Harbour Grids

By Zane Koss

A visually and lyrically beautiful debut that celebrates the landscapes we take for granted.

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 Stephen Ratcliffe’s attention to daily observation and formal repetition, Lyn Hejinian’s investigations of the linguistic structures, Larry Eigner’s textural sense of language and compositional space of the page, and Juliana Spahr’s ethical attention to the ways we inhabit the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Invisible Publishing
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781988784922

Book preview

Cover: Harbour Grids, poems, by Zane Koss. Image: mid-century city harbour picture with a fractured effect overlaid.

"The grid is one of modernity’s core forms and concepts — the fabricated space fashioned for plotting its measured trajectories. In Harbour Grids, Zane Koss’s moving minimalist intervention, the grid is both constraint and focalizer. Through the shimmering veil of infrastructure, nation, and language, ‘scattered… across the… shifting surface’ of the page, we gather glimpses of the natural world, welcome those who have navigated the border’s rigid nets, and hear languages other than a monolithic English. The result is a near perfect balancing of form and formlessness —of urban enclosure, and a willful swerve onto the open common."

    — Stephen Collis, author of A History of the Theories of Rain and Decomp

"The grid referred to in the title of Zane Koss’s e quisite Harbour Grids is a pattern of visual and sonic ripples — the 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 s’s, observed details surface, fleeting (they are