12 or 20 (second series) questions with Louise Akers

Louise Akers is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She is a PhD student in English at NYU and is the co-organizer of the small press and working group, the Organism for Poetic Research. Akers is the author of two books of poetry, Alien Year (Oversound, 2020) and Elizabeth/The story of Drone (Propeller Books, 2022).

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first chapbook came out in 2021 with the exceptional people at Oversound, but the process of writing it had begun probably in 2016. It was a sharply condensed version of a much longer, more gangly and amorphous manuscript that I had taken a pretty sculptural approach to cutting down. Working with Oversound was a wonderful and generous experience, and I am very proud of that little chap! My second book, Elizabeth/the story of Drone (Propeller Books, 2022) is a very different beast. I wrote it mostly in the summer and fall of 2019 while I was working part time at a museum, and it is much more project-based, much less distilled. For instance, it has characters and scenes, which was a stretch for me! My editors at Propeller were also incredibly thoughtful and supportive, so it retains, I think, a kind of frantic, creepy spontaneity that’s much less condensed. Now my work feels much more personal; both of those books I think were self-consciously non-confessional, almost anti-autobiographical. I lost both of my parents in the last two years, which really put my writing on hold. It also kind of disallowed me from avoiding myself in my work anymore. I think going through that really changed how I approach language and self-disclosure in language. Grief makes your brain different.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I’ve always been really attracted to language as a medium you can manipulate or organize into something that can exceed or subvert or complicate its so-called “content.” I’m fascinated by how far away language can get from its meaning, from anything resembling “information,” but still do or activate so much else. That’s really what got me into poetry. Admittedly, I tried to make Elizabeth into a novel, but fell quite short of the mark, I think. I struggle with maintaining that level of fidelity to an object, maybe.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

My writing comes quickly or not at all really, haha. I write in pretty huge deluges and then kind of try to take a scalpel to it. In some cases, the first shot is the final one, but in others only a line or two will survive the purge so to speak, so it really depends. I take a lot of notes. I go through periods where I feel like I am just accumulating and accumulating language in a kind of stockpile, and then suddenly, without warning really, I am ready to let her rip. 

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I think I am always aware of a future life of a poem in a book, but I don’t necessarily proceed with that intention. I will have one document full of writing or poems that I can fully conceptualize many different books around. I think I am more successful when I am more conceptually agnostic and just kind of let my writing develop constellations of meaning over time.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love doing readings–because they are fun and social and ephemeral experiences, but also it is a hell of a way to edit a poem. When I know I am reading something out loud in front of strangers, I will be totally ruthless in a way that only vanity can inspire. Also sometimes while I’m reading it, and really hearing and feeling its living reception I will change little things to allow for clarity or rhythm or some other immediate and interpersonal effect.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

My questions or concerns have emerged really out of my professional/institutional backgrounds, which include the art world and academia. Elizabeth was really concerned with the media-technological intersections between the commercial art world and the USAmerican war machine; drones became a kind of figure for that acute anxiety, but also defanged self-disgust in a sense of complicity. Now, I am thinking more about grief, on an individual level but also on a social level. Covid happened and f*cked us all up in ways that we are still only just beginning to recognize, let alone understand. The ongoing genocide in Palestine has revealed many things about the West and the US, including just how tight the chokehold that the executive branch of government has on the academic and cultural institutions that we, as writers and artists and scholars, have tried very hard to be a part of, actually is. Grief feels really close, and closer still the more it is held at bay. There is so much more to say about this, but I’ll leave it there for now.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Oh, it’s hard not to just quote Walter Benjamin on this one. I think critique is important; I think it is important to register the fact that throwing language at a problem (“problem” standing in here very broadly and clumsily for any of the myriad social-political-environmental-economic cataclysms we are enmeshed in currently), policing the language around a problem, or even diagnosing a problem discursively are all deeply incomplete projects, while also realizing that that is not an excuse or a reason not to do those things. Very clunky sentence, but hopefully you get the drift.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I like it. I find it pretty easy to take criticism, and also I kind of appreciate the moments where I instinctively dig my heels in. I think it’s revealing about what is important to me in ways I might not register otherwise. I do have to say I have had really exclusively wonderful experiences with editors, so maybe I am just lucky!

