Cover Design: Mark Laliberte
At a time when binaristic and hierarchical relations are being readily interrogated, MA|DE — a unity of two voices fused into a single, poetic third — takes up a critique of the human-animal divide in their full-length debut, ZZOO. From the depths of the oceans to the outer reaches of the sky, a menagerie of species trade off time in the limelight, none of them solely occupying the central space on the global stage. MA|DE’s collaborative practice foregrounds interdependence, outward focus, shared spaces and non-hierarchical thinking, all of which emerge allegorically in interzonal poems that are as richly realized as they are formally eclectic. This wild-blooded collection turns conventional exhibitionism on its head, treating humans and animals as equal subjects of art, science and selfhood. ZZOO is a bestiary for the modern world.
Featured in 49th Shelf’s “Most Anticipated: Our Spring 2025 Poetry Preview“
In DUSIE’s “Best of List of 2025 Canadian Poetry“
In The Miramichi Reader’s “Best Poetry of 2025“
In @literalnobody’s “Best Poetry [2025]“
ENDORSEMENTS
“ZZOO cuts through the cultures and beliefs humans have spun around animals to create rare poetic visions, both dark and fresh, exhilarating and sharp.”
—Rachel Poliquin, author of The Breathless ZZOO: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing
“MA|DE pulls off the beautiful “sugarwhip” of collaboration: moebius-strip-like, poems that are two-sided and also one, and vice versa. This voice of voices is deindividuated. The “I” becomes a “We.” As they write, “When the clouds took human / shape, we felt indivisible.” This whimsical poetic menagerie hums with variety: of sound, form, animals. Perhaps you can’t step in the same river twice, but in ZZOO, two step in simultaneously.”
—Gary Barwin & Tom Prime, authors of Bird Arsonist and A Cemetery for Holes
REVIEWS
“vivid, original and often mind-blowing”
—Lisa de Nikolits (A Turn of Phrase) author of That Time I Killed You and Everything You Dream Is Real
“Great poetry collection.”
—Books Are Deadly
“Innovative, experimental, whimsical, mysterious.”
—Terri Favro, author of The Sisters Sputnik and Cold City
“Every detail of ZZOO feels like it’s been carefully and meticulously thought out…when you pick up a book by MA|DE, you’re not just picking up poetry. You’re being folded into a universe.”
—Michael Russell, author of gallery of heartache and Grindr Opera
“smart and engaged language […], resonating with sound and lyric play across the human-animal divide […] layered and sharp.”
—rob mclennan, author of the book of sentences
“Read them aloud. No, seriously, do it. Let them absorb you into themselves. You’ll be better for it.”
—K.R. Wilson, author of Stan on Guard
Cover Design: Mark Laliberte
In Euphoria, a small, fictional town that feels displaced in time and space, an affluent but isolated couple have vanished from their suburban home. Their estranged friend, Fir, a local video store employee, is the only person who notices their disappearance. When the police refuse to help, Fir recruits Fain, who moonlights as a security guard, and they set off on a seemingly hopeless search for the lost lovers. Their chance at an answer, if they can ever find it, lies on the wooded edge of Euphoria, where Slip, an elderly trailer park resident, finds a scattering of bones that cannot be identified. Distrusting everyone, Slip undertakes a would-be solitary quest to discover the bones’ identity. Yet secretly, Limn and Mal, two bored, true crime-loving teenagers from the trailer park, are dogging Slip. Determined to bring justice to the dead, Limn and Mal will instead bring the lives of all seven characters into fraught and tangled confrontation.
Beneath the familiar surface of this missing-persons novel lies an unparalleled experiment: the creation of a folkloric alternate reality where sex and gender have been forgotten. Expanding on the work of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and joining gender-confronting contemporaries like Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed and Akwaeke Emezi’sThe Death of Vivek Oji, Anomia is an atmospheric exploration of a possible world, and a possible language, existing without reference to sex or gender.
