Country Music

Country Music is a book about the stories the author listened to late at night around kitchen tables or campfires growing up in rural British Columbia. Mining these materials for a rural poeticsa country musicKoss begins to understand his working-class upbringing and academic surroundings through philosophical inquiries into what draws him continually back to these stories. The stories themselves, punctuated by the humour and violence of life in the mountains, offer a means of critiquing extractivenessboth the violence of settler-colonial capitalism and the systems of class privilege that devalue rural, working-class experience. Its a book that wants to find a way forward through the imperfect inheritance were given. Shifting between the poetic inquiries of Lisa Robertson and the vernacular improvisations of Fred Wah, the book offers an investigation of identity, family, and place akin to Kaie Kelloughs Magnetic Equator, Kate Siklosis Selvage, D.M. Bradfords Dream of No One But Myself, or Jordan Abels Nishga.