Review: Harbour Grids – Zane Koss

I received this book for free from in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

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.

I love poetry, but this one took a minute to sink in. When listening to an audiobook – the choice of narrator is an essential component because they are responsible for conveying the story to the reader. As much as I wanted to blame the lack of enthusiasm on the narrator, I couldn’t because the author narrated the audiobook. So I’m sure he knew how he wanted to convey his words to the reader. I would have had a better experience reading the paperback version, but at this point, I’m not in a rush to even go that route.

Reviewed by: Orsayor

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