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Not every single thing you do has to be done in the most efficient way. It’s ok to get somewhere via a circuitous, delayed, or otherwise imperfect route.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I am in graduate school getting a PhD so maintaining a routine is really a cherished pipe dream of mine. I am working with my therapist on it! My only real routine comes from my dog, Moose, who needs four walks a day. Everything else can fall apart, but she always gets me out of bed for that first walk!!

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

When I am really struggling, the only way for me to move at all is to read. I often will just grab a comically heavy hitter like Rimbaud or Ashbury or Dickinson off the shelf and open to a random page and start reading until I feel like I have a brain again. It doesn’t always work.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The ocean and those little lavender scented pillows that deter moths.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

My sister is a visual artist and she and I are very close, so visual art has always been really important to me and my practice. I worked in galleries for a few years, and studied art history in undergrad. I think a lot about Impressionist painters like John Singer Sargent and Romantic painters like JMW Turner, because their work seems to suggest a lot about what I think poetry can do: say a lot with a little, which is to say, perform a deceptively spontaneous gesture, and perform it with excruciating precision despite its purported lack of realism. I also listen to a lot of music, but have famously uncool taste haha.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

A brief and non-exhaustive list of writers who are very important to me presented in no particular order: Anne Carson, William Blake, Fred Moten, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sean Bonney, Samuel Delany, Wallace Stevens, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Diane di Prima, Alice Notley, Louis Zukofsky, Lucretius, John Donne, Dionne Brand, William Wordsworth (I’m a Romanticist, technically, so I can’t help it), Lyn Hejinian, Walter Benjamin…the list goes on and on!

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to write a play. That form of collaboration and interpretation and spontaneity attracts me immensely, but also intimidates me!

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I think if I had not been a writer, I would still be in the art world. I think if I could start over and have a different life, I would be a professional athlete lol.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Growing up, my older sister was always demonstrably exceptionally talented as a visual artist; I was not. I think my parents really didn’t want us to be in direct competition with each other, so I was kind of pushed into sports because I was better at that. I had this kind of complex that because she was so good at creative arts, that wasn’t for me. I had to be good at something else entirely. It wasn’t until after college really that I started writing creatively, and I think it was mostly because my sister wasn’t a poet, so I thought I could do that. I got into poetry because it seemed the most precise way to get at wiggly, uncertain feelings and thoughts and desires I didn’t have language for otherwise.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I very rarely read novels, which I shouldn’t admit, but I read Portrait of a Lady by Henry James last month and it was an absolute delight. I also really loved Robert Eggers’ new take on Nosferatu, with the caveat that film is not my strong suit.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Right now I am working on a book about grief. It’s also about certainty. It hasn’t really happened on purpose, but whenever I start writing it’s like this kind of elliptical return. It’s also heavily influenced by my very conflicted but somewhat obsessive reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I’m very curious about ways in which philosophers, misguidedly and dogmatically, try to make their readers feel better about how impossible it is to know anything about anything or anyone with any certainty. Philosophy is supposed to be something like therapy, you know? But it fails, and often leads us down worse rabbit holes with more distressing questions, or accusations. I miss my parents and I feel like time stopped when I lost them. But it didn’t for anyone else. I don’t know what to do with that, so I’m writing about it.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

today is Aoife's ninth birthday,

Happy birthday, Aoife!

Nine. god sakes.

She had a birthday party this past Sunday, during which she and seven of her friends, as well as sister Rose and myself, could not figure out how to escape the escape room (I absolutely hate escape rooms, but that was her request). But the kids had enough fun, and no-one cried or fought or anything so it probably still worked. Once the time ran out we were released for pizza and cake. Everybody loves cake.

