MA|DE Full-length collections:
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
Choose your favourite of 5 limited-edition cover designs … which ZZOO are YOU???”
MA|DE Chapbooks:
(click covers for previews / excerpts / more info)
MA|DE
Expression Follows Grim Harmony (aka EFGH)
(2023, Jackpine Press)
• foil & raised ink cover
• 32 interior pages — two-colour risographic printing
• limited edition of 75 numbered copies
• released August 2023
In Expression Follows Grim Harmony, MA|DE continues to explore the ‘alphabetical‘ — a playful & challenging constrained poetic form of their own making. The writing presented in their newest chapbook is economical, efficient and driven by a sense of exuberance. Since their first micro-chapbook of alphabeticals, A Barely Concealed Design (released in 2020 through Puddles of Sky Press), MA|DE has refined their approach to the form, crafting smoother & stranger lines, and, most strikingly, has incorporated alphabet-themed visuals into the mix. The unit of composition here is the page spread: each poem is presented face recto and is importantly paired with an accompanying letter-constrained vispo work, presented face verso, a coupling strategy that emphasizes & complements the aesthetic & dynamic qualities of letter-play within the works.
Bringing together 14 poems with accompanying images, EF|GH is a gorgeously produced 32-page publication featuring a lush foil & raised ink cover with eye-bending, two-colour risographic interior printing; it represents MA|DE’s penultimate step towards a book-length collection of alphabeticals that will mark the full realization of this difficult but delightful form!
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MA|DE
A Trip to the ZZOO
(2020, Collusion Books)
• full-colour variant cover (wolf or deer designs)
• 24 interior pages / 8″H x 5″W / perfect binding
• limited edition of 100 numbered copies
• released December 2020
• Shortlisted for the 2021 bpNichol Chapbook Award
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.
“In A Trip to the ZZOO, MA|DE train Kingdom Animalia to stutter and glitch. Jellyfish, tardigrades and wolves find equal footing; anorexia, condominiums and Trash Mountain take on a brittle, pulsing life of their own.” — BRYCE WARNES in The Pamphleteer
“… an exciting, stimulating read, full of poems as thoughtful as they are beautiful. Poetry like this is much like a river — something that becomes different, and makes you different, every time you plunge in.” — JEREMY COLANGELO (issue 14 of The /tƐmz/ Review)
“… an ecosystem of wild imagery, cutting language and the soft fleshiness of mouse-sized details made grand.” — MICHAEL RUSSELL, author of Grindr Opera
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MA|DE
A Barely Concealed Design (aka ABCD)
(2020, Puddles of Sky Press)
• 10 photocopied interior pages on creme paper / rubber stamped cover
• 4″H x 5.5″W — Japanese binding
• 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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MA|DE
Test Centre
(2019, ZED Press)
• 32 interior pages / die-cut cover
• 8″H x 5″W / perfect binding
• limited edition of 100 copies
“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)
JADE WALLACE
Anomia
(2024, Palimpsest Press)
• 280 pages
• 8.25″H x 5.25″W / perfect binding
• $21.95 CAD
• cover and interior design by Mark Laliberte
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.
“Anomia resists definition, courageously dissolving the divides between genres, genders, and realities […] A novel unlike anything you’ve read before.”
— Corinna Chong, author of Bad Land and The Whole Animal
“With mycelial plotting propelled by Jade Wallace’s nuanced and atmospheric prose, Anomia is an astonishing debut.”
— Michael Melgaard, author of Not That Kind of Place and Pallbearing
“[A] whirling, delightful strange weaving.”
— Aaron Tucker, author of Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys and Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos
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JADE WALLACE
Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There
(2023, Guernica Editions)
• 104 pages
• 8″H x 5″W / perfect binding
• $20 CAD
• cover design by Mark Laliberte
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.
“Jade Wallace’s inventive debut poetry collection reminds us that we are all fundamentally travellers. These poems are psychogeographic maps attentive to the margins and sidelines of intellectual, emotional, and historical journeys that are often overwhelmed by their ostensible destinations. Preferring instead the spaces between, these poems are open to the potential wonder and mystery of the world in its contingency and complexity where “it’s hard to be sure we were there at all.” Skyscrapers, reversing falls, small towns defined by tire fires—travel is a mode of movement and critical self-reflection in this extraordinary book.”
