Dominoes at the Crossroads
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
In Dominoes at the Crossroads Kaie Kellough maps an alternate nation—one populated by Caribbean Canadians who hopscotch across the country. The characters navigate race, class, and coming-of-age. Seeking opportunity, some fade into the world around them, even as their minds hitchhike, dream, and soar. Some appear in different times and hemispheres, whether as student radicals, secret agents, historians, fugitive slaves, or jazz musicians.
From the cobblestones of Montreal’s Old Port through the foliage of a South American rainforest; from a basement in wartime Paris to a metro in Montréal during the October Crisis; Kellough’s fierce imagination reconciles the personal and ancestral experience with the present moment, grappling with the abiding feeling of being elsewhere, even when here.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Montreal-based poet and performance artist Kaie Kellough’s wildly imaginative collection of short stories conjures a future Canada where Caribbean Canadians have become the cultural focus. The switch occurred, as the narrator explains, in the “Post-Climate Crisis Period,” when desirable (and largely white-owned) land was flooded by the rising seas, sending the formerly prosperous fleeing to Montreal’s largely Black-populated outer areas as refugees, turning the existing paradigm of status and privilege upside down. The evocative stories that grow out of this premise deal smartly with themes of racism and colonialism, taking us from Canada to Africa to South America, always through fantastic ideas (like a magical saxophone that weaves Caribbean roots into North American culture!). Kellough’s gorgeously lyrical language revels in what it would be like to celebrate these cultures without the baggage of real-world racism. The result draws us irresistibly into a world of celebration and possibility.