Read an excerpt from Anomia on Open Book Ontario
Featured in 49th Shelf’s “Most Anticipated: Our 2024 Spring Fiction Preview”
Featured in IN Magazine‘s “7 Wonderfully Queer Works of Canadian Literature“
Featured in All Lit Up’s Pride Reads 2024
An All Lit Up Spring 2024 Staff Pick
All Lit Up’s July Summer Book Club Pick (15% discount available!)
A Best Book of 2024 in The Miramichi Reader
ENDORSEMENTS
“Anomia resists definition, courageously dissolving the divides between genres, genders, and realities […] A novel unlike anything you’ve read before.”
—Corinna Chong, author of Bad Land and The Whole Animal
“With mycelial plotting propelled by Jade Wallace’s nuanced and atmospheric prose, Anomia is an astonishing debut.”
—Michael Melgaard, author of Not That Kind of Place and Pallbearing
“[A] whirling, delightful strange weaving.”
—Aaron Tucker, author of Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys and Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos
REVIEWS
“Jade Wallace has created something trailblazing here.”
—All Lit Up
“[A] balm for today and a blueprint for tomorrow.”
—Zachary Thompson in Hamilton Review of Books
“Jade Wallace’s work is as innovative as it is inimitable, continuing to carve out its own path in remarkable and effective defiance.”
—Nicholas Selig in The Miramichi Reader
“ANOMIA is a sort of picture, a landscape of images and affects bound together to create a place with such a recognizable geography that it becomes difficult to believe it cannot be found in the real world.”
—Margaryta Golovchenko in PRISM International
“[A] quirky and delightful surprise, a compelling read that had me fascinated from the first page to the last.”
—Amanda Earl in The Temz Review
“[A] lush and frequently witty meditation on community, love, memory, and found family that adheres to a rigidity of form while employing precise, affective language.”
—Shannon Page in Plenitude
“Mystery story meets gothic fairy tale […] A definite recommend from me.”
—Terri Favro, author of The Sisters Sputnik and Generation Robot
“In beautiful, eerie language, ANOMIA follows the stories of seven characters haunted by the past […] I loved this book.”
—Anne Baldo, author of Morse Code for Romantics
“[P]rovocatively strange and […] wondrously absorbing.”
—Hollay Ghadery, author of Widow Fantasies
“Wallace delivers ANOMIA with such force and guts.”
—Books Are Deadly
“[A] beguiling fairytale, a true crime fan’s delight, an exploration the Gothic horror of small-town life.”
—Amanda Earl, author of Beast Body Epic, in The Temz Review
“If the job of literature is to nudge us into new perspectives and new ways of thinking without being heavy-handed about it (so that people, you know, actually listen) ANOMIA succeeds admirably.”
—Alex Boyd, author of Army of the Brave and Accidental
“[A] lush and frequently witty meditation on community, love, memory, and found family.”
—Shannon Page in Plenitude
“[A] quietly perceptive, gentle, and genuine story of human mystery.”
—K.R. Wilson, author of Call Me Stan
“Anomia is a masterful novel […] I love Wallace’s writing style and voice and can’t wait to read more of their work!”
—Sarah O’Connor, winner of gritLit’s 2024 writing contest
“[E]xtremely memorable […] heavy hitting.”
—Avery Huotari in The Walleye
(Cover Design: Mark Laliberte)
Each section of LOVE IS A PLACE BUT YOU CANNOT LIVE THERE (Guernica Editions, 2023) is a psychogeographic investigation. Two casual ghost hunters on a road trip hear the death rattle of their relationship. Residents of a city’s fringe measure their physical and social isolation. A mother and her adult child have diametrically opposed reactions to their vacation spot. Lovers on a romantic coastal getaway discover how estranged they are from one another. Curious figures begin to embody their environments. Forthright and anecdotal, these poems recount the signals people transmit and receive, and the reciprocal ways we make, and are made by, the places we inhabit.