— Adam Dickinson, author of Anatomic
“Firmly anchored in the tradition of the Southern Ontario Gothic, Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There maps the eerie unmappable. Attentive to everyday violence, horror, and beauty, the poems in this collection follow their speakers through rural and suburban Southwestern Ontario, to corner stores, motels, apartments, tourist towns, ghost towns, and skeleton museums. Jade Wallace writes with tenderness, humour, and a haunting perspicacity that is all their own.”
— Annick MacAskill, author of Shadow Blight
“Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There explores and subverts the haunted corners of the rural and urban—the haunting corners of ourselves. Wallace’s curious, nimble, and nostalgic words land with the halcyon sweetness of Ambrosia salad, the unsettling significance of an abandoned house. There’s music in this phenomenal collection—ballads and dirges; symphonic elegies of road-trip gothic.”
— Hollay Ghadery, author of Rebellion Box
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JADE WALLACE
The Southern Ontario Gothic Tour
(2020, JAW Editions)
• 30 interior pages in PDF format
• cover design by Mark Laliberte
Poems about taking road trips to haunted places — includes a selection of full-colour photographs. This online chapbook was completed with the financial support of the City of Windsor’s Arts, Culture & Heritage Fund.
Free download, click cover
MARK LALIBERTE
BookBook
(2018, above/ground press)
• 28 photocopied interior pages on white paper, creme cardstock cover
• 8.5″H x 5.5″W — saddle-stitch binding
Vispo chapbook of works exploring books, pages, spines, libraries
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JADE WALLACE
Rituals of Parsing
(2018, Anstruther Press)
• 16 interior pages
• 8.5″H x 5.5″W — saddle-stitch binding
• cover design by Mark Laliberte
• limited edition of 40 copies — SOLD OUT
“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
MARK LALIBERTE
asemanticasymmetry
(2017, Anstruther Press)
• 24 interior pages — 3-colour risography
• 7.5″ H x 7.5″ W / saddle-stitch binding
• limited edition of 100 copies
asemanticasymmetry is 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; the works presented here are specifically built on the skeletons of works found in both Fractal Economies (2006, Talon Books) and kern (2014, Les Figues Press), as well as a large number of newer dry-transfer pieces beaulieu created during his tenure as Poet Laureate of Calgary.
Much of beaulieu’s vispo is characterized by a delicate, reflective symmetricality. This sense of balance and circularity is a defining feature in much of the work he produces, and for Laliberte, this harmony was the first principle that he set out to disrupt / complicate. He also felt that the use of colour was generally outside of beaulieu’s standard lexicon, but could be put to formal and poetic use in these remix texts — limited here to black, red and blue, keeping risography printing in mind as an eventual delivery mechanism. Laliberte adopted the square as a working format for all the works in the series — the popular reference to music remix culture being implied here in a simple packaging/format gesture.
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MARK LALIBERTE
BRICKBRICKBRICK
(2010, BookThug)
• 128 interior pages — 2-colour offset printing
• 7.5″H x 4.5W” / perfect-binding
• Afterword by Angela Szczepaniak
• $18 CAD
• one of the ’10 Best Canadian Comix of the Decade: 2010-2019′ — Kim Jooha in Sequential Magazine
BRICKBRICKBRICK is background reading brought to the forefront. 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.
The hybrid ‘texts’ presented here (slowly developed from 2001-08), appropriate and invade the hand-made illustrative markings of different illustrators or cartoonists, as they draw bricks — usually in the backgrounds of city scenes. Each drawn source is pulled forward and stripped of all signs of their original narrative intent. In a process that is metaphorically connected to the careful manipulation of written words on a page, each work is digitally constructed — brick by brick — into new and distinct walls that the reader will likely enjoy hitting up against.
“BRICKBRICKBRICK deftly uses comics to create a metaphor for writing, entreating that readers explore how idiosyncratic writers build their environments one word at a time, brick by brick. Laliberte’s volume is a metaphor for contemporary avant-garde practice as it moves the centre of attention from narrative and its hallmarks (character, dialogue, plot) and, in a form reminiscent of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman, focuses instead on setting.”
— derek beaulieu, author of Kern and Fractal Economies
“This isn’t a comic. Or is it? Does it matter? I’m really not concerned with definitions, but I am concerned with stretching the limits, expanding the family that is comics.”
— Derik Badman, review in The Panelists
“The concept is simple, the completed text stunning. The book can be read as concrete poetry with conceptual undertones.”
— Jonathan Ball, author of The Lightning of Possible Storms
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