Choose your favourite of 5 limited-edition cover 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 February 2025 — choose your favourite cover, pre-order now!
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
