THERE IS NOTHING
ORDINARY ABOUT
THIS RAG

June 2010

Maple Leaf Rag is a dynamic, jazz-infused riff on Canadian culture. With rhythm and edge, Kaie Kellough’s verbal soundscape explores belonging, dislocation and relocation, and national identity from a black Canadian perspective. This collection of poems is both written word and musical score — a dictated dub replete with references to African Canadian and African American culture (current and dated), Canadian history and politics, and characters ranging from dancers to piano players to boxers.

Kaie Kellough spells out the 21st century inheritance of multiple movements: the engaged pedigree of dub poetry, the identity politics-infused lyric, and the advancement of a so-called “spoken word” that bends—synesthetically—back to the page in concrete form. It is our luck that Kellough’s remarkable book-length experiment in form and social criticism occurs on this terrain. And it is a challenge that Canada, the black diaspora, and all followers of progressive poetics must meet. “News that stays new”? Kellough’s verse is New School that will stay New School.”

— Wayde Compton

These classy poems spring into motion like a jazzy urban pop-up book with its own musical score. Their craftsmanship recalls an age when attention to detail was an artisan’s signature, imagery fully-awake and precise by smooth linguistic sleight-of-hand. How supplely Kellough’s poems reflect the contours of the cultural landscapes they inhabit will be well borne out by time. Read these poems aloud—or better yet, go hear Kaie read them.”

— Catherine Kidd

Maple Leaf Rag is available through the publisher, Arbeiter Ring Publishing (ARP). Arbeiter Ring Publishing (ARP) was founded in 1996 by musician John K. Samson and writer/editor Todd Scarth in downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba. Our mandate is to publish a dynamic combination of cultural, fiction, and non-fiction titles with an emphasis on progressive political analysis of contemporary issues, or what the Winnipeg Free Press described as “left-wing politics with a rock-and-roll attitude.”