KFB24 Cole. Kirby. Smith.
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A dream offering of newKFB full-lengths from Kirby, Dale Martin Smith, & a new chapbook by Norma Cole.
Subscribe to the season and save $10!*
Praise for Norma Cole:
Norma Cole’s forms of expression are ambitious. Her poems often (though not always) take small forms; they are made of short lines, in small stanzas, so that the space of the page starts to play an active role in the reading of them. Subtly, surreptitiously, these small packages explode in delicate, or sometimes not so delicate, arrays of color and attitude. Norma is famous for her empathic connections to people, artists and others, living and dead. Many of her poems carry dedications. She builds community as part of her poetic practice. On the other hand, she reserves a razor-sharp and ice-cold anger for the abuses of power and depradations of the morally corrupt as she observes them in the halls of power, here and around the world. The world is always calling in these poems; sometimes it is being called away, as we are made to look, through Norma’s poems, from the perspective of the universe. It is then that the human quality really shines through. Norma is a visual artist, in addition to being a writer, and has often worked in collaboration with other artists. Not just the look of her poems, but the images she shows us in them, will carry us a long way. - Vincent Katz, March 16 2021, Tribute to Norma Cole
sooner or later, time
approaches, highly
volatile, almost asleep
and not get their footing
NORMA COLE
R A I N Y D A Y
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-68-8
Norma Cole was born in Toronto in 1945. She is a poet, painter, and translator. Her most recent books of poetry include Fate News (2018), Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside (2012), Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems, 1988–2008 (2009), and Spinoza in Her Youth (2002). Cole has also published the volumes To be at Music: Essays & Talks (2010) and Actualities (2015), a collaboration with painter Marina Adams. Her translations from French include Danielle Collobert’s It Then (1989) and Jean Daive’s A Woman with Several Lives (2009). Additionally, Cole edited and translated Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (2000). Her awards include the Fund for Poetry, Gertrude Stein Award, the Richardson Award for Non-Fiction Prose and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award for Poetry. She curated a show by Marina Adams at Cue Arts in NYC and collaborated with Adams in BOMB 114, Winter 2011. Her visual work has been shown at the Miami University Art Museum, [2nd floor projects] in San Francisco, “Way Bay,” at the Berkeley Art Museum and most recently her film, “By the Turning Bridge,” at Arion Press, San Francisco, and NIAD, Richmond, California. A book of her drawings, called DRAWINGS, with an introduction by Mary Ann Caws, just appeared from Further Other Book Works.
Praise for Dale Martin Smith:
What is lyric’s relation to history, to a public today? In this poetry – the impossible heart beating intensities through every human murmur and whisper that manages to lift itself up into song into solace. In this poetry, the deep neon glow of America visible from across fake nations’ lines, pulsating broken geographies, rent histories, torn earth. Deep gratitude to Dale Smith for willing more beauty and more tenderness into the world. – STEPHEN COLLIS, Latner Prize winner and author of A History of the Theories of Rain
In lines of great lyric discernment with an eye to atrocities of the past in the present, Dale Smith reimagines the song form as our consummate equipment for living. Flying Red Horse confirms his breathtaking artistry that – insofar as any time of innocence is over – holds at once a place, an exhortation, a persevering, a reverie, a promise. – ROBERTO TEJADA, Guggenheim Fellow and author of Why the Assembly Disbanded
Come heaven’s material poem, call
bony spirit step when I can hardly stand.
DALE MARTIN SMITH
THE SIZE OF PARADISE
Poetry. Book. 100 pages.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-65-7
A poet and literary scholar, Dale Martin Smith was born in Dallas, Texas. He earned a BA and PhD in English from the University of Texas, and an MA in Poetics from New College of California. He is the author of the full-length poetry collections Flying Red Horse (2021), Slow Poetry in America (2014), Black Stone (2007), American Rambler (2000), as well as the KFB chapbooks, Sons (2017), and Blur (2022). Smith’s scholarly contributions include Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 (2012) and two edited editions, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson (both 2017), for which he received Simon Fraser University’s Charles Olson Award. His essays and poetry have appeared in Poetry, The Walrus, LA Review of Books, Boston Review, and Lambda Literary. With Hoa Nguyen, he edited Skanky Possum, a literary zine and book imprint, 1998-2004. Smith joined the faculty of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, in 2011. He is currently at work on an essay collection, ["That Tongue Be Time"] on the poetry and prosody of Norma Cole (2024).
