A Net of Momentary Sapphire is now available from Talonbooks.

Where validity edges Wednesday
far below, waves on rocks white
prayer ocean as if endless if —

Some advance praise:

“A net is a texture for catching” Samuel Johnson says in his dictionary, which I have gone to for help in finding words for the singular and moving experience of reading this poem-length book. Both thing and process, Kolewe’s net is formed from precise tercets and the irregular gaps between them, glittering, resurging, sinking, swaying, and reappearing in a baroque pattern of strangeness. What this recurrent weave catches is the faceted flickering of linguistic consciousness within the reader’s melodic attention. We read, we’re always the same reader, and we’re also the reader who is about to be fundamentally changed by a turning page. Kolewe’s metaphysical verse poses itself entirely and generously in the difficult movement of this continuing present by means of an ethical delicacy knotted from threads of tradition, doubt, and the acutely sensual rendering of daily perception. It holds astonishing beauty.

—Lisa Robertson
author of Boat and The Baudelaire Fractal

There’s an eerily familiar ambivalence to the means by which A Net of Momentary Sapphire keeps circling, keeps turning over what it’s trying to grasp. Its visions and revisions are tensioned by the potential for the absolutely meaningful – for getting it just right, for the singular phrase – versus the epic experience of not quite making it there. As Kolewe quietly unfurls the myriad, crippling richness of multiplying possibilities, somehow the elusiveness of really knowing, of unequivocal sense-making, speaks the search for meaning into radiance all while recording its shortfalls. It’s a painfully alive book that entangles a reader over and over again.

—David Bradford
author of Dream of No One but Myself

There’s also a video of me reading from the book at the Talonbooks Spring 2023 launch in Vancouver, here.

An early version of part of the book is available in a chapbook from above/ground press, titled “Like the noises alive people wear.”