work," this deeply multifaceted book moves between observational directness and maddened speech, places and persons, humor and alarm. Tempted by Laura Riding's renunciation of poetry yet rich with life-forms of all kinds (vegetable, animal, processual), it is a work of immediate presence and continuous change, enacting an ever-renewing ecology of connection in peril.
Lisa Fishman’s seventh book was recently released: Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020). She is also the author of 24 Pages and other poems (Wave, 2015); F L O W E R C A R T (Ahsahta Press, 2011); Current (Parlor Press, 2011); The Happiness Experiment (Ahsahta, 2007); Dear, Read (Ahsahta, 2002) and The Deep Heart’s Core is a Suitcase (New Issues Press, 1996). Chapbooks by Fishman include at the same time as scattering (Albion Books, 2010), Lining (Boxwood Editions, 2009), KabbaLoom (Wyrd Press, 2008), and ‘The Holy Spirit does not deal in synonimes: a Transcription of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Marginalia in Her Greek and Hebrew Bibles’ (Parcel Press, 2008). A pamphlet, Deer 1, was published by Oxeye Press, 2015, and Note on Niedecker’s Takuboku was published as a pamphlet by The Brother in Elysium in 2015 (expanded in The Wave Papers, 2016).
Fishman’s work is anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing (Omnidawn, 2014), The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013), The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012), Not For Mothers Only (Fence Books, 2007), American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2000) and elsewhere. New work by Fishman appears in 6x6, Denver Quarterly, The Fairy Tale Review, touch the donkey, Aurochs and other journals. Fishman was a performer with Young Shakespeare Players (Madison, WI) from 2015-2018, the Lorine Niedecker Poet-in-Residence on Blackhawk Island in 2009, and recent Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, where she is Professor of English and Creative Writing. A Pushcart Prize nominee and PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers nominee, Fishman continues to live on the farm she and her husband started in 1999 in Orfordville, Wisconsin, dividing her time between Wisconsin, Chicago, and Nova Scotia. She is a dual US/Canadian and is a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.
JOSHUA BECKMAN ANIMAL DAYS (Wave Poetry)
CA$23.00
Readers interested in the fragment as a form, or in the relationship of the body to perception will appreciate how Beckman unfolds and rearranges the physical phenomena he describes.
JOSHUA BECKMAN
ANIMAL DAYS
Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of many books, including Animal Days (Wave, 2021), The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks (Wave Books, 2018), The Inside of an Apple, Take It, Shake, Your Time Has Come, and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is editor-in-chief at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Micrograms, by Jorge Carrera Andrade, 5 Meters of Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) by Carlos Oquendo de Amat, and Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008) by Tomaž Šalamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He also co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books, 2015).
DOUGLAS KEARNEY SHO (Wave Books)
CA$23.00
Kearney's prosody is miraculous. Explosive double beats launch the lines or hit the break like a hi-hat. Slant rhymes suggest infinite puns, but Kearney sometimes downshifts from complexity and just cruises around the neighborhood. Formalism as syncopation and signification: I can't think of another writer as gifted as Kearney is at sound.
Sho exemplifies the daring possibilities for poetry today. Despite the devastation held within our lexicon, words hold the dazzling potential that we can rise through language to "come up clutching what is under— / come back striking / what’s above.”
—CD Eskilson, The Arkansas International
DOUGLAS KEARNEY
SHO
(Wave Books)
Eschewing performative typography, Douglas Kearney’s Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular strategies, while examining histories and current events through the lyric, brand new dances, and other performances. Both dazzling and devastating, Sho is a genius work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. In his “stove-like imagination,” Kearney has concocted poems that destabilize the spectacle, leaving looky-loos with an important uncertainty about the intersection between violence and entertainment. (Wave)
Douglas Kearney has published six collections, including Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and the California Book Award's silver medal in poetry. M. NourbeSe Philip calls Kearney’s collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues. (Subito, 2016), “a seismic, polyphonic mash-up.” Kearney’s Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution handpicked selection that Publishers Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” He has received a Whiting Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, residencies and fellowships from Cave Canem, the Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and lives in St. Paul with his family.