Praise for Kirby:
A glorious rampage through glory holes to holy glory, This is Where I Get Off is an incandescent trip through time & place. With singing rage, ferocious wit, shy tenderness, and defiant heart, these poems kick against the pricks, even as they worship what wounds. This collection cuts through convention to command attention. A triumphant FUCK YOU to unfeeling. Sublimely smutty, these poems make radiant the articular pain of gay lust in a world that denies its existence. Love is not obscene, bodies are beauty, and belonging can be found even in the back row of an adult cinema. "Can you imagine all she's lived through?" Kirby questions, then answers by blowing open all closets, tossing skeletons aside to two-step on the bones. - Roxanna Bennett, Author of Unmeaningable & Unseen Garden
Kirby's Poetry is Queer is a work that refuses to be contained, boxed-in, defined by any terms that might seek to diminish or limit its insistence on possibility. A manifesto for life as art, art as life, one that witnesses, repairs, and defends the self in all its time-spanning facets—beauty, liberation, grief, survival, transcendence--Poetry is Queer is a gift from a rebel elder who is willing to look back with honesty and to reach forward with hope. - Damian Rogers, Author of An Alphabet for Joanna
Advance praise for She:
She is a capacious city of rich human habitation, where elation is every day’s caring infusion. Her cityscapes are painted deftly—in few words, in pauses, in juxtapositions, in fond attentions, in breath and the difficulty of breath, by a poet who knows deeply that life is fragile and that age comes and alters us. She says: the world loves us back when we love it. Flowers, streets, lovers, skies, persons, walks, in/fusions. She is joy’s pronoun! — Erín Moure, Theophylline
A Poetic Migration Via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo)
KIRBY
She
Poetry. Book.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-63-3
KIRBY’s work includes Behold (2023), a stage adaption of Poetry is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2021) What Do You Want to Be Called? (Anstruther Press, 2020) This Is Where I Get Off (Permanent Sleep Press, 2019) She’s Having a Doris Day (KFB, 2017) & editor NOT YOUR BEST No. 2, The Queer Ass Fuck Issue (KFB 2021). They're working on a follow-up to Poetry is Queer, MORE (2026) and their Substack column, “The First Time” can be found at Send My Love To Anyone. They are the publisher at knife | fork | book and can be found at kirbyshe.com
*(Canada Only. KFB is distributed by Asterism Books).
Subscribe to the season and save $10!*
Praise for Norma Cole:
Norma Cole’s forms of expression are ambitious. Her poems often (though not always) take small forms; they are made of short lines, in small stanzas, so that the space of the page starts to play an active role in the reading of them. Subtly, surreptitiously, these small packages explode in delicate, or sometimes not so delicate, arrays of color and attitude. Norma is famous for her empathic connections to people, artists and others, living and dead. Many of her poems carry dedications. She builds community as part of her poetic practice. On the other hand, she reserves a razor-sharp and ice-cold anger for the abuses of power and depradations of the morally corrupt as she observes them in the halls of power, here and around the world. The world is always calling in these poems; sometimes it is being called away, as we are made to look, through Norma’s poems, from the perspective of the universe. It is then that the human quality really shines through. Norma is a visual artist, in addition to being a writer, and has often worked in collaboration with other artists. Not just the look of her poems, but the images she shows us in them, will carry us a long way. - Vincent Katz, March 16 2021, Tribute to Norma Cole
sooner or later, time
approaches, highly
volatile, almost asleep
and not get their footing
NORMA COLE
R A I N Y D A Y
Poetry. Chapbook.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-68-8
Norma Cole was born in Toronto in 1945. She is a poet, painter, and translator. Her most recent books of poetry include Fate News (2018), Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside (2012), Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems, 1988–2008 (2009), and Spinoza in Her Youth (2002). Cole has also published the volumes To be at Music: Essays & Talks (2010) and Actualities (2015), a collaboration with painter Marina Adams. Her translations from French include Danielle Collobert’s It Then (1989) and Jean Daive’s A Woman with Several Lives (2009). Additionally, Cole edited and translated Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (2000). Her awards include the Fund for Poetry, Gertrude Stein Award, the Richardson Award for Non-Fiction Prose and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award for Poetry. She curated a show by Marina Adams at Cue Arts in NYC and collaborated with Adams in BOMB 114, Winter 2011. Her visual work has been shown at the Miami University Art Museum, [2nd floor projects] in San Francisco, “Way Bay,” at the Berkeley Art Museum and most recently her film, “By the Turning Bridge,” at Arion Press, San Francisco, and NIAD, Richmond, California. A book of her drawings, called DRAWINGS, with an introduction by Mary Ann Caws, just appeared from Further Other Book Works.
