Winner of the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize • Finalist for the QWF A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry

An original, inventive--and visually stunning--exploration of place, identity, language, and experience from the acclaimed poet, novelist, and sound performer.

The poems in Kaie Kellough's third collection drift between South and North America. They seek their ancestry in Georgetown, Guyana, in the Amazon Rainforest, and in the Atlantic Ocean. They haunt the Canadian Prairie. They recall the 1980s in the suburbs of Calgary, and they reflect on the snowed-in, bricked-in boroughs of post-referendum Montréal. They puzzle their language together from the natural world and from the works of Caribbean and Canadian writers. They reassemble passages about seed catalogues, about origins, about finding a way in the world, about black ships sailing across to land. They struggle to explain a state of being hemisphered, of being present here while carrying a heartbeat from elsewhere, and they map the distances travelled.

KAIE KELLOUGH is a novelist, poet, and sound performer. He is the author of the novel Accordéon, which was a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, two books of poetry, Lettricity and Maple Leaf Rag, and two albums, Vox:Versus and Creole Continuum. He has performed and published internationally. He lives in Montreal, Quebec.

An original, inventive--and visually stunning--exploration of place, identity, language, and experience from the acclaimed poet, novelist, and sound performer.

The poems in Kaie Kellough's third collection are inhabited by migration and distance. They are ghosts that issue from suburban oblivion. They are released from their non-existence by suicides in the back seats of sedans. They wander, and seek a language for their wandering. The words they find are often made of smoke. They drift between North and South America looking for their ancestry in the Amazon Rainforest, the Atlantic Ocean, and the prairies, foothills, and badlands of Western Canada. They haunt the hostile suburbs of Calgary and they finally come to rest in the snowed-in, bricked-in boroughs of Montreal. They find their voice in the natural world and in the works of Caribbean and Canadian novelists and poets. They reassemble passages about migration, about seed catalogues, about origins, about finding a way in the world, about black ships sailing across to land, and this act of appropriation is evidence of two things: a struggle to explain a state of being hemisphered, of being present here while carrying a heartbeat from elsewhere, and a mapping of the distances travelled.