Leak by Kate Hargreaves

Quill and Quire 2014 Fall Poetry Preview Selection
49th Shelf Most Anticipated 2014 Fall Poetry Selection

Welcome to Kate Hargreaves’ Leak, where the relationship between language and the body lives in the bumps and bruises that in turn become new ways of understanding the borders and leaks of our everyday existence. In Leak, bodies lose pieces and fall apart, while words slip out of place and letters drop away. Emergency room signage becomes incomprehensible, the census requests bodily measurements, a cyclist confuses oil with her own blood. This visceral deconstruction of the body and its multiple representations tests the boundaries of body politics—pathologically, emotionally, and lyrically.

Watch the BookThug Author Interview:

Watch the Book Launch and Reading:

Praise for Leak:

“Inside Kate Hargreaves’ stunning new book, words bite and yawn and breathe the page, chipping away at the dictionary, diagnosing the alphabet. A tour de aperture, these poems will leak from your tongue into your brain, gushing pleasure: pleasure: pleasure: pleasure.” —Nicole Markotić, author of Bent at the Spine

“With deliberate caprice, Kate Hargreaves executes, deranges, disentangles, fractures, accidenting language into dazzling constellations.” —Rosemary Nixon

“Leak is an exciting poetic debut which performs a relentless and passionate anatomy through syntax that spills, kicks, craves, bloats, sheds, and spits. Hargreaves reminds us that, for worse and for better, parts of speech and speaker tend to gurgle beyond their notional grammars. Read it and gush.” —Susan Holbrook, author of Joy Is So Exhausting

Reviews:

“Hargreaves portrays a distinct violence in being, specifically in being a woman, that is apparent even from her table of contents (“Heap / Chew / Skim / Pore / Chip / Peel”), which focuses on words that are both domestic and torturous. Leak experiments and plays with language and the result, like the book as a whole, is both pleasurable and painful, indulgent and subversive.” —Contemporary Verse 2

“The collection is best read aloud, the tongue tripping over Hargreaves’s delightful lyrical trickery.  With each play on words, her love of language is evident, right down to each descriptive stanza.”—Room Magazine

“Leak is striking for the sounds [Hargreaves] generates, allowing the language to roll and toss and spin in a fantastic display of gymnastic aural play so strong one can’t help but hear the words leap off the page.” —rob mclennan’s blog

“A bruising book of bruises, of both body & mind, Leak refuses to play down the internal & external wounds we all suffer, & sometimes even seek.” —Eclectic Ruckus

“Hargreaves is playing for keeps here, nothing is frivolous on the inside like nothing is frivolous on the cover; everything appears fantastic, it is all precisely ordered and disordered and present.” —All Lit Up

Interviews:

12 or 20 Questions with Kate Hargreaves —rob mclennan ‘s blog

Touch the Donkey Supplement #74 : Seven Questions for Kate Hargreaves —Touch the Donkey

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Kate Hargreaves is a writer, book designer, and roller derby skater in Windsor, Ontario. She is the author of the poetry collection Leak (BookThug) and a book of short vignettes, Talking Derby: Stories from a Life on Eight Wheels (Black Moss). Her writing has appeared in the anthologies Detours (Palimpsest), and Whisky Sour City (Black Moss), as well as in journals across Canada and the U.S. She won a Governor General’s gold medal for her graduate work in creative writing, and in 2015 was voted Windsor’s best writer by readers of The Windsor Independent. Find her on Twitter @PainEyre and at www.CorusKate.com.