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MA|DE’s full-length poetry debut, ZZOO, now available for pre-order — editioned in 5 variant covers!

Choose your favourite of 5 limited-edition covers designs … which ZZOO are YOU???

MA|DE
ZZOO
(2025 — Anstruther Books / Palimpsest Press)

• edited by Jim Johnstone
• 124 pages / trade paperback / perfect binding
• $21.95 CDN/USD
• collection available in 5 limited-edition cover designs: FOXHOLE, TANNIAN, SERPENTINE, INSECTOID and COSMICIST

All 5 variants are releasing in spring 2025 — choose your favourite cover, pre-order now!

Cover Variants, from L to R: FOXHOLE • TANNIAN • SERPENTINE • INSECTOID • COSMICIST

ABOUT THE BOOK /

At a time when binaristic and hierarchical relations are being readily interrogated, MA|DE — a unity of two voices fused into a single, poetic third — takes up a critique of the human-animal divide in their full-length debut, ZZOO.

From the depths of the oceans to the outer reaches of the sky, a menagerie of species trade off time in the limelight, none of them solely occupying the central space on the global stage. MA|DE’s collaborative practice foregrounds interdependence, outward focus, shared spaces and non-hierarchical thinking, all of which emerge allegorically in interzonal poems that are as richly realized as they are formally eclectic. This wild-blooded collection turns conventional exhibitionism on its head, treating humans and animals as equal subjects of art, science and selfhood. 

ZZOO is a bestiary for the modern world.

ADVANCE PRAISE /

“ZZOO cuts through the cultures and beliefs humans have spun around animals to create rare poetic visions, both dark and fresh, exhilarating and sharp.”
— RACHEL POLIQUIN, author of The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing

“MA|DE pulls off the beautiful “sugarwhip” of collaboration: moebius-strip-like, poems that are two-sided and also one, and vice versa. This voice of voices is deindividuated. The ‘I’ becomes a ‘We.’ As they write, “When the clouds took human / shape, we felt indivisible.” This whimsical poetic menagerie hums with variety: of sound, form, animals. Perhaps you can’t step in the same river twice, but in ZZOO, two step in simultaneously.”
— GARY BARWIN & TOM PRIME, authors of Bird Arsonist and A Cemetery for Holes

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5 New Poems in BOOK XI

A whole five of our poems appear in issue XI of Book XI, a “Journal of Literary Philosophy” housed at The Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center at Hamilton College. It feels extra lucky that these poems, from our forthcoming debut collaborative collection ZZOO with Palimpsest Press, are in the “Superstitions” issue. Enjoy poems such as:

1. “No Performances Today,” which is about a real-life cemetery for circus performers;

2. “Skybird,” in which two people who almost never go on planes write about the phenomenology of air travel;

3. “Sugarwhip,” a strange little diptych we struggle to describe, but it’s kind of about evolution;

4. “Subsidized Housing for Small Birds,” one of my personal favourite poems (and titles) from our book, which we wrote after perusing a handbook on bird-watching; and,

5. “Arbeitslied” (“work song”).

The issue is available to read in full for free online.