DON MEE CHOI DMZ COLONY (Wave Books)
CA$23.00
2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY WINNER [USA]
DON MEE CHOI
DMZ COLONY
(Wave Books)
Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said’s notion of “the intertwined and overlapping histories” in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind. (Wave Books)
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020) Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and several chapbooks and pamphlets of poems and essays. She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, Lucien Stryk Translation Prize, and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon's poetry, including Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), which received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
AMANDA EARL MATTHEW
CA$25.00
When this gospel queen heard she had a vispo of Matthew, she said, "WE MUST!" ...and then she SAW IT. - KIRBY
AMANDA EARL
MATTHEW
OUT JUNE 2021
NATALIE DIAZ POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM (Faber)
CA$20.00
SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION
NATALIE DIAZ
POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM [Faber]
Postcolonial Love Poem is a thunderous river of a book, an anthem of desire against erasure. It demands that every body carried in its pages - bodies of language, land, suffering brothers, enemies and lovers - be touched and held. Here, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic, and portrayed with a glowing intimacy: the alphabet of a hand in the dark, the hips' silvered percussion, a thigh's red-gold geometry, the emerald tigers that leap in a throat. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dune fields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.
Natalie Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves. Her poetry questions what kind of future we might create, built from the choices we make now - how we might learn our own cures and 'go where there is love'. [Faber]
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, won an American Book Award. She is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow, as well as a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded the Holmes National Poetry Prize and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumna of the Ford Fellowship. Diaz is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.
REBECCA SALAZAR SULPHERTONGUE (M&S)
CA$20.00
"Rebecca Salazar's poetry is a life-preserver in a sea of prejudice, pain, and confusion. Her words sing us back to what's essential: truth, often cutting but always necessary, and beauty, found in the least likely of places." — Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
"The sprawling visionary heft of sulphurtongue recoils the diluted senses of earth and skin, sex and sulphur dioxide, queerness and religion, and more to reveal their deeper labyrinths of meaning. The singular power of this work rests not only in its wholly mature command of the craft, but in how Salazar’s sulphurtongue is a burning votive towards a world where the warped silos of history’s personal, ecologic, and collective toll gather toward a new imagining. A shimmering, head-long, heart-spin of a debut." — Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst
REBECCA SALAZAR
SULPHURTONGUE
(M&S)
REBECCA SALAZAR (she/they) is a writer, editor, and community organizer currently living on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik people. The author of poetry chapbooks the knife you need to justify the wound (Rahila's Ghost) and Guzzle (Anstruther), Salazar also edits for The Fiddlehead and Plenitude magazines.
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CANISIA LUBRIN THE DYZGRAPHXST
CA$21.00
CA$15.00
Canisia Lubrin returns with a mesmerizing new collection, the follow-up to her breakout book, Voodoo Hypothesis.
The Dyzgraphxst presents seven inquiries into selfhood through the perennial figure Jejune. Polyvocal in register, the book moves to mine meanings of kinship through the wide and intimate reach of language across geographies and generations. Against the contemporary backdrop of intensified capitalist fascism, toxic nationalism, and climate disaster, the figure Jejune asks, how have I come to make home out of unrecognizability. Marked by and through diasporic life, Jejune declares, I was not myself. I am not myself. My self resembles something having nothing to do with me. (M&S)
CANISIA LUBRIN is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work is published widely and has been frequently anthologized, including translations into Italian and Spanish. Lubrin’s debut poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis, was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, longlisted for the Gerald Lambert Award, the Pat Lowther Award, and a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. She was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award for her fiction contribution to The Unpublished City: Vol 1 and 2019 Writer in Residence at Queen’s University. Lubrin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.
WATCH YOUR HEAD: WRITERS AND ARTISTS RESPOND TO THE CLIMATE CRISIS (Coach House Books)
CA$24.00
A warning.
A movement.
A collection borne of protest.
85 Contributors
15 Editors
1 Visionary Publisher
In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it.
Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical.
This is a call to climate-justice action.
Edited by Madhur Anand, Stephen Collis, Jennifer Dorner, Catherine Graham, Elena Johnson, Canisia Lubrin, Kim Mannix, Kathryn Mockler, June Pak, Sina Queyras, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Rasiqra Revulva, Yusuf Saadi, Sanchari Sur, and Jacqueline Valencia
Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN and Climate Justice Toronto.
