Andy Verboom lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), where he is a program manager for the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.
Andy is the publisher & managing editor of long con magazine and Collusion Books, co-author of two collaborative poetry chapbooks, and solo author of four poetry chapbooks. His poetry has won Frog Hollow’s Chapbook Contest & Descant‘s Winston Collins Prize, been shortlisted for CV2‘s Foster Poetry Prize & Arc‘s Poem of the Year, and appeared in CAROUSEL, Prism, The Ex-Puritan, Vallum, & elsewhere.
knife fork book. March 2020.
20 pg.
If poetry reminds you of trying to shake someone’s hand with a sex toy, you too may have been born under the “cosmic sigil” of the double-headed dildo.
These double-headed sonnets — in which endings become funhouse mirrors, event horizons, and corsets all at once — explore the distances between and within bodies.
Verboom is a wordfucker, and DBL finds him at his most playful.
... playful, quick-witted, hopeful, and raw at the same time.
845 Press. Oct 2018.
46 pg.
Bordered on all sides by constraint, Floor Games takes H.G. Wells's flair for the analogue and material, and then splices [...] so that the language and twisting narratives and phrases emerge multitextual and multivocal, as collaborative multispecies.
Floor Games is a wonderful, rich piece of work ... it skates along in the strange space a little way before language breaks down and finds many thought-provoking and beautiful things there. Its unlikely seed texts enable it to venture into dark and complex themes (militarism, colonialism, vivisection, AI) and yet it remains the same changeable, startling, childlike guide throughout.
Few poets use form to tease out and twist up their subject matter as inventively as Verboom [...]. The poems that result are as slick as they are jarringly incongruent; that the whole thing comes out sounding like Verboom speaks to the idiosyncrasy of his voice.
Couplets x Ting Fest. March 2018.
24 pg.
Co-created with Angie Quick.
How would we fall out of love if whalefall happened to space whales too? What if postcoital snail telepathy were real but only for alien snails sent to infiltrate Earth?
This collaboration with painter, poet, & performer Angie Quick answers such burning questions, exploring the eroticapocalyptic through the illustrated poem and the comic strip.
Baseline Press. Oct 2017.
40 pg.
If you’ve ever lost sleep over poetry’s neglect of Orthrus — that cowpoke brother of infamous hellhound Cerberus — these poems could be your nightmare-fuelling Ambien prescription.
Taking the two-headed monster as the household god of masculinity’s violently flailing fragility, Orthric Sonnets considers how the ethics of animal experimentation entwines with the poetic tradition of idealizing and dismembering women.
the brevity of the chapbook format brings out another kind of density: that is, the distillation of all that strange background reading into a brief run of high-quality poems ... the oddness is compressed into a strange richness
Frog Hollow Press. Nov 2016.
32 pg.
Co-authored with David Huebert.
What would sonically charged poetic forms like holorime, homophonic translation, and homolinguistic translation look like in their horrible, final-boss form?
Full Mondegreens is an experiment in going full monty with Sylvia Wright’s neglected notion of the “mondegreen,” the misheard poetic lyric. In poems by Brodsky, cummings, Dickinson, Donne, and others, each and every syllable becomes a door to Wright’s “mondegreen underworld” — and all these doors are flung wide open.
Anstruther Press. July 2016.
28 pg.
Tower tracks the private flight paths, associative ley lines, and secret lead pipes connecting Toronto & Halifax, Canada, with Wellington & Auckland, New Zealand. If “place is / alchemical projection” — the transmutation of toxic proximities into glittering skylines — then this sequence is anti-alchemy. The poems stir travelogue, doggerel, mythography, concrete poetry, and ekphrasis into a cauldron of self-incrimination.
Poetry
“Widow’s Nostredame” in Chaudiere Books’ National Poetry Month feature (Apr 2022)
“Delusional Structures of the Inner Ear” in CAROUSEL 44 (Aug 2020; Dec 2020) as the first link in CHAIN, an ongoing, global series of response poems
“The Barer Sheet” & “Campfire Rounds from Ancient Earth” (collaborative performances) for Sesquisharp at the Maritime Conservatory of Performing Arts (Aug 2019)
“Reconnaissance” in Contemporary Verse 2 41.1 (July 2018) as Young Buck Poetry Prize Honourable Mention & in the Luna Mouths Atlantic poets series (Dec 2019)
“The Toys to Have” in The /temz/ Review 2 (Jan 2018)
“Of the Building of Cities” in The Lampeter Review 15 (Dec 2017)
“Roofspeak” in PRISM international 56.1 (Nov 2017)
The Wide Skirt / Der weite Rock / The White Rock / Der weiße Stein / The Wise Stain… (durational performance) at TAP Centre for Creativity (Oct 2017)
“There Emigrate Bullets” in Word Hoard 5 (Nov 2016)
“Jesus H. Christ Does Private Dancing” in The Puritan 35 (Nov 2016)
“The Megafaun: Fact or Fiction?” in Vallum: Contemporary Poetry 13:2 (Nov 2016) and the Vallum Blog’s Poem of the Week (Dec 2016)
“The Critique of a Handsome Vacuum” in Arc Poetry Magazine 81 (Nov 2016)
“Sea Cucumber Elegy” in Contemporary Verse 2 29.1 (July 2016)
“Gastromance” in Arc Poetry Magazine 80 (June 2016) in the Poem of the Year Shortlist
“Evil Arrow-sign God” & “Vesuvian Man” in BafterC 8.1 (May 2016)
“On Watching ‘Makin’ Bacon Pancakes 10 Hour Version'” in 300 Hours a Minute: Poems about YouTube Videos (Desert Pets Press, 2015)
“Moon Hill” in Hart House Review (Spring 2015)
“Counting Half the World” in Hart House Review, Winter Supplement (2015)
Criticism
“Of Mermaids and Men: a review of Jessie Jones’s Nix” in PRISM international (2018)
“Theses on the Criticism of Popular Songwriting” (2017), co-written with David Janzen
Conscientious Conceptualism and Poetic Practice series (2017), as editor-in-residence at The Town Crier
“Poetry could be Bullshit: From Scatology to Conscientiousness” (2017)
“Ethics in Constraint: Liberation and Determinism in the Misheard Lyric” (2017), co-written with David Huebert
“Speaking of ‘Lyric Conceptualism’: Space, Time, and the Travelling ‘I'” (2017), co-written with Kevin Shaw
“Review of Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance” (2015)
“Review: Christine Leclerc’s Oilywood” (2015)
“Paradoxy: Interpretive Environments, Time Travel, and the Unrereadable” (2013)
