Interposition by Kaie Kellough | The Miramichi Reader

From the very first lines of “to be,” the opening section Kaie Kellough’s Interposition, we find ourselves descending into a nightmare, moving steadily towards a stultifying existence characterized not by connection but by the spaces between us. That sense of being caught between worlds (that word “between” again) allows an overwhelming feeling of bifurcation to envelop us, constrict us, restrict us. As the insistent, navel-gazing “i” morphs into an identity-less “x” and ultimately “i/x” who survives in the dystopic in-between shaped by social media and alt. reality, we lose our sense of self and of being. Language and syntax break into fragments that scatter across the pages.

This is the state we find ourselves in as we embark on the second section, “between.” By now we have come to accept the broken, fragmented lines that verge on incoherence, yet on careful reading are nerve-wrackingly lucid. This is not a book you can rush through, for it demands constant vigilance. Our conventional tools for reading the West/Western languages and those that were colonized and rendered into writing modelled in the image of the West using its alphabet, disintegrate. We can no longer assume that our eyes must move in a linear pattern from left to right; instead Kellough asks us to reconstruct syntax line by line, morpheme by morpheme. We read down columns and across columns and between columns to extract multiple meanings, contradictions, and nuances. In these lines, we begin to experience a persistent “may/be” echoing to the right of the page/screen, leading us to hear, simultaneously,

books’ densities dead empires’ whispers

The effect is terrifying, not only for the way it forces us to re-evaluate our conventional (western, colonial) reading practices but also for the way it compels us to witness the disintegration of our world into corporate-controlled sound-bytes.

The subject matter flits from topic to topic in short clips that range from addressing the increasingly uncritical nature of our faculties to the pillaging of the environment to serve corporate and individual greed that exploits and manipulates ruthlessly, until we

                                                                                              hear
wind   thru
recycled polyester trees                      planted by the children
of oil and gas executives

and are forced to ask ourselves “what it is // this language” that has become

a microprocessor
whose mind is made
of looted minerals

As we move into the final section, “in between,” we spiral out from the asphyxiating, navel-gazing “i/x” and its ill body searching for identity to a heart-wrenching cri de coeur:

o who
can declare
i
can breathe
o who
can despair
i
am matter
o who
can repair

Interposition, Kellough tells us in the acknowledgements, was written largely in the winter of 2021, that is to say, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet several years later, as we continue to watch governments capitulate and turn the racist, homophobic tirades of billionaires and their enablers into policy, it feels that this book gains relevance by the day.

Kaie Kellough (he/him) is a poet, fiction writer, and sound performer living in Montreal. His previous collection, Magnetic Equator, won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is a writer and vocalist for the group FYEAR and is pursuing graduate work in English at Queen’s University.

Publisher: Penguin Random House Canada (March 2026)
Paperback: 6″ x 9″ | 112 pages
ISBN: 9780771023729

Peter Midgley

Peter Midgley is a bilingual writer and editor from Edmonton. Over the course of thirty years, he has worked as a freelance editor, festival director, university lecturer, managing editor, acquisitions editor, clerk of court, bartender, actor, janitor, and door-to-door salesman. This experience has given him enough material for more than a dozen books. His latest book, let us not think of them as barbarians (NeWest Press), was shortlisted for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award in 2019.