Longlisted for the 2024 Nelson Ball Prize
Featured in CBC’s “46 Canadian poetry collections to watch for in spring 2023”
Featured in 49th Shelf’s “Most Anticipated: Our Spring 2023 Poetry Preview”
Staff Writer’s Pick in Hamilton Review of Books
National Poetry Month Editor’s Pick in The Miramichi Reader
“Jade Wallace’s inventive debut poetry collection reminds us that we are all fundamentally travellers. These poems are psychogeographic maps attentive to the margins and sidelines of intellectual, emotional, and historical journeys that are often overwhelmed by their ostensible destinations. Preferring instead the spaces between, these poems are open to the potential wonder and mystery of the world in its contingency and complexity where “it’s hard to be sure we were there at all.” Skyscrapers, reversing falls, small towns defined by tire fires—travel is a mode of movement and critical self-reflection in this extraordinary book.”
—Adam Dickinson, Griffin Poetry Prize judge and author of Anatomic
“Firmly anchored in the tradition of the Southern Ontario Gothic, Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There maps the eerie unmappable. Attentive to everyday violence, horror, and beauty, the poems in this collection follow their speakers through rural and suburban Southwestern Ontario, to corner stores, motels, apartments, tourist towns, ghost towns, and skeleton museums. Jade Wallace writes with tenderness, humour, and a haunting perspicacity that is all their own.”
—Annick MacAskill, Governor General’s Award Winner for Shadow Blight
“Love is a Place But You Cannot Live There explores and subverts the haunted corners of the rural and urban—the haunting corners of ourselves. Wallace’s curious, nimble, and nostalgic words land with the halcyon sweetness of Ambrosia salad, the unsettling significance of an abandoned house. There’s music in this phenomenal collection—ballads and dirges; symphonic elegies of road-trip gothic.”
—Hollay Ghadery, Poet Laureate of Scugog, Reviews Editor for Minola Review, and author of Rebellion Box
“[F]ull of quiet wordplay, sharp details, and the gentle, breathtaking weirdness of forgotten places…A subtle, smart collection.”
—Review by Leah Bobet in Spacing
“[A] wonderful series of narratives in verse […] The book’s exciting concept is supported by strong imagery and a skillful balance between humour and darkness throughout.”
—Review by Zoe Shaw in The Miramichi Reader
“The poems crackle with energy and wry humour.”
—Review by Elizabeth Obermeyer in This Magazine
“I’ve always loved the dreamy David Lynch-like quality of Jade Wallace’s work […] I often feel, when reading Wallace’s work, that I’m alone in a room, with a carousel of old Kodachrome slides and each click is a read that transports me instantly into another time, another place.”
—Review by Lisa de Nikolits in The Minerva Reader
“Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There is a stunning collection of poems that refuse to be hurried […] Wallace writes with a combination of wit, confidence and unashamed criticism that is wholly unique, refreshingly genuine.”
—Review by Nicholas Selig (@sadpoetmemes)
“I thought the language was beautiful […] it just all tied together really nicely […] a really great collection.”
—Review by Maria Zuppardi on the Get (Can)Lit Podcast
“Perfectly timed, perfectly titled.”
—Rahat Kurd, author of Cosmophilia and The City That Is Leaving Forever
“[A] lovely collection of linked sets of poems written with great poise and clarity.”
—K.R. Wilson, author of Call Me Stan
“Their short, compelling narrative poems are impactful little stories—engaging, enticing and exquisite.”
—Peter Hrastovec, Windsor’s Poet Laureate, author of Sidelines
“I have a soft spot for poetry books that know how to build an arc and don’t make the reader jump through hoops to figure it out. Each section of [the] book is like its own carefully crafted city with its own unique geography […] a powerful, complex testament to human emotion and experience.”
—Michael Russell, author of Grindr Opera
“[A] magic 8 ball of poems […] each page is a short adventure that told me about myself and the places I’ve been and am in right now as much as it painted a picture of the author and the places they exist.”
—Wake Lloire, poet, storyteller, and queer community builder
“I loved it from start to finish!”
—Lynn Tait, author of You Break It You Buy It
“I absolutely loved [this] little book.”
—Meg Freer
“Geography, geology, road trips, apartments, young adulting, young love, all witnessed through the eyes of a of a whip-smart itinerant, always one step back, making mental notes even while they participate. Highly recommend.”
—Ursula Pflug, author of Mountain and Down From
Jade Wallace 