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KATE SUTHERLAND THE BONES ARE THERE (Book*hug)
CA$18.00
CA$15.00
KATE SUTHERLAND
THE BONES ARE THERE
(Book*hug)
“Listen: The Bones Are There is lament. Siren. An alarm clocking witness to pasts fraught with loss in the name of discovery and patriarchy. Lists of extinct species. Legal-case lists of women executed for witchcraft. A list of de-extinction instructions. Lists of syntactic similarities insist the reader sees the correlative imperialist violence of what was—
These bones were found…
These bones were found…
These bones were found…
—not so long ago. With an archivist’s touch and a lawyer’s eagle eye, Kate Sutherland plunders historic texts to rip colonialism asunder.” —a. rawlings
>>> KFB EXCLUSIVE
Purchase KATE SUTHERLAND'S THE BONES ARE THERE and receive a FREE COPY of her beauteous KFB Chapbook BEASTS OF THE SEA [while supplies last]
KATE SUTHERLAND was born in Scotland, immigrated to Canada as a child, and grew up in Saskatoon. She studied first at the University of Saskatchewan, then at Harvard Law School. She is the author of two collections of short stories, Summer Reading (winner, Saskatchewan Book Award for Best First Book) and All in Together Girls, and the poetry collection, How to Draw a Rhinoceros (shortlisted for a Creative Writing Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). Her stories and poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies including Best Canadian Poetry and Best American Experimental Writing. She has done residencies at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland and at the Leighton Artist Studios in Banff. She lives in Toronto where she is a professor and conducts research in the fields of Tort Law, Feminist Legal Theory, and Law and Literature at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University.
SARAH DOWLING ENTERING SAPPHO (Coach house Books)
CA$22.00
The title poem in SARAH DOWLING's new book is the most on fire long love poem since Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems. Amazing! - Stephen Collis
An abandoned town named for the classical lesbian leads to questions about history and settlement.
Driving along the Pacific Coast Highway, you come to a road sign: Entering Sappho. Nothing remains of the town, just trash at the side of the highway and thick, wet bush. Can Sappho’s breathless eroticism tell us anything about settlement—about why we’re here in front of this sign? Mixing historical documents, oral histories, and experimental translations of the original lesbian poet’s works, this book combines documentary and speculation, surveying a century in reverse. This town is one of many with a classical name. Take it as a symbol: perhaps in a place that no longer exists, another kind of future might be possible. (Coach House)
AVANT DESIRE A NICOLE BROSSARD READER (Coach House Books)
CA$27.00
The definitive survey of an essential feminist poet.
Edited by SINA QUEYRAS, GENEVIEVE ROBICHAUD, and ERIN WUNKER
In June 2019, Nicole Brossard was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Trust. Rarely has a prize been so richly deserved. For five decades she has been writing ground-breaking poetry, fiction, and criticism in French that has always been steadfastly and unashamedly feminist and lesbian.
Avant Desire moves through Brossard’s body of work with a playful attentiveness to its ongoing lines of inquiry. Like her work, this reader moves beyond conventional textual material to include ephemera, interviews, marginalia, lectures, and more. Just as Brossard foregrounds collaboration, this book includes new translations alongside canonical ones and intertextual and responsive work from a variety of artist translators at various stages of their careers.
Through their selections, the editors trace Brossard’s fusion of lesbian feminist desire with innovation, experimentation, and activism, emphasizing the more overtly political nature of her early work and its transition into performative thinking.
