Interposition - by Kaie Kellough (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Featured in the Publishers Weekly Spring 2026 Preview

From Kaie Kellough, poet, sound performer, and Griffin prize winner, comes a linguistic incursion into desire, technology, and the absurd.

Kaie Kellough (Magnetic Equator, Griffin Poetry Prize winner, 2020) returns with a long poem that repurposes the language of the present. Interposition borrows its vocabulary from the news, entertainment, war, advertising, technology, and the everyday tragedies of popular culture. It reveals the morbid humour of our inability to distinguish between the urgencies of personal achievement and climate crisis. It compresses sound and rhythm into paradox, and it conflates absurdity and emergency.

Mapping the continued encroachment of capital and virtual culture upon our psychic space, Interposition examines how, with each click, we are reconstituted online and sold back to ourselves, and asks: How do we uncouple our selves from our avatars?

Review Quotes

Featured in the Publishers Weekly Spring 2026 Preview

"Immersive as always, in Interposition, Kaie Kellough writes from inside the circuitry of contemporary life, tracing pressures exerted by capital, surveillance, digital mediation, and algorithmic systems on the body and imagination. The form of this poem, any poem, cannot rescue the reader from the structural burdens of daily life, but Kellough suggests that poetic work itself might function as disruption: 'my job is to undo ... / a subsonic fissure thru the infrastructure.' The line encapsulates the poem's larger project, one that cannot escape from technological capitalism entirely, but can still expose the fractures already vibrating within it." --Montreal Review of Books

"Kellough's approach in Interposition is allusive and mosaic, building a series of implications through suggestion and elision. His poem rails against "'the artificial poise of a text' while also self-consciously highlighting that very artificiality." --Quill & Quire

"Renegade meanings run away in Kellough's sonic centrifuge or 'unruly collection of narratives' between & betweens location and locution." --The Seaboard Review of Books

"Kaie Kellough's book-length long poem is a rant, a ramble, elegant, and confrontational in a breakdown and breakout of contemporary social and digital culture. In this triptych of three lengthy sections--'to be, ' 'between, ' 'betweens'--Kellough treats the page as a visual and sculptural field. He plays against conventional forms of verse and stanza, the confessional 'I, ' and epiphany. And he shapes with a variety of forms--spaciousness and density, prose poetry, margin shifts, structural repetitions, and more. In his use of space, he's both a minimalist and maximalist." --The British Columbia Review

About the Author

KAIE KELLOUGH is a poet, fiction writer, and sound performer living in Montreal. His previous collection, Magnetic Equator, won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is a writer and vocalist for the group FYEAR and is pursuing graduate work in English at Queen's University.