Spotlight series #108 : Mahaila Smith

The one hundred and eighth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Ottawa writer and editor Mahaila Smith.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan, Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn, North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson, award-winning poet Ellen Chang-Richardson, Montreal-based poet, professor and scholar of feminist poetics, Jessi MacEachern, Toronto poet and physician Dr. Conor Mc Donnell, San Francisco poet Micah Ballard and Montreal poet Misha Solomon.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lesley Wheeler

Lesley Wheeler, Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, is the author of Mycocosmic, runner-up for the Dorset Prize and her sixth poetry collection. Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds and the novel Unbecoming; previous poetry books include The State She’s In and Heterotopia, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. Wheeler’s work has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Workshop, and the Sewanee Writers Workshop. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Poets & Writers, Kenyon Review Online, Ecotone, Guernica, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Virginia and teaches at W&L University.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

This is weird to say because poetry books earn virtually nothing, but the biggest way publication changed my life was economic. Publication is artistically validating and joyous, and those first books in each genre transformed my sense of identity, but in the academic reward system, books enable tenure and promotion.

My debut full-length poetry collection, Heathen, was, like many first books, a best-of album honed at live readings. Mycocosmic is a concept album about the underworlds that support above-ground transformation.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Poetry suits me because I love sound patterns and my brain prefers associative to logical moves. I wrote fiction constantly as a child, though, and I’ve circled back to bring that genre into my writing life again.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Initial drafts tend to flow rapidly: the bad first draft of my novel Unbecoming, for example, emerged in a seven-week writing binge. It’s very rare, though, for me to draft a poem or anything else that doesn’t then require massive revision. I tend to put a draft away for months, pull it out for a radical overhaul, and repeat the process a few times. It takes me a long time to see the work from a critical distance.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I’ve worked both ways, but most commonly: I write by impulse until I accumulate a pile of poems. Then I sift through them, thinking about throughlines. Finally, I start writing and revising toward that throughline, and the book comes together. “Underpoem [Fire Fungus]” in Mycocosmic, a verse essay that unites the book by threading across the bottom of every page, was probably the last poem I wrote for the collection.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I always feel lucky to give a reading to a live audience—to connect with people through poetry in real time. I enjoy conversations about poetry even more, whether in interviews or classrooms. Like a lot of professors, though, I’m an introvert-extrovert: it’s fun to ham it up, but then I have to pay myself back with solitude.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I tell students when I teach speculative fiction that its operative questions are “what’s real, what matters.” That’s true for poetry as well, whether it arises from a documentary impulse, relies on autobiography, imitates prayer, or springs from some other field. For the past ten years I’ve also been probing the question “who am I now?” Midlife transforms a person in many ways, but it’s electrifying to read about microbiota, too. If 80% of the DNA in my body is not human, is it in any way meaningful to use first-person singular pronouns? Obviously I’m doing so right now, but I’m interrogating the habit.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

It’s incredibly various, thank god. I’m so glad there are activist poets, linguistic experimenters, spiritual poets, entertainers, and more.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

