A ramble, a rant, a box of wonders
Interposition
by Kaie Kellough
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2026
$25.00 / 9780771023729
Your Lover Stabbed in the Streets
by David Romanda
Okotoks: Frontenac House, 2025
$22.95 / 9781997580027
Reviewed by Steven Ross Smith
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Kai 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.
There are pages with only two words on them, or six, and others crammed with dense paragraphs. And everything in between.
Where I quote, I cannot do full justice to the fonts and page layouts he and his designer have rendered, so I will represent.
Vancouver-born Kellough (Dominoes at the Crossroads) endeavours to step outside the biographical “I” and the culture’s promotion of self through ego and celebrity—“the streaming biographical noise,” as he calls it—to “other,” to shuck, and examine persona:
x is the inverse of i
is who i is not
x is not is
x rejects
every is i covets
x don’t care to leave one
dram
of i in the world
Yet the I seems unshakeable. He does embrace autobiography early in the poem and at the same time offers historical critique:
back then, I would go up to the 7th floor of the library building
overlooking the sloping brutalist campus
concrete fortifications against
brown terrors of the pioneer psyche
up to the seventh floor, where in a glass enclosure
I could listen to records from the university’s collection
As the poem unfolds the speaker becomes, perhaps, all of us, as observer-critic, endeavouring to be aware although captive in this culture, even the written one. He reminds us of its pervasive effects:
an unruly collection of narratives
about art’s primitive telos about writing as
a masked vigilante act
Kellough’s non-linear narrative references myriad tropes, terms, and presences in contemporary culture: “ear-buds,” “subscriptions and emojis,” “farmed salmon,” “botox and collagen implants online,” “streaming service,” “proud boys,” and on and on.
He draws attention occasionally to the surface of language, of phrase as construct, featuring terms like “bcuz,” “avg,” “dispo-,” “prole-,” “thru,” and “enuf,” the ampersand—sometimes text-lingo’d and sometimes allusive.
Kellough, here and there, digs into the past:
ghost galleons
built in Halifax to sail back in time
to ply the trade in africans
[…]
dotting
the i in the word “mine”
But mostly he tosses us about in the storm-surged present—
a pandemic
an aerial bombardment
a deliberate ethnic extinction
brown flesh blown into fragments white
as new beaches
on twi – er – x – er
a porno-
graphic
tik-
toker
flaunts their net
subscribers
Toward the end Kellough has been driven, not to certainty in these uncertain times, but to question after question—
can i despise
the new normal? can these cookies
transform my physique? can I loathe
the old-fashioned truth? can I conceal
foreign mercenaries
in a TFSA? can I love
glazed timbits
Interposition is a testament, where answers and hope are scarce. Just before the concluding page Kellough testifies.
some days
crawl through the ashes
behind enemy lines, behind
computers, dreadlocks
& wires, inside
the wires
Indeed, we are wired, wired in, captive. Kellough, I posit, in Interposition, bears witness, asking each of us to see, to seek, to help him find the way out.
* * *
Where Kellough’s musings are open, Kelowna-born David Romanda’s are tight. He presents a suite of surrealistic mini-narratives that reveal unexpected twists, surprises, and, sometimes, whimsy.
They are poetic in their crisp and truncated lines but are more prose than poetry—‘story-ish’—though I’m fully aware that definitions blur nowadays.
“My Question,” for example, unfolds like this:
They were talking about
a dead man in a tuxedo
that washed up Saturday
on the rocky beach near the aquarium.
I’m not sure why I asked this,
but I was curious. I asked,
“Was he still wearing his bow tie?”
And there’s “Purple Slug”:
Can’t you
give it
some other name?
I will not continue to quote in full from Romanda’s narratives, as some surprise must be left for the reader. So, I will randomly summarize some of his representations.
In these micro-fictions, he presents comment on the question of reality versus fiction; he offers workplace/health dilemmas, personal and impersonal relationships, provocative and unnerving subway rides, a first kiss, lover’s dilemmas, and more. His personae are I or he or she or they, sometimes sounding biographical and sometimes not… but these are fictions, after all, not reality, though a kind of reality seems evident. An effective straddle. And there are wisps of humour, darker and lighter. There are stories that conclude and some that leave the reader hanging, wondering of outcomes.
Romanda’s attention is on the stories and their quirks, and though crisp, there is little language play—no sonic echoes, no poetic tropes like alliteration or rhyme, and the rhythms are minimal, though the phrasings are compressed—economical, in the poetic sense. Yet they barely brush against aspects of the prose poem. Such is not the author’s intention, it seems. All effort goes into revealing or mysterious narratives in the briefest form.
Kawasaki City-based Romanda (Little Pink Plastic Babies) even offers advice to, and depiction of writers—uncannily accurate and inaccurate in varying circumstances:
The Young Writer Asks the Old Writer
“What happens
when I use myself up
and there’s no more inspiration?”
The writer with the deeply
lined neck and face answers,
“You repeat yourself.”
And there’s the author who burns her writing in despair:
She quit writing
and the world didn’t fall apart.
In his closing story, he presents a disgruntled husband packing up and getting ready to leave, but then:
he unpacks.
Putting everything back where it belongs.
Romanda doesn’t unpack and put things where they belong for the reader, but rather opens his oddly packed box of wonders, to show off fifty eccentric, edgy, engaging, neatly wrought, and sometimes unsettling, fables.
[Editor’s note: Interposition will be published on March 24, 2026.]
*
Steven Ross Smith enjoys muddling with words and books in Victoria, BC. His writing, swayed by experimenters in early Toronto days, juxtaposes disparate threads, as in his seven volume poetic series fluttertongue. His decades-long westward migration through Canada’s landscapes implanted continuing amazement and many poetic influences. His fourteenth book is Glimmer: Short Fictions, from Radiant Press. Most recently, The Green Rose, a chapbook collaboration with Phil Hall appeared in 2024. Smith was Banff Poet Laureate, 2018-21. He is currently absorbed in a rappy-spoken-word album project, as SloLo Smithy, streaming on BandCamp. [Editor’s note: Steven reviewed recent books by Jan Zwicky, Joanna Streetly, Mary Ann Moore, Sharon Thesen, and Jacqueline Bell, Jeff Derksen, Stephen Collis, Harold Rhenisch, Kevin Spenst, Eimear Laffan, and Tim Lilburn for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line 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