Devotees of Brossard will be invigorated by the range of previously unavailable materials included here, while new readings will find a thread of inquiry that is more than a mere introduction to her complex body of work. Avant Desire situates Brossard’s thinking across her oeuvre as that of a writer whose sights are always cast toward the horizon. (Coach House Books)
CHANTAL NEVEU THIS RADIANT LIFE translated by ERíN MOURE (Book*hug Press)
CA$20.00
Very few words are hosted on each of these aerated pages. Turning the page in itself confirms the implicit need for breathing space, or for trying to make some sense of it all, while being carried along the currents of one’s own time. Everything intermingled. Inescapable as the butterfly effect. Words work like knots of awareness down the rope of lines.” —Caroline Bergvall
“As Chantal Neveu and Erín Moure mine the mono-dimensional sediment of language they liberate a vocabulary of synaesthetic perception. This Radiant Life crushes narrative and reference, not into parts of speech but into illuminated particles, “words as such.” In this trans-collaboration, words reciprocate the speed and spaces on the perimeter of public sensibility. Gangues of language like “eye to eye” “word flow” in the face of the Arab Springs, “the sound of paper,” “coffee/ reheated/ on the hob,” “zig…zag” float by as radiant flecks and syllables on a perceptual horizon. Each turn of the page carries an echo of isolate light, the answer to what happens next.” —Fred Wah
“Oscillating between various subatomic particles, spaces, and word matter that make life life—i.e. the stuff and messiness of being, the macro and the micro, the chemistry, biology, geology, language of experience/experiment—This Radiant Life entreats us to slow down, attend to, and cherish the elemental. In so doing, we will have access to an inexhaustible force for resistance and resilience; we will be able to truly see and be seen by others. Powerfully embodied and chiselled by Chantal Neveu and deftly and intricately translated by Erín Moure, This Radiant Life is urgent, alive, and absolutely present.” —Oana Avasilichioaei
Chantal Neveu is the author of five books of poetry, including La vie radieuse (This Radiant Life, Book*hug); coït (Coït, Book*hug); mentale, Une spectaculaire influence (A Spectacular Influence, Book*hug), and èdres (É=É). She has created numerous interdisciplinary literary works, presented in Canada and abroad. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies: Cyclages/Grupmuv, Espaces de savoir, Laboratoire parcellaire. She has held residencies at Maison de la poésie de Nantes (France), Passa Porta and Villa Hellebosch (Belgium), and Villa Waldberta (Germany). Neveu lives in Montreal.
Erín Moure has published over forty books, including poetry, essays, memoir, and translations/co-translations from French, Spanish, Galician, Portuguese, Portunhol, and Ukrainian. Recent translations: In Leaf by Rosalía de Castro, The Uplands: Book of the Courel by Uxío Novoneyra, and Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism by Juan Gelman. Moure holds two honorary doctorates from universities in Canada and Spain, was a 2017 Creative Fellow at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, and the 2019 International Translator in Residence at Queen’s College, Oxford. Moure lives in Montreal.
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FRED WAH MUSIC AT THE HEART OF THINKING
CA$25.00
CA$20.00
Only a few left!
KFB 2021 FERTILE SELECTION
“Verse, prose, verse-prose: multi-referential yet playful. It is a book of poetics as poem as reality-expanding creative possibility. In a sequence written across books and forty years, MHT is a poetics of process—as opposed to a poetics of knowledge—that directs our attention to the play of reality and time, as being led by words to where “the wickerwack of wonder prevails”.
— Hoa Nguyen on Fred Wah’s Music at the Heart of Thinking (Talonbooks 2020)
The music of thinking. The thinking of music. Music at the Heart of Thinking is a poetry that works through language as the true practice of thought and improvisation as the tool that listens to and notates thinking. From jazz, the unpredictable ad lib driving itself from itself. From a drunken Shaolin monk, the poem as imbalanced tai chi. From Keats’s negative capability, the half-closed eye, the estrangement of language. All intended to bump beyond the end of the word into focus. As a response to readings in contemporary texts, art, and ideas. Music at the Heart of Thinking relocates critical language and thinking to the poetic bavardage at the heart of such endeavours. The poetics that generates these texts arises out of a lifelong poem project that has its roots in the long poem genre of the ’80s and its interest in the resistance to closure and the containment of meaning characteristic of the lyric. This book continues the work of two previous out-of-print publications, Music at the Heart of Thinking (1987) and Alley, Alley Home Free (1990). The poems are generated as textual responses in the reading, looking, and listening of the poet’s attention to his cultural milieu. Thus the writing addresses contemporary texts and art over the past forty years. Within this poetry of estrangement lie possible coherences for some sense of writing as a notation for thinking as feeling. The difficulty of this writing is literal and intentional, wary of any attempt to make thinking simple, easy, or predictable. (Talonbooks)
FRED WAH was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, in 1939, and he grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. Studying at UBC in the early 1960s, he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. After graduate work with Robert Creeley at the University of New Mexico and with Charles Olson at SUNY, Buffalo, he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960s, founding the writing program at DTUC before moving on to teach at the University of Calgary. A pioneer of online publishing, he has mentored a generation of some of the most exciting new voices in poetry today.
