Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create accountLimited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Nowās a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weāll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up todayGift audiobook credit bundles
You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.
Start giftingHarbour Grids
This audiobook uses AI narration.
Weāre taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreSummary
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 labour, 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.
Reviews
āA meditation both visual and lyric, pointillist and staccato, accumulative and stretched out as a singular line between regular points.āārob mclennan
āIn Harbour Grids, lines of shimmering āsā phonemes ripple across fragmentary layers of New Yorkās 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.āāDaphne Marlatt, author of Intertidal and Steveston
āThe grid is one of modernityās core forms and conceptsāthe fabricated space fashioned for plotting its measured trajectories. In Harbour Grids, Zane Kossās moving minimalist intervention, the grid is both constraint and focalizer. Through the shimmering veil of infrastructure, nation, and language, āscattered / across the / shifting surfaceā of the page, we gather glimpses of the natural world, welcome those who have navigated the borderās rigid nets, and hear languages other than a monolithic English. The result is a near perfect balancing of form and formlessnessāof urban enclosure, and a willful swerve onto the open common.āāStephen Collis, author of A History of the Theories of Rain and Decomp
āThe grid referred to in the title of Zane Kossās exquisite Harbour Grids is a pattern of visual and sonic ripplesāthe hiss and shimmer of a living and lived world. The grids are represented by parallel rows of the letter S, regularly placed with open space between them. At diverse Sās, observed details surface, fleeting (they are gone from the next page, the next moment), but lasting long enough to disturb the pattern and excite the mind. There is nothing in Harbour Grids thatās inert. And with each perceived glint, each registered sound, a harbourscape unfolds: wavelets, tidal lift and fall, boats and ships, streets and shops, vehicles, pedestrians. And human social life burbles on, speaking its different languages. Thereās no reigning subjective presence hereāno singular āI.ā Subjectivities are part of the distributed stuff of the world. But Harbour Grids is nonetheless a powerfully affective book, suffused with melancholy and some kind of accompanying pervasive wisdom. Itās a beautiful book.āāLyn Hejinian, author of My Life and The Language of Inquiry
āFrom its opening page onward, Zane Kossās Harbour Grids takes us into a floating world of letters and words arranged on the aqueous white surface of the rectangular page. Words enter this world as if by accident, washed up among the sounds and shapes of the letter āsā repeating again and again in four-line square grids on the white page, detailing what Koss calls his āphenomenological investigation of the surface of New York harborā perceived in fragments. āsā as the shape and sound of waves moving across water, punctuating the words and phrases that appear as if out of the fog or night or from ābehind freightersā or even āa cosmos of paths ā¦ submergedā; āsā as breath, the readerās and listenerās breathing, āone shimmering planeā¦ among othersā¦ in the eyesā¦ a shard of lightā radiating out across the lines of the poem and the space of the place itself.āāStephen Ratcliffe, author of sound of wave in channel and Selected Days
Expand reviews