MA|DE

(Mark is also secretly on this list twice, as he has a couple of pieces in The Anstruther Reader.)

Thanks to Conor McDonnell for including ZZOO on a list of books that inspired his work for @49thshelf.bsky.social! And congrats to Conor on his latest poetry collection, What We Know So Far Is, out yesterday from @wolsakandwynn.bsky.social!

Read the full list here: 49thshelf.com/Lists/Member...

and whether and how to engage with social issues in art without moralizing.

Many thanks to Hollay and Valentino Assenza for their tireless engagement with literature. ☺️

www.podbean.com/media/share/...

Feels very appropriate for our book of animal poetry to appear on HOWL - CIUT 89.5FM! MA|DE recently chatted with @hollay.bsky.social about: what makes a ZZOO different from a zoo; writing for depth rather than clarity; what it's like to work with an editor as a two-person collaborative ...

Matt Boylan - Review — The Ampersand Review

Special thanks to Tali Voron-Leiderman for sending us a copy of the issue with some fancy Ampersand swag. 📘🖊

Read the review: theampersandreview.ca/new-page-99
Read the issue: theampersandreview.ca/issue-no-8-toc
Buy the issue: theampersandreview.ca/purchase/the...

"richly intertextual contemporary poetry full of allusion & shrewd wordplay;" "an ontological exploration of the nature of being;" "shirks notions of anthropocentrism & deconstructs the duality between human and animal;" & "beautifully crafted language and masterful symbolism" among other laurels.

🐶🐼There's particular delight in print review & MA|DE was lucky enough to experience that this week thanks to reviewer Matt Boylan, writing for @theampersandreview.bsky.social. Boylan has many insightful & laudatory things to say about ZZOO @palimpsestpress.bsky.social, including:

MA│DE, ZZOO VENTRAL As above, this eternity below the ocean waves is a bitter and frigid blue. Heavenly heads are full of cold light, though blood swe...

Read the full review here: robmclennan.blogspot.com/2025/09/made...

It's a quintessential right of passage for small press poetry books to be reviewed by @robmclennan.bsky.social and we're ever so grateful to him for bringing MA|DE's debut collaborative collection into the fold. Rob calls ZZOO "layered, and sharp” and remarks on its “smart and engaged language."

Poster in dusty pink and teal for a literary reading: Stacey Easton and Sadiqa de Meijer at The Printed Word on Fri Sep 26th at 6 pm, hosted by Pasha Malla, 16 McMurray St #3 in Dundas Ontario.

Please join us. #hamont

🪲🐬🦩This Saturday September 13 at 2pm, we'll be reading at the Leamington branch of Essex County Library alongside Daniel Lockhart, Kathryn MacDonald, Carrie Lee Connel & Andreas Connel-Gripp. It’ll be our first time reading in Leamington & ZZOO’s first visit too. Hope to see you at this free event!

MA|DE, Podcast Episode · New Books in Poetry · 07/10/2025 · 54m

a spectacle, how we approach the formatting of every poem like a design exercise with a heightened sense of what it looks like on the page & the curious tendency of poems to shift their meanings over time even for their authors.

What a treat to talk to an interviewer like Hollay Ghadery @hollay.bsky.social of @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social (& elsewhere), who is equal parts enthusiastic & insightful about books. MA|DE had a great time chatting with Hollay about why we tried to treat each poetry reading on our ZZOO tour like...

P.S. For those unfamiliar, GET LIT is part of CMFU fm at McMaster University, and has featured a great range of writers in the past; definitely worth a listen and a follow, in our opinion!

GET LIT E455 with MA|DE (Mark Laliberte & Jade Wallace) Podcast Episode · Get Lit · 2025-08-06 · 30m

what sets 'ZZOO' apart from other contemporary lyric poetry collections & what’s on the horizon for MA|DE in the near future. Listen here: podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/g...

Earlier this week, we had a 15-minute chat scheduled with Jamie Tennant @jtennant.bsky.social for episode 455 of his GET LIT podcast, which quickly turned into a 30-minute interview. We discussed where collaboration begins, how two very serious people manage to make playful work ...

Great to chat with you, Jamie!

(Though if you want to choose your cover and get a signed copy, you'll still have to order directly from us.😇)

If you happen to be a member of LCP @canadianpoets.bsky.social, you can get 15% off + free shipping on many new and forthcoming Canadian poetry collections, including MA|DE's ZZOO, if you order through @alllitupcanada.bsky.social anytime between now and Saturday August 9! 🐙🐍🦋 alllitup.ca/books/zzoo/

how the collection came together & how the hell we got 5 covers. Read the interview: alllitup.ca/a-set-of-var...

“A set of variant covers in a bookstore might be thrilling and mysterious”: An Interview with MA|DE For the past several years, MA|DE—Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace—has been carving out a unique space in the literary landscape, embracing collaboration as both a practice and an ethos. Their work is a fusion of poetic experimentation, visual artistry, and deep engagement with the traditions of literary and artistic partnerships in Canada. In this interview, Mark and Jade take us through the origins of MA|DE and the journey of their full-length poetry collection ZZOO (Palimpsest Press), which included an ambitious approach to their cover design (there are five cool covers of ZZOO to choose from!). With a keen eye on the intersections of poetry, visual art, and literary publishing, MA|DE continues to push the boundaries of what a poetry collab can be.

