Welcome to Kate Hargreaves' Leak, where the relationship between language and the body lives in the bumps and bruises that in turn become new ways of understanding the borders and leaks of our everyday existence. In Leak, bodies lose pieces and fall apart, while words slip out of place and letters drop away. Emergency room signage becomes incomprehensible, the census requests bodily measurements, a cyclist confuses oil with her own blood. This visceral deconstruction of the body and its multiple representations tests the boundaries of body politics — pathologically, emotionally, and lyrically.

Kate Hargreaves is a poet, fiction writer, book designer and roller derby skater. Her first book, Talking Derby: Stories from a Life on Eight Wheels (Black Moss, 2012), is a collection of short prose vignettes inspired by playing women’s flat-track roller derby. Hargreaves’ poetry has been published in literary journals across North America, including Descant, filling Station, The Puritan, Drunken Boat, The Antigonish Review, Canada and Beyond, Carousel, and Rampike, and has also appeared in the anthologies Whisky Sour City (Black Moss, 2012) and Detours (Palimpsest, 2012), and the Windsor Review’s “Best Writers Under 35” issue. Hargreaves was the recipient of a Windsor Endowment for the Arts Emerging Literary Artist award in 2011 and a Governor General’s Gold Medal in Graduate Studies at the University of Windsor in 2012, where she obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English & Creative Writing. Kate grew up in Amherstburg, Ontario, but now lives in Windsor, where she works as a publishing assistant and book designer at Biblioasis. Follow her on Twitter @TalkingDerby and connect with her on Facebook www.facebook.com/TalkingDerby.

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Praise for Leak:
Inside Kate Hargreaves's stunning new book, words bite and yawn and breathe the page, chipping away at the dictionary, diagnosing the alphabet. A tour de aperture, these poems will leak from your tongue into your brain, gushing pleasure: pleasure: pleasure: pleasure.
– Nicole Markotic
With deliberate caprice, Kate Hargreaves executes, deranges, disentangles, fractures, accidenting language into dazzling constellations.
– Rosemary Nixon
Leak is an exciting poetic debut which performs a relentless and passionate anatomy through syntax that spills, kicks, craves, bloats, sheds, and spits. Hargreaves reminds us that, for worse and for better, parts of speech and speaker tend to gurgle beyond their notional grammars. Read it and gush.
– Susan Holbrook