having traversed air, am i noise or am i here?

            how can i return somewhere i’ve never been?

            seeker, descendent, returnee, one who

            was once abducted and has now fled

                                                                          —from “Exploding Radio” 

Kaie Kellough’s latest poetry collection treads longingly across the planet. Magnetic Equator leads us into the tender geography of memory; Kellough carries us home piss-drunk in a white-flurried Albertan rush, moments before burning us under the Caribbean noon. This collection is a vital shift for Canadian diasporic poetry; Kellough manages to bind the Caribbean and Canadian landscapes through illustrative style and innovative vocalizations.

Born in Vancouver, raised in Calgary, and now based in Montreal, Kellough’s ancestral roots are in Guyana, South America. Now 47, the multi-faceted poet also practices in sound performance and electronic audio music. Kellough’s previous published works span several genres: two collections of poetry, Lettricity (2005, Cumulus Press) and Maple Leaf Rag (2010, Arbeiter Ring Publishing), two works of fiction, Accordéon (2016, ARP Books) and Dominoes at the Crossroads (2020, Véhicule Press), and two audio recordings, Vox:Versus (2011, WOW) and Creole Continuum (2014, HOWL). Magnetic Equator has been met with strong critical praise, winning the distinguished Griffin Poetry Prize, a Canadian prize founded in 2000 by entrepreneur and philanthropist Scott Griffin. Kellough’s work was described by one judge as “singing of exile and scattering ... negotiat[ing] survival and revolt as it moves with the surety and complexity of improvisation and collaboration”.[1] 

The first piece in the collection, “Kaieteur Falls”, cannonballs us into a howling ecosystem of poems congested with smoke, sound, and uncertain proximities. This work lives in the noise of language, not aiming for immediate clarity, but rather, to be felt like a skin. It is intentionally vibratory, allowing us to sift through the words’ shifting tides. Entering the text entails giving way to a phonetic wave of motion. 

“High School Fever: Nowhere, Prairie” follows a less sonic and more narrative structure, while still reverberating with the rumbling sense of sound found in “Kaieteur Falls”. The poems buzz of a stalled Canadian dream. Caged by racial isolation and stumbling youth, Kellough writes, “These were the worst years of my life. I wasn’t supposed to admit that” (23). Kellough’s testimony of the “nowhere, prairies” telescopes into a fractured, stagnant landscape peopled by a lost citizenry; alcohol, frost, and vacant nationalism clothe a skeletal Calgarian teenhood. 

By contrast, we are then greeted in lush Guyanese warmth in “Exploding Radio”. As Kellough circles a barrel of questions on belonging (“i don’t know/ how not to be multiple. i don’t know/ what to desire from this avowal” 35), we witness his pacing within the thick life of cities rich with colour. Here, Kellough wraps the reader in a map and asks where the blood veins are; he traces a hand across the whole globe and offers an ecology. We trustfully follow his stretching of latitude and longitude, of building story into the Earth. 

Kellough’s collection is, fundamentally, an exercise in wanting, as he tracks his own history and desire for homeland. Magnetic Equator narrates Canada nakedly, not shying from the dry discordance that diasporic peoples and people of colour sometimes occupy in moving through the country. Kellough explores this masterfully, touching on experiences of abjection with a flatly candid precision (“the black, brown, beige ones were invisible. i was nowhere. calgary was nowhere” [24]). The text is untethered because it needs to be—in poems that hotly pursue belonging and place, Kellough welcomes us into a nation of splintered trees. And then, he leads our palms straight to the dirt to trace their seeds. Magnetic Equator acts as an offering, leaving a sensation of witnessing the world in a snowglobe and briefly, holding it firm.