Of his seventeen books of poetry, is a door received the BC Book Prize, Waiting For Saskatchewan received the Governor-General’s Award and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry. Diamond Grill, a biofiction about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café won the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction, and his collection of critical writing, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, received the Gabrielle Roy Prize.
Wah was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2012. He served as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2013.
To learn more about his work, visit The Fred Wah Digital Archive
KLARA DU PLESSIS HELL LIGHT FLESH (Palimpsest Press)
CA$19.00
"KFB is a very special bookstore that makes you feel like a poet." - KLARA DU PLESSIS
KFB SELECTS 2020
Winner of the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award for Ekke
KLARA DU PLESSIS
HELL FLESH LIGHT
In her second collection of poetry, Hell Light Flesh, Klara du Plessis returns with a Dantesque trilogy on family, punishment, and the ferocity and brilliance of creation. Hell Light Flesh drops the reader into a narrative claustrophobically entwined in unquestioned systemic violence where art and art criticism act as a consistent glimmer of hope. Over and over, the poem lends itself to allegory, and yields to layers of interpretation. Hell Light Flesh is mandatory reading for devotees of the long poem and fans of du Plessis’ thrilling brand of essayistic poetry alike. (Palimpsest)
KLARA DU PLESSIS is a poet, critic, and literary curator. Her debut collection of multilingual long poems, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and garnered much critical acclaim. She lives in Montreal and Cape Town.
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ANGELA CARR WITHOUT CEREMONY (Book*hug)
CA$18.00
CA$15.00
Only a few left!
“Angela Carr’s words in Without Ceremony point their arrows toward a ledge where communication knows “both failure and perfection at once.” Her poetry isn’t invested in naming things (perhaps this is what is unceremonious) because things, even thingness, and their energies change so rapidly. Carr creates a field of verb-rich arriving where confessional exasperations are tried and transformed in pleasurable abstraction. She summons other women poets and artists (Hesse, Dickinson, Mitchell) not to revere them but to create a queer chorus of those who can bring us to see that what seems holy is simply ordinary.” —Stacy Szymaszek, author of A Year From Today
Centred on the everyday, and crafted without preamble or pretension, the poems in Without Ceremony are a literary pastiche— a thematic mosaic not unlike tracks on an album. Amidst a timeless cast of characters from Lucretius and Eva Hesse to Joan Mitchell and St. Augustine, Carr illuminates what it means to truly know something and questions how certain knowledge becomes valued over others. Without Ceremony spotlights the gendered division of ideas and the inherent strength of language to harm and oppress, as well as elevate. Within these pages, passing encounters become rare spectacles, and the ordinary, without ambitions of grandeur or ceremony, is celebrated, making Carr’s new collection a clarifying elixir for our time. (Book*hug)
JAMES LINDSAY DOUBLE SELF-PORTRAIT
CA$18.00
Only a few left!
“Here, the poet declares it is time to reconsider what is heroic, what is left after wading through the detritus of the modern world and the self is left bare. In Double Self-Portrait unsettled lives are depicted with the fierce self-questioning of a philosopher in the well-negotiated timbre of a comedian tuned to the wreckages of this hour in the world. Lindsay’s searching lines offer a counter-reading of the self that does not mean to make you see everything. Here is a repose for the things that should last in the self but do not.” – CANISIA LUBRIN, author of The Dyzgraphxst and Voodoo Hypothesis
Double Self-Portrait explores doubling and reproduction in art, memory, culture, nostalgia and fatherhood. Divided by four longer, more autobiographical poems, Double Self-Portrait is a deeply layered collection, one that at times speaks directly to the reader and at other times is meta-textual. Bees, cicadas, music and photography swirl through these poems, bounded as they are by the resistance to and embracing of responsibility. This is a collection where the poems work individually and together, subtly building toward a single theme that slowly coalesces during the reading to create a collection that resonates in your mind long after the book is closed. (Wolsak & Wynn)
JAMES LINDSAY has been a bookseller for more than a decade. He is also co-owner of Pleasence Records in Toronto, a record label specializing in post-punk, odd-pop and avant-garde sound pieces.
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