Mark Laliberte & Jade Wallace: To tell the story of MA|DE, we have to go back to 2018. That’s when we—Mark Laliberte & Jade Wallace—first began working together. In the beginning, our collaboration was single-celled, a free-form thing. We wrote together in a shared document, word upon word, line upon line, without much sense of where it would all end up. We wrote daily, and just began building poems. As we continued working together, day into month into year, the specific nature of our collaboration started to take shape, or reveal itself. We were writing and experimenting. We were also looking at the history of collaboration in Canada, both in the visual and literary arts scenes—and, to be honest, we felt more spiritually connected to long-term artistic collaborations like General Idea, Public Studio and FASTWÜRMS (who, incidentally, were Mark’s MFA advisors at the University of Guelph back in the early 2000s). We began calling ourselves MA|DE in reference to our shared projects—taking on the branded positionality of a contemporary pop group, adopting a “band name” of sorts. For us, this naming gesture is symbolic: it indicates that this collaboration has a life of its own, and hopefully a long one; it is not simply the brief nexus of two writers’ careers, as so many literary collaborations are. MA|DE is a kind of entity or spirit we manifest, our third mind.

In the fog that consumed the entire month of March (thanks COVID), we totally lost track of this interview, the ACTUAL first written interview MA|DE ever did about 'ZZOO.' Our very belated thanks to the wonderful @alllitupcanada.bsky.social for chatting with us about how MA|DE came together ...

Realized this is actually our SECOND written interview but we're poets so you can't fault us for not being able to count.

You can read the full interview here: miramichireader.ca/2025/06/zzoo...

SM: I can imagine that ZZOO was a difficult thing to capture when you were conceptualizing it. MA|DE: With our collaborative work, there’s a lot of things going on that sometimes one or both of us are not even always aware of. One of us will write a line, and the other looks at it after like, what did they even mean by that? You think they meant one thing, and actually they meant some other thing, and then the line ends up kind of meaning both things. We feel like there’s a lot of nuance in the work that one or both of us might sometimes not know about because of these layers. By contrast, when we’re working on solo work, there might be layers, but it’s much easier to be aware of them as you work on the piece. You’re putting them there, and it’s deliberate. With our collaborative work it’s a bit more of a mystery. One of the ways we grounded the poems in ZZOO was to organize them into four distinct sections within the book. Our idea was that we would start submerged in ‘Water,’ then go on to ‘Land,’ then up into the ‘Air’ and then out into the heavens / the afterlife / the unknown (the section is called ‘Elsewhere’). Some of the poems, especially in that section, get quite morbid. There’s also a poetic suite that travels inside of ZZOO, a kind of long poem that is quartered and distributed across the terrain of the book so that a part appears in each of the four sections; collectively, the poem explores the life cycle, transformations and migratory patterns of Danaus plexippus, the monarch butterfly.

SM: I definitely felt like there was a full emotional landscape I had to navigate while reading ZZOO and I wondered if that was a guided thing, if that had something to do with the way you ordered the poems. To put something like this together, is it as intense of an experience for the creator as it is for the audience? MA|DE: With respect to emotional navigation, for us it helps that, with a few small exceptions in the book, most of these are not based on experiences that are personal to us. They’re things we read about, researched or encountered in passing. The poem “Psychopomp” was one of the few exceptions to that approach; it was actually written after our cat, Ari, died. Having said that, most of the poems in ZZOO are inspired by things that emotionally resonated with us when we came across them, and that’s why we wanted to write about or reference them. Still, they weren’t part of our actual lives so there was an amount of distance that was built-in. When we went to reference or work with them, it was a lot easier for us than it is for people who are grappling with things / traumas that are immediate to their experience. Some of the poems we attempted to actualize based on an initial point of insight didn’t always work or come alive, and we abandoned them. That does happen sometimes. But overall we were able to balance out the four sections of ZZOO topically and emotionally. We also used the endnotes section of the book, ‘Taxidermia,’ to reveal references that the reader might not readily get, and to acknowledge the real-world incidents that were the starting places for the poems. Poetry opens up all kinds of doorways into a subject but it doesn’t always provide a lot of grounding. It can be very extrapolative. We wanted to have that balance available in the book between art and fact, but not let the poems get mired too much in extremely concrete details. Endnotes let us strike that balance.

We're proud to present our very first WRITTEN interview about ZZOO! Sarah Marie @literalnobody.bsky.social, for The Miramichi Reader , asked us a range of surprising questions, covering topics from ZZOO's emotional landscapes to practical matters like touring a small press poetry collection.

🥰 Back at you!

That about wraps up our ZZOO touring for the year — unless you'd like to schedule MA|DE for your reading, festival, or other literary event.😉 You can even drag us out to a party with our trunk of masks if you want.

We had a lot of fun using the projection screen for our performance.

It was also great to catch up with Hamilton friends like Steacy Easton & Jamie Tennant @jtennant.bsky.social (who happens to be one of our @palimpsestpress.bsky.social mates).

The last stop on the June leg of our 'ZZOO' tour was Hamilton, where Hamilton Public Library graciously welcomed us for the third year in row (!). We were joined by poetry greats Jim Johnstone (who also edited ZZOO) & Liz Worth @lizworth.bsky.social.

Whoa! Big news!

Then, at the even more well-attended Ottawa Small Press Book Fair itself.

Both events were lovingly organized and hosted by rob mclennan @robmclennan.bsky.social (many thanks to him!). We had a great time both days and were delighted to be able to catch up with so many literary community friends.