Country Music

by Zane Koss

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 poetics—a country music—Koss 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 “extractiveness”—both the violence of settler-colonial capitalism and the systems of class privilege that devalue rural, working-class experience. It’s a book that wants to find a way forward through the imperfect inheritance we’re 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 Kellough’s Magnetic Equator, Kate Siklosi’s Selvage, D.M. Bradford’s Dream of No One But Myself, or Jordan Abel’s Nishga.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

Published April 15, 2025

Reviews

[Michael]

My conversation with Koss discussing the book here:
https://umfm.com/programming/broadcas...

[Isobel · Rating 5 out of 5]

well yes!

[Jessi · Rating 5 out of 5]

why my desire to arrest this motion

to get the stories down just

right


as if possible

[C. R. Hawkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

All I hear at night is Zane yelling BOOM!

[Lea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Country Music is a poetic speaker for the rural heart that finds itself in modern times as an adult in a city. The rural landscape is slipping away but not fast enough and—at the same time—too fast.

Without the speaker’s immersion in story, existence becomes questionable.

On one hand, the past is unforgettable.

… i have still lived more years
of my life

on a dirt road than a
paved one,
i tell people that, and

though true, it doesn't
feel that way …

On the other hand, the present context of life challenges how one is expected to identify.

Kate asks me,
when are you going to stop identifying as blue-collar

you will probably never work with
your body ever again in your life

I said,
when i stop feeling like

Imagery and dialogue explore the stickiness of one’s place of upbringing, when that changes drastically in adult years. A relatable feeling. I appreciated the collection’s dynamic application of form and tone, to tell the whole untellable story!

[Jade Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like the people who are its subjects, this book says as much with its silences as with its words. Perfectly encapsulates a very particular type of homesickness, a kind of Western Canada version of hiraeth maybe, but one very much conscious of its own troubled entanglements in class and colonialism. Don't get me wrong though, this is very much a searching book, not a didactic one.