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KAIE KELLOUGH is a novelist, poet, and sound performer. He is the author of the novels Dominoes at the Crossroads and Accordeon, 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 was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, raised in Calgary, Alberta, and in 1998 moved to Montreal, Quebec where he now lives. He has performed and published internationally.
Speaking to Caribbean and hemispheric migrations, the poems in Magnetic Equator recall trouble, hybridity, steep falls, continuance, and elaboration. Taking on influence, place, and racialized diasporic experience as it draws language into geographic drifts and historic collisions, these are voicings that cascade and collect 'an accent adrift in its second language / over a b-side version of empire'. Singing of exile and scattering, the text negotiates survival and revolt as it moves with the surety and complexity of improvisation and collaboration. Sonic, visual, and intertextual, Kaie Kellough traces source and accumulation: 'our crossings of past, we depart / opposite, along the sentence that encircles the world'. --Griffin Poetry Prize Jury Citation Magnetic Equator joins the tidalectics tradition of Brathwaite. This is a poetry of place, albeit a fluid place of in-betweenity, of migration and hybridity, ethnic, geographic, historical, temporal, and chronological. This is essential work doing the necessary heavy-lifting that poetry is intended to do. -M. NourbeSe Philip A masterpiece. Deep isolation envelops these pieces in their tireless travels from the rainforests of Guyana to the prairies of Western Canada, the beaches of Vancouver to the snowy streets of Montreal. Kellough's search is a river that carries us from place to place with a current of self-assurance, and in his deconstructions of language, history, and identity, he creates a sweeping epic in Magnetic Equator that is stunning in its scope. --Montreal Review of Books Magnetic Equator brims with influence and relation, sparking dialogue with books such as Omeros by Derek Walcott and A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand, both acknowledged influences. Ultimately, Kellough engages with the larger historical experience of diaspora writers and exiles, among whom identity's hyphen is a 'divining rod'. Magnetic Equator informs as it enchants with its rare combination of documentary poetics and confessional voice. --Quill & Quire
