Harbour Grids

By: Zane Koss

Narrated by: Zane Koss

Harbour Grids is a long poem in four parts that investigates ideas of community and belonging. Beginning as a meditation on the surface of New York Harbor, the poem radiates outward through issues of labor, location, history, belonging, and subjectivity. How do we experience our complex relations to the world we live in? Harbour Grids seeks to answer this question by combining the sonic texture and investigative poetics of Daphne Marlatt, the improvisatory spirit and ethical engagement of Fred Wah, the experimental attention to the structures of language of Nasser Hussain, and the dazzling sense of visual space of Jordan Abel.

©2022 Zane Koss (P)2023 Invisible Publishing

Critic reviews

“A meditation both visual and lyric, pointillist and staccato, accumulative and stretched out as a singular line between regular points.”—rob mclennan

“In Harbour Grids, lines of shimmering ‘s’ phonemes ripple across fragmentary layers of New York’s urban development from harbour to immigrant neighbourhood. Zane Koss has created a stutter-statement most singular in its embrace of word and silence, visual image and social critique. To read Harbour Grids is to experience this moving interplay between surface and depth.”—Daphne Marlatt, author of Intertidal and Steveston

“The grid is one of modernity’s core forms and concepts—the fabricated space fashioned for plotting its measured trajectories. In Harbour Grids, Zane Koss’s moving minimalist intervention, the grid is both constraint and focalizer. Through the shimmering veil of infrastructure, nation, and language, “scattered / across the / shifting surface” of the page, we gather glimpses of the natural world, welcome those who have navigated the border’s rigid nets, and hear languages other than a monolithic English. The result is a near perfect balancing of form and formlessness—of urban enclosure, and a willful swerve onto the open common.”—Stephen Collis, author of A History of the Theories of Rain and Decomp