Overview
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.
Kate Hargreaves
Kate Hargreaves is a writer and roller derby skater. Her first book, Talking Derby: Stories from a Life on Eight Wheels (2012), is a collection of short prose vignettes inspired by women's flat-track roller derby. Her poetry has been published in literary journals across North America, including Descant , filling Station, The Puritan, Drunken Boat, The Antigonish Review, Canada and Beyond, Carousel , and Rampike , in the anthologies Whisky Sour City (2012), Detours (2012), as well as in the Windsor Review's "Best Writers Under 35" issue. Hargreaves was the recipient of a Windsor Endowment for the Arts Emerging Literary Artist Award in 2011 and a Governor General's Gold Medal in Graduate Studies at the University of Windsor in 2012, where she obtained her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in English and Creative Writing. Kate grew up in Amherstburg, Ontario, but now lives in Windsor, where she works as a publishing assistant and book designer.
Reviews
Praise for Leak:
Inside Kate Hargreaves's 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
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 anat- omy 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
Reader Reviews
Tell us what you think!
Sign Up or Sign In to add your review or comment.
Related Blog Posts
July 31, 2020
Celebrated as one of Canada's well-known and award-winning Indigenous authors, Richard Van Camp began his career with a collection of short stories—
Angel Wing Splash Pattern (Kegedonce Press)—a playful, profound collection of stories that are very much grounded in ... Read more
March 24, 2020
In recognition of World Water Day (March 22, 2020) we're bringing you two poems from the collection
Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (Caitlin Press), the second in a trilogy, edited by Yvonne Blomer. Below, Yvonne shares more about our connection to water as an essential ... Read more
January 23, 2020
Northern Indigenous author Catherine Lafferty talks to us about her connection to place, the barriers to entry for Indigenous writers in the Northwest Territories where she lives, and her memoir
Northern Wildflower (Roseway Publishing). Scroll on for our chat with Catherine ... Read more
November 8, 2019
For readers who want to add a bit of danger into their downtime, or for those already planning to get into a bit of trouble this weekend, here are three new titles that'll take things up a notch.
October 2, 2018
Cree artist and writer Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau's English debut,
Winter Child (Freehand Books) is a semi-autobiographical novel that tells the story of a Cree-Métis woman grieving her late son—who seemed fated for death from his first breath—and reconciling her ... Read more
January 31, 2018
In her award-nominated food memoir
Apron Strings (Goose Lane Editions), journalist Jan Wong serves up witty, thought-provoking observations around the food culture and customs of some of the world's best food destinations. As epicurious ALU-ers, we were inspired to share ... Read more
September 5, 2017
by Robert Priest
It's the first day of school for many kids across Canada, but what does that mean when your school is underfunded, uninspiring, and dangerous? Children's poet and musician Robert Priest joins us with a tale of his tour of
The Wolf is Back, which features a poem about, and ... Read more
August 24, 2016
In our final book club post of the summer (don’t mind us crying over here…), we’re recommending some other CanLit titles to keep you reading long after you’re done
A Gentle Habit. And if you missed our July book club pick, there are even more fantastic books we can ... Read more
June 22, 2016
by Kate Hargreaves
With the recent release of D.D. Miller's roller derby book,
Eight-Wheeled Freedom, we asked writer, poet, designer, and derby player
Kate Hargreaves to share her experiences in the sport with us. Her early motivations in joining derby morphed into a lifelong love of ... Read more