Praise for Dale Martin Smith:
What is lyric’s relation to history, to a public today? In this poetry – the impossible heart beating intensities through every human murmur and whisper that manages to lift itself up into song into solace. In this poetry, the deep neon glow of America visible from across fake nations’ lines, pulsating broken geographies, rent histories, torn earth. Deep gratitude to Dale Smith for willing more beauty and more tenderness into the world. – STEPHEN COLLIS, Latner Prize winner and author of A History of the Theories of Rain
In lines of great lyric discernment with an eye to atrocities of the past in the present, Dale Smith reimagines the song form as our consummate equipment for living. Flying Red Horse confirms his breathtaking artistry that – insofar as any time of innocence is over – holds at once a place, an exhortation, a persevering, a reverie, a promise. – ROBERTO TEJADA, Guggenheim Fellow and author of Why the Assembly Disbanded
Come heaven’s material poem, call
bony spirit step when I can hardly stand.
DALE MARTIN SMITH
THE SIZE OF PARADISE
Poetry. Book. 100 pages.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-65-7
A poet and literary scholar, Dale Martin Smith was born in Dallas, Texas. He earned a BA and PhD in English from the University of Texas, and an MA in Poetics from New College of California. He is the author of the full-length poetry collections Flying Red Horse (2021), Slow Poetry in America (2014), Black Stone (2007), American Rambler (2000), as well as the KFB chapbooks, Sons (2017), and Blur (2022). Smith’s scholarly contributions include Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 (2012) and two edited editions, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson (both 2017), for which he received Simon Fraser University’s Charles Olson Award. His essays and poetry have appeared in Poetry, The Walrus, LA Review of Books, Boston Review, and Lambda Literary. With Hoa Nguyen, he edited Skanky Possum, a literary zine and book imprint, 1998-2004. Smith joined the faculty of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, in 2011. He is currently at work on an essay collection, ["That Tongue Be Time"] on the poetry and prosody of Norma Cole (2024).
Praise for Kirby:
A glorious rampage through glory holes to holy glory, This is Where I Get Off is an incandescent trip through time & place. With singing rage, ferocious wit, shy tenderness, and defiant heart, these poems kick against the pricks, even as they worship what wounds. This collection cuts through convention to command attention. A triumphant FUCK YOU to unfeeling. Sublimely smutty, these poems make radiant the articular pain of gay lust in a world that denies its existence. Love is not obscene, bodies are beauty, and belonging can be found even in the back row of an adult cinema. "Can you imagine all she's lived through?" Kirby questions, then answers by blowing open all closets, tossing skeletons aside to two-step on the bones. - Roxanna Bennett, Author of Unmeaningable & Unseen Garden
Kirby's Poetry is Queer is a work that refuses to be contained, boxed-in, defined by any terms that might seek to diminish or limit its insistence on possibility. A manifesto for life as art, art as life, one that witnesses, repairs, and defends the self in all its time-spanning facets—beauty, liberation, grief, survival, transcendence--Poetry is Queer is a gift from a rebel elder who is willing to look back with honesty and to reach forward with hope. - Damian Rogers, Author of An Alphabet for Joanna
Advance praise for She:
She is a capacious city of rich human habitation, where elation is every day’s caring infusion. Her cityscapes are painted deftly—in few words, in pauses, in juxtapositions, in fond attentions, in breath and the difficulty of breath, by a poet who knows deeply that life is fragile and that age comes and alters us. She says: the world loves us back when we love it. Flowers, streets, lovers, skies, persons, walks, in/fusions. She is joy’s pronoun! — Erín Moure, Theophylline
A Poetic Migration Via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo)
KIRBY
She
Poetry. Book.
ISBN: 978-1-989355-63-3
KIRBY’s work includes Behold (2023), a stage adaption of Poetry is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2021) What Do You Want to Be Called? (Anstruther Press, 2020) This Is Where I Get Off (Permanent Sleep Press, 2019) She’s Having a Doris Day (KFB, 2017) & editor NOT YOUR BEST No. 2, The Queer Ass Fuck Issue (KFB 2021). They're working on a follow-up to Poetry is Queer, MORE (2026) and their Substack column, “The First Time” can be found at Send My Love To Anyone. They are the publisher at knife | fork | book and can be found at kirbyshe.com
*(Canada Only. KFB is distributed by Asterism Books).