Country Music

“Country Music is both delicate and ferocious, tender and steely. [...] Spackled with violence, hilarity, grotesquerie, these poems are animated by Koss’s profound listening and attentiveness and a kind of wild longing. These are poems as if exchanged among friends and family, as if generated around an archaic campfire, as if John Prine had spent his youth in the Kootenays, as if poetry were still a medium of common life: and suddenly we see with this book that it is.”—Maureen McLane, author of My Poets

Zane Koss grew up listening to stories. Often these were told late at night around kitchen tables or campfires against the backdrop of rural British Columbia. The stories themselves, punctuated by the humour and violence of life in the mountains, offer a means of critiquing “extractiveness”—both the violence of settler-colonial capitalism and the systems of class privilege that devalue rural, working-class experience. Mining these materials for a rural poetics—a country music—Koss begins to understand both his working-class upbringing and academic surroundings. Country Music is a book that wants to find a way forward through the imperfect inheritance we’re given. Shifting between the poetic inquiries of Lisa Robertson and the vernacular improvisations of Fred Wah, the book offers an investigation of identity, family, and place.

Zane Koss is a poet and translator living in Guelph, ON. He is the author of Harbour Grids (Invisible Publishing, 2022) and several chapbooks of poetry. He is the co-translator of Hugo García Manríquez's Commonplace (Cardboard House, 2022) and Karen Villeda’s String Theory (Cardboard House, 2024), with the North American Free Translation Agreement (NAFTA). He was born and raised in the East Kootenays, BC, and earned a doctorate at New York University.