Kaie Kellough, Interposition

 

beuz i can’t think

in this star-powered new conclusion

this streaming autobiographical noise

in which the protagonist

dissociates & enters

forever as a brand

 

                        & the universe rewards

w/ subscriptions & emojis

 

            i can’t think

until a re-

shaped jawline

emancipates my can-do

& i transform into the wolf

of self-motivation (“to be”)

The latest poetry title from Montreal-based “poet, fiction writer, and sound performer” Kaie Kellough is Interposition (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2026), a book that follows his Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Magnetic Equator (McClelland and Stewart, 2019) [see my review of such here]. Composed as a book-length suite in three extended, expansive, accumulative sections—“to be,” “between” and “betweens”—Kellough blends performance swirls and punctuated language to immediately establish the book’s intentions. “these words declare // who i is,” he writes, near the opening of the first section, “across all platforms [.]” There is a way Kellough’s lyric opens into critical explorations across conversational and visual space, comparable to such as the ongoing works of American poets Jessica Smith and Melissa Eleftherion, M. NourbeSe Philip’s classic Zong (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2008; Invisible Publishing, 2023) [a book I reviewed for The Antigonish Review when it was first appeared, see such reprinted here] or even New York poet Christian Schlegel’s more recent The Blackbird (Brooklyn NY: Beautiful Days Press, 2025) [see my review of such here]. There is something big and stretched in the way Kellough pulls at the lyric, a clear performance element articulating the self amid the climate crisis, data mining and culture wars, and where any individual sense of being, purpose and even reason might sit amid the chaos of all that noise, far too often presented with equal or disproportional weight.

x          never wanted but it happened in spite

of a void of am-                       bition x was raised

by arrivants to over-

come                imperium of doubt                   & do not

 

fixed caste                                heredity alterity &

non-consensual

collective consciousness           & others’ expectations

invaded x & the (“to be”)

 

Working an enormous amount of loose threads, Kellough’s book-length expanse examines and critques anxiety, achievement, culture and chaos, attempting to navigate through the bombardment and into clarity, utilizing the space of the lyric not as an end unto itself—whether witness or document—but a means through and to it.

 

(now i understand that in my poems, this                diegetic contrivance

 

                                                        when the speaker of the poem

 

                        oscillates btwn music               & matter

 

this freedom suite

 

                                    africa brass

 

this contrivance returns like a chorus –