Zane visited the Elora Poetry Centre on Sunday afternoon, August 10, to read from Country Music, his new book. Here’s a brief blurb from the publisher: “Zane Koss grew up listening to stories. Often these were told late at night around kitchen tables or campfires against the backdrop of rural British Columbia. The stories themselves, punctuated by the humour and violence of life in the mountains, offer a means of critiquing ‘extractiveness’–both the violence of settler-colonial capitalism and the systems of class privilege that devalue rural, working-class experience. Mining these materials for a rural poetics–a country music–Koss begins to understand both his working-class upbringing and academic surroundings.” — Invisible Publishing

Zane, a poet and translator living in Guelph, was born and raised in the East Kootenays, BC, and earned a doctorate at New York University. His delivery masterfully captured the vernacular speech of his boyhood in rural interior BC as he read the text of Country Music in its entirely, followed by a lively Q & A.