World Poetry Day is celebrated on 21 March, and was declared by UNESCO in 1999, “with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard”.
“Part of our guiding ethos as MA|DE is a sense that we should optimally function like an indie band, with the publisher acting as a label. It’s crucial for us to be actively involved in every stage of the book’s life cycle—including writing, editing, designing, marketing and touring.”
ALL LIT UP talked to Mark Laliberte & Jade Wallace, the duo behind MA|DE, about their collaborative process and their new book ZZOO (order here), which has FIVE very striking covers so that readers can select their favourite!
More details, including guest readers at every event, coming soon! And if you’d like to invite us to read somewhere, we’re still booking events for this year, just get in touch.
HEY WINDSOR: Signed copies of ZZOO — in all 5 cover variants! — are now available waaaaay ahead of the street date (which is Feb 15) at Biblioasis Bookshop … we stopped in to double-sign a stack of copies yesterday … get them in advance while they last.
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