To engage deeply with someone else’s work in progress is an act of incredible generosity. I find that push-and-pull rewarding. Yes, occasionally I’ve thought an editor got something wrong or, ouch, could have managed their tone a bit better, but in poetry, for me, that’s never, never seemed motivated by ego. Literary editing is a labor of love.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I always give a different answer to this question, but what’s on my mind today is something Asali Solomon tells her fiction students: the first obligation of any writer is to be interesting.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I never stopped writing critical prose or had trouble toggling between criticism and poetry. Writing literary prose, though, is not, as I once foolishly thought, a natural meeting point between the two. Managing verb tenses alone—wow! As in poetry, the writer of prose narrative is always juggling the question of what to explain and what to elide, but the math is fundamentally different.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I wake up slowly, drink a pot of tea, do puzzles. When I’m alert, I reluctantly drag myself to the desk, but I’m happy once I get going, even if I’m mainly prepping for class. Actual writing and revision happen only sporadically during the academic terms but daily during summers and sabbaticals—I’m pretty disciplined then.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I read or take a walk, trying not to worry about it, because the writing always comes back. If moving my body or immersion in someone else’s book doesn’t work, I just switch gears. It’s good to have multiple projects going so there’s always a productive way to procrastinate.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Bus exhaust in the rain reminds me of my mother, which isn’t very flattering, but when I was six we visited her home in Liverpool for the first time. Everything amazed me, that first time on a plane, even the smelly rank of buses that greeted us at the airport.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Walking around a museum often jolts me into poetry. Mycocosmic came largely from scientific reading about mycelium and biochemical transformations. The State She’s In draws at least as much from history and politics. Poetry’s Possible Worlds was inspired by narrative theory and cognitive science almost as much as twenty-first-century poetry. Sources are always myriad—the whole world can excite the writing impulse, if you’re paying attention—but some projects lean on one discipline more than another.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Emily Dickinson, H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, and Langston Hughes are poets I steer through the world by. I read fiction daily, and when the news is this terrible, I lean toward mysteries and fantasy. This year there’s been a lot of Martha Wells, T. Kingfisher, and John Dickson Carr.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I aspire to write a book-length poem, but everything keeps splintering on me. I came closest in a terza rima novella called “The Receptionist” in The Receptionist and Other Tales. That was crazy fun to write, but could I sustain the energy in a less narrative mode? We shall see!

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Making some kind of art would always have been an avocation. Teaching undergraduates is a good fit for me as a day job, to the point that I wonder if any other paying employment could have satisfied me as much. Honestly, I have no idea.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I loved painting and drawing when I was young, but AP Physics clashed with Art in my high school schedule and my father insisted on the former. I envy singers, but I can’t carry a tune.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I have trouble with the word “great.” It’s not that I don’t make judgments constantly, I’m very opinionated, but it suggests stable hierarchies of value I don’t believe in. Context matters so much: great for what, for whom, where, when? I still feel awe when I reread “The Book of Ephraim,” Life on Mars, Montage of a Dream Deferred, or just about anything by Ursula K. Le Guin, but last year I reread Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, which has always inspired the same feeling, and it wobbled for reasons I can’t articulate yet. Was I just in a bad space that week? I don’t think A Complete Unknown was a perfect movie by a long shot, but it was utterly absorbing and great to talk about later.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’ve been writing poems that in various ways invoke the spiral as subject matter or formal principle. I also have a novel ms, Grievous, under consideration, and I’m drafting a nonfiction collection with the working title Community with the Dead: Reading Modernism Strangely.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Zane Koss, Country Music

 

