‘Extracting content / value’
Country Music
by Zane Koss
Fredericton: Invisible Publishing, 2025
$22.95 / 9781778430633
Reviewed by Joe Enns
*
Towards the end of Zane Koss’ new book of poetry, Country Music, Koss describes an old man who wears the same long johns from October to March. The man’s skin and hair merges with the fabric and they have to cut off the long underwear. This corporeal image analogizes perfectly what Koss (Harbour Grids) portrays throughout Country Music, which is one long poem that weaves anecdotal vignettes—snapshots of life in the Kootenays—with agonistic and nostalgic introspection. By examining and dissolving story into poetry, Koss conveys a social fabric in relation to place and the ways that others are held and resurrected through language.
Country Music is a sprawling conversation. Koss continuously plays with perspective and point of view, often blending first person narrative into second person and then stepping back even further to a reflective third person perspective—“and we pick up billy and he’s dead / sobbing, breaking the narrative with exhausted sobs / and my dad apparently on the other line listening”—such that the reader never quite knows who’s speaking. Multiple voices interrupt each other with a back-and-forth: “not quite sure what you mean / i mean the one / isn’t there the one where your dad / oh fuck / that one.” Interrupted and incomplete thoughts create a sensation of familiarity, quickly immersing the reader.
Minimal punctuation and capitalization emphasizes the nonlinear stream-of-consciousness narration. Invermere-reared Koss creates the impression of a rambling train of thought with unrefined diction and the omission of details as though the speaker has told the story a hundred times before. Resisting context makes us think that we’ve already heard this story, but want to hear it again. The lack of punctuation puts more weight on the line breaks and spacing, which Koss uses to full effect.
Koss plays with silence and empty space in a way that is appropriate to the content, often leaving whole pages almost entirely blank like a taking a big breath. This rise and fall of interrupting voices and then a long pause emulates the feeling of being in a crowded room, but also in one’s own head. Koss makes bold decisions with the use of space and repeatedly leaves pages almost blank with a single, lonely asterisk at the centre. The asterisks are insightful, conveying a series of emblems, possibly a star or a Google map pin or a tear drop. This loneliness and distance demonstrates the speaker’s distance from home and the yearning to go back to that place and time.
I use the term “empty space” instead of “white space” purposely because “white” implies a conversation about race, but that doesn’t really appear in Country Music. However, Koss does question a Eurocentric colonial lifestyle (“a relationship that is rooted / to a history // in a particular history”), and this interrogation becomes pivotal to the central theme. Each anecdotal vignette depicts a conflict with nature (“never in relation to the land except / in opposition”). The storytellers are reacting to the harshness of the natural world, seemingly unprepared, but also in awe: “let it go back / in the woods; that sense / of wonder.” But this use of the word “nature” becomes more complex.
The book’s epigraphs reference Charles Olson, and Olson certainly influences Koss—especially through the projective verse that creates a “field of action” rather than relying on form. The poet is “contained within his nature.” Koss uses action rather than form to interrogate his lived experience, while noting the changes in his identity associated with a change in situation and geography. Olson wrote, “Nature works from reverence, even in her destruction,” which does well to describe the impetus behind Koss’ anecdotes and interstitial reflections, the inner and the outer both changing each other like the old man’s long johns.
Koss’ struggle with personal identity leads to class differences as well. Blue collar redneck meets academia. How does a masculine redneck hardened by clashes with the wilderness write something sensitive like poetry (“I never shot anything except / popcans and paper targets”)? Koss answers this by showing the similarities in process. Writing is a form of resource extraction similar to logging: “discover nature, scraping a living from the bush / dragging words from each scenic vista, extracting content / value.” But like the reverence of the wild, Koss treasures the social community influenced by it: “cuz it’s in my nature / this love.” Recognizing these class differences, Koss then delves briefly into a Marxist vein as he lists the changes in prices of resources as compared to compensation for workplace injuries in a capitalist economy that grows heavier over decades.
Country Music plays with expectations. Generally, the prose form generates an expectation of narrative, a linked chain of events, and a chain of events implies a story structure. Koss doesn’t use prose but instead refers to story frequently, making the reader consider the book as one longer story. The reader then expects an overarching story structure to the book, which doesn’t happen. There’s an anecdote, then the speaker tells us how they feel. Koss relies on style and voice for his “field of action,” resisting any sort of form or structure, like a wandering memory with no outcome or destination.
Koss embeds personal anecdotes into a broader social history tied to the geography of the Kootenays. The undulating stream-of-consciousness style and interruptive voices can be immersive. Past, present, and the hypothetical overlap to form a mosaic of blurred perspectives. In Country Music, Koss resurrects loved ones through language as though the events are currently happening (“telling the story with her whole body… as if re-living / as if it came up out of the ground her body the conduit”). Landscape, community, family, and self blur together like the old man’s long john fabric, like forming a new skin, and Zane Koss attempts to cut through the layers and questions how language can take the place of a body.
*
Joe Enns is a writer, painter, and fisheries biologist on Vancouver Island. His writing has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, FreeFall, The Fiddlehead, GUSTS, and Portal Magazine, and book reviews in Event, Malahat Review and The British Columbia Review. Joe has a BA in Creative Writing and a BSc in Ecological Restoration. [Editor’s note: Joe has reviewed Sean Arthur Joyce, Cathy Stonehouse, Clint Burnham, Nadine Sander-Green, Spenser Smith, Rodney DeCroo, Barbara Pelman, Karl Meade, M.W. Jaeggle, Ali Blythe, Emily Osborne, Will Goede, and Evelyn Lau for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster