KIRBY “This Is Where I Get Off”
BOOK - $10.70
STREET DATE: 5/17/19
CAT: PERMSLEEP034
LABEL: Permanent Sleep
A glorious rampage through glory holes to holy glory, This Is Where I Get Off is an incandescent trip through time and place. With singing rage, ferocious wit, sly tenderness, and defiant heart, these poems kick against the pricks, even as they worship what wounds. This collection cuts through convention to command attention, a triumphant “fuck you” to unfeeling. Sublimely smutty, these poems make radiant the particular pain of gay lust in a world that denies its existence. Love is not obscene, bodies are beauty, and belonging can be found even in the back row of an adult cinema. “Can you imagine all she’s lived through?” Kirby questions, then answers by blowing open all closets, tossing skeletons aside to two-step on the bones.
— ROXANNA BENNETT Author of Unmeaningable and Unseen Garden
This Is Where I Get Off isn’t the work of a mere debutante, but a lived-in and unflinchingly rendered poetic treatise on life, love, and survival from one of Canada’s best kept secrets. Get in, take a tour of Kirby’s temples, and get off!
— JIM JOHNSTONE Editor of The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry.
Part memoir and part adventure, This is Where I Get Off is a debut collection as exciting as a treasure map where ‘‘X’ marks multiple spots. Kirby’s poems pay homage to yesterday’s lost temples and make space for new ones, celebrating our secrets and our bodies as sites for sacred ritual. Provocative, erotic, vulnerable, and liberating, Kirby lights a match, and stands in the heat of the fire.
— DAVID JAMES BROCK Author of Everyone is CO2 & Ten-Headed Alien
Kirby's This Is Where I Get Off is a glory whole!
— JESSICA JOY HIEMSTRA Author of The Holy Nothing
I read Kirby's This Is Where I get Off with awe, envy, amazement. And then I read it again, for the love that resides everywhere here... And here I say to the author love is the very wonder of you.
—Excerpt from the forward by LYNN CROSBIE Author of Chicken and Liar
KIRBY is the founder and publisher of knife | fork | book and co-founder and publisher of its What Queer Reading imprint (Toronto).
FOR FANS OF:
John Rechy, Edmund White, C.P. Cavafy
MARKETING POINTS:
KIRBY's previous chapbooks are Simple Enough, The World Is Fucked and Sometimes Beautiful, Cock & Soul, Bob's boy, and She's Having a Doris Day (knife fork book, 2017). They've appeared in The Rusty Toque, Matrix Magazine, Carousel, and numerous anthologies beginning with the letter Q. Kirby is the founder/publisher of knife | fork | book, Toronto.
Forward by renowned Canadian poet and novelist, Lynn Crosbie
Numerous reading appearances and events scheduled throughout 2019 and 2020 including various small press fairs and workshops.
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