tell the cougar story

                                    so jerry and tom go out

this one time to check jerry’s traps he’s got a line out

for lynx and you have to check these quite regularly

so the poor thing isn’t stuck there so long that it starves

to death or chews its leg off to get out it’s just

a regular foot trap staked to the ground

and they get there to where it’s supposed to be

and it’s gone but there’s some tracks heading out

over the snow, big tracks, not a lynx and they follow the tracks

and there it’s this huge cougar the trap stuck on its paw

dragging the chair and stake and jerry’s only got his 22

because he’d thought it would just be the lynx

Guelph, Ontario-based poet and translator Zane Koss’ second full-length collection, following Harbour Grids (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2022) [see my review of such here] is Country Music (Invisible Publishing, 2025), a book-length poem of stories, ghosts and the country music of rural British Columbia upbringing. It is a very different tone and approach from, say, the music of Dennis Cooley’s Country Music: New Poems (Kalamalka Press, 2004) or Robert Kroetsch’s “Country and Western” section of his Completed Field Notes (University of Alberta Press, 2002). As the back cover offers, Koss’ music emerges from stories told around campfires or the kitchen table, held “against the backdrop of rural British Columbia,” offering working-class tales of “humour and violence of life in the mountains.” Koss weaves these stories through and around the shape of an understanding of his own origins, and how he got to where he is now. As he writes, early in the collection: “where have our fathers / gone i have still lived more years / of my life // on a dirt road than a / paved one, / i tell people that, and // though      true, it doesn’t / feel that way; mike, / where have we gone [.]” He opens the book, the poem, with a sequence of storytelling narratives to establish his foundation of a good story, plainly told; conversational, sections of which feel comparable to The Canterbury Tales, but all told by the same unnamed narrator. The poems, the extended long poem, of Country Music, is structured in accumulating sections, offering short narrative bursts of storytelling lyric, notational across the pause and parry across each storyteller’s particular diction.

seen that picture of you
with the gun

    with the twelve-gauge pump-action
    shotgun
and the dead birds, pixelated

while you mourn your grand
father; i bet you        are wondering;

                but me,
i never shot anything except
popcans and paper targets,
but i know it,                  clubbed
fish to eat; gutted
             them,        myself

    one time my dad brought
home a tiny rabbit
    in a cardboard box        that
his skidder had disturbed

There is a way that Koss writes these stories as part of his own DNA, but as much deliberately left behind, distancing himself from the roughness, the low-level violence; of knowing one is from a particular space but no longer of that space, no matter how foundational some of those experiences, that thinking. “when they tell these stories now // i fill in the lost details // as they try to tell them // wanting it exactly // as i remember it // every rhythm // every detail [.]” Or, this particular moment, as one’s own learned impulses make unexpected appearances:

    these days hand-fees the cat scraps from the table;
but sometimes, the urge overcomes me, to lay my hot
coffee spoon against the thinnest skin on the back of
kate’s hand; it comes up deep from below, faster than i
know how to fight it; when i tell her you used to do that
to me at the breakfast table, every morning, she can’t imagine
you thus.

The next page, the next line, writing: “truthfully, i can no longer either [.]” This is a thoughtful and powerful collection, as Koss articulates a roughness, and a particular kind of low-level toxic masculinity taught that he still works to remove from himself. Through such, Koss’ Country Music is comparable to Dale Martin Smith’s Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2021) [see my review of such here], in which Smith speaks of fathers and sons, and what passes through and what he works to prevent passing along. Koss, in his own way, works to think across similar spaces and distances, attempting to articulate even how to utilize the page as that best thinking space, to find both comprehension and comfort. “how to make the page the space,” he writes, “where that happens /// alone,” he writes. “the page the context in which improvisation                  could // driven by the difference only // only possible in otherness // to make the page a space of // confronting my own otherness to myself // as a means of improvisation // cannot quite [.]”

As well, there’s a particular kind of pacing and visual rhythm displayed in Koss’ long poem that is reminiscent of the late Prince George poet Barry McKinnon’s classic I wanted to say something (Caledonia Writing Series, 1976; Red Deer College Press, 1990); whereas McKinnon’s wrote the stories of prairie immigration across his family history, focusing on parents and grandparents, Koss writes a more immediate setting of attempting to articulate and understand himself through family stories, including the telling and retelling of many tales he was directly around for, leading up to the present moment. “the beer bottles / mark time,” he writes, “gathered around, telling new / ones [.]” Koss writes not purely through the lens of what these stories tell but in the telling, of the attempting to clarify what it is that helped make him, and those elements he chooses to hold, and others he attempts to leave behind, all while wishing to remember the whole of it, as best as he can. And, as Barry McKinnon opened sections of his prairie long poem with “I wanted to say something,” so too, Koss, composing his structural echo across the interior of his own particular British Columbia upbringing:

I wanted to write a poem

                        that would somehow
place me
                        late night

kitchen table

            stories

 

                                    a campfire

 

All my sense

                                                depends upon
that