MA|DE Full-length collections:
(click covers for previews / excerpts / more info)
MA|DE
ZZOO
(2025, Anstruther Books / Palimpsest Press)
• 124 pages / trade paperback / perfect binding / $21.95 CDN
• edition available in 5 variant covers
• releasing spring 2025 — choose your favourite cover, pre-order now!
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.
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MA|DE Chapbooks:
(click covers for previews / excerpts / more info)
A Trip to the ZZOO
(2020, Collusion Books)
• full-colour variant cover (wolf or deer designs)
• limited edition of 100 numbered copies
• released December 2020
A collection of collaborative poems that in some manner mention, reference or explore animal life; the title’s variant spelling is a deliberate gesture, signalling to the reader that the poems only share a partial resemblance to the spectacle of animal exhibition at a traditional zoo. These poems often venture into the territory of ecopoetics, with environmentally-conscious through-lines being a frequent presence in the work, either implicitly or explicitly.
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A Barely Concealed Design
(2020, Puddles of Sky Press)
• limited edition of 54 copies
• released December 2020
This book of short constraint-based poems by MA|DE is “full of bizarre twists in language, rich images, and an electrical charge that can only come from the rubbing together of two imaginative minds.” — Michael e. Casteels
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Test Centre
(2019, ZED Press)
“Some questionnaires can only be taken together.” Bechdel, Turing, Draize, Rorschach, Uhlenhuth, are just names of a series of tests used to question, quantify, and label the world. In Test Centre, these and more pose deep questions as its poems crack open and peek into your soul, and perhaps you will even pose a question to what you find there.
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Solo works by MA|DE members include:
(click covers for previews / more info)
ANOMIA
(2024, Palimpsest Press)
In Euphoria, a small, fictional town that feels displaced in time and space , an affluent but isolated couple have vanished from their suburban home. Their estranged friend, Fir, a local video store employee, is the only person who notices their disappearance. When the police refuse to help, Fir recruits Fain, who moonlights as a security guard, and they set off on a seemingly hopeless search for the lost lovers. Their chance at an answer, if they can ever find it, lies on the wooded edge of Euphoria, where Slip, an elderly trailer park resident, finds a scattering of bones that cannot be identified. Distrusting everyone, Slip undertakes a would-be solitary quest to discover the bones’ identity. Yet secretly, Limn and Mal, two bored, true crime-loving teenagers from the trailer park, are dogging Slip. Determined to bring justice to the dead, Limn and Mal will instead bring the lives of all seven characters into fraught and tangled confrontation.
Beneath the familiar surface of this missing-persons novel lies an unparalleled experiment: the creation of a folkloric alternate reality where sex and gender have been forgotten. Expanding on the work of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and Jeannette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and joining gender-confronting contemporaries like Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed and Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji, Anomia is an atmospheric exploration of a possible world, and a possible language, existing without reference to sex or gender.
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LOVE IS A PLACE BUT YOU CANNOT LIVE THERE
(2023, Guernica Editions)
Each section of Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There is a psychogeographic investigation. Two casual ghost hunters on a road trip hear the death rattle of their relationship. Residents of a city’s fringe measure their physical and social isolation. A mother and her adult child have diametrically opposed reactions to their vacation spot. Lovers on a romantic coastal getaway discover how estranged they are from one another. Curious figures begin to embody their environments. Forthright and anecdotal, these poems recount the signals people transmit and receive, and the reciprocal ways we make, and are made by, the places we inhabit.
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The Southern Ontario Gothic Tour
(2020, JAW Editions — free download, click cover)
BookBook
(2018, above/ground press)
Vispo chapbook of works exploring books, pages, spines, libraries
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Rituals of Parsing
(2018, Anstruther Press)
“If I were to tattoo lines of poetry on my arms, I would make my sections from these poems.” — Lisa de Nikolits in The Minerva Reader
asemanticasymmetry
(2017, Anstruther Press)
A collection of ‘remix texts’ built by creatively re-interpreting/re-shaping/re-writing selections from the large body of vispo work that Canadian author derek beaulieu has created using dry-transfer (letraset) lettering.
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Brick Brick Brick
(2010, BookThug)
This collection presents a series of visual meditations on the subject of “assembly poetics”. Like much of Laliberte’s recent output, this project hovers around — but never quite steps into — the cultural zone that pure, popular comics inhabit.
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