Country Music

“In his book-length poem, [Zane Koss] lurches from story to story, searching for a deeper understanding of the sensibilities he shares with his loved ones, most of whom live ‘on the other side of a continent,’ in British Columbia. The anecdotes inhabit the voices of family and friends across generations, ranging from the East Kootenay backwoods to New York City bars filled with graduate students. Each vignette reveals the pleasure of turning joint experiences, even painful ones, into ‘a good story,’ with details captured ‘just / right.’ Koss’s voice is alive with desire and imperfection, as he records the polyphonic sound of his community through the words of people ‘gathered round the kitchen table.’ […] his ‘voices in the dark’ come through clearly, and ‘we laugh until we are crying.’ For Koss, his slim, enthralling volume marks an artistic breakthrough: ‘This is the only poem / I ever wanted to write.'”—Emily Mernin, Literary Review of Canada

“Zane Koss’s Country Music is both delicate and ferocious, tender and steely. Known for his conceptual flair, translation practice, and complex poetics of location, Koss here shows he has even more strings to his bow – including a tale-telling brio as he stakes his claim to a poetry of common life. A book humming with attachment and grief and rage and humor, Country Music offers teen hijinks and misdemeanors, grim encounters with cougars and coyotes, a family’s rich tradition of storying their (and others’) lives. Country Music is both a homecoming and a complex measuring of the distance from home – from a working-class childhood in Western Canada, a community anchored in jobs in mining and logging and mills, a life rich in dirt roads, skidoos, hunting, biking, hard labor, shared meals and shared jokes. Koss maps an emotional vista and landscape; the book emerges as an effort of self-location, a deep connection sought and sustained amid the pandemic spent in Brooklyn. Family stories and friends’ fates are lovingly, complexly summoned and channeled as Koss undertakes a sounding and a grounding. Spackled with violence, hilarity, grotesquerie, these poems are animated by Koss’s profound listening and attentiveness and a kind of wild longing. These are poems as if exchanged among friends and family, as if generated around an archaic campfire, as if John Prine had spent his youth in the Kootenays, as if poetry were still a medium of common life: and suddenly we see with this book that it is.”—Maureen McLane, author of My Poets

“The voices we’ve heard linger in our memory and imagination, tangled in the stories we continually tell ourselves about ourselves. A poem is a useful way of connecting our own voice into this entanglement. In Country Music Zane Koss does this by decomposing the anecdotal within the mycelium of family, community, and the land. His exploratory poetic intervention into memory and the local allows him to locate his voices and make up his own story. As he says, ‘I wanted to write a poem that would somehow place me.’”—Fred Wah, author of Music at the Heart of Thinking