A Trip to the Zzoo
by MA|DE

• Read MA|DE’s discussion of the composition process of A Trip to the Zzoo in periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics

MA|DE (est. 2018) is a collaborative writing entity, a unity of two voices fused into a poetic third. It is the name given to the joint authorship of Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace, artists whose active solo practices differ quite radically from one another. MA|DE’s collaborative writing formalizes a process that began as an extended dialogue between two people newly discovering one another; their long, exploratory conversations opened up a language-space all their own. MA|DE is currently working on their first full-length collection of poetry, which formulates a set of shared visions, symbols, and ciphers that invites the reader into their complex, continually-expanding internal universe.

“…an exciting, stimulating read, full of poems as thoughtful as they are beautiful. Poetry like this is much like a river—something that becomes different, and makes you different, every time you plunge in.”
—Jeremy Colangelo, author of Beneath the Statue (Now or Never Press), in The Temz Review

“In A Trip to the Zzoo, [MA|DE] train Kingdom Animalia to stutter and glitch. Jellyfish, tardigrades, and wolves find equal footing; anorexia, condominiums, and Trash Mountain take on a brittle, pulsing life of their own.”
—Bryce Warnes in The Pamphleteer

“For all the critique that underlies the work, there’s a profound jouissance that runs through the poems. After all, we are on a trip to the zoo, where we might turn out to be the strangest of animals.”
—Kevin Spenst in subTerrain

“[MA|DE’s collaborative writing approach] imbues the poems with a marvellous, often uncanny slant that illuminates shadowed corners of autonomy and anatomy.”
—Hollay Ghadery, author of FUSE: Exploring the Fractured Biracial Identity (Guernica Editions)

“This book is an ecosystem of wild imagery, cutting language and the soft fleshiness of mouse-sized details made grand.”
—Michael Russel, author of Grindr Opera (Frog Hollow Press)