Leak

Poetry. Readers will be delightedly sickened by LEAK, the latest text from Canadian writer Kate Hargreaves. Following on Hargreaves' intriguing look into roller derby culture in Talking Derby, LEAK uses disjunctive poetic techniques, listing, sorting, organizing of language, as well as a shifting subject, to represent the relationship between language and the body, where bumps and bruises become new ways of understanding the borders and leaks of our everyday existence. In LEAK, bodies lose pieces and fall apart, while words slip out of place and letters drop away. Emergency room signage becomes incomprehensible, the census requests bodily measurements, a cyclist confuses oil with her own blood. Such textual gaps and overlaps contribute to LEAK's intentional sense of unfinishedness, reflective of the impossibility of signifying one coherent mind, body, or text. With nuances of Susan Holbrook's Joy is So Exhausting, Nikki Reimer's sic], and Jenny Sampirisi's Croak, this visceral deconstruction of the body and its multiple representations will appeal to those readers who appreciate thinking that tests the boundaries of body politics--pathologically, emotionally, and lyrically.

"Inside Kate Hargreaves's stunning new book, words bite and yawn and breathe the page, chipping away at the dictionary, diagnosing the alphabet. A tour de aperture, these poems will leak from your tongue into your brain, gushing pleasure: pleasure: pleasure: pleasure."--Nicole Markotic

"With deliberate caprice, Kate Hargreaves executes, deranges, disentangles, fractures, accidenting language into dazzling constellations."--Rosemary Nixon

"LEAK is an exciting poetic debut which performs a relentless and passionate anatomy through syntax that spills, kicks, craves, bloats, sheds, and spits. Hargreaves reminds us that, for worse and for better, parts of speech and speaker tend to gurgle beyond their notional grammars. Read it and gush."--Susan Holbrook