November 2026
Passage Series #13
Softcover, 144 pages, 7.8 x 5.12 inches
ISBN: 979-8-9947789-1-3
Design by Rissa Hochberger
Edition of 1,000
18 USD
Pre-order (ships in November)
About the book
Zoe Imani Sharpe’s debut collection Figure Eight is a meditation on impermanence from within displacement’s forced and felt motions. Departing from the demolition of the public housing complex in downtown Toronto that was her childhood home, Sharpe asks how desire is structured and, inversely, how it restructures around the point of loss. Changing form and shifting modes of address, these sequences collapse the distinction between emergence and dissolution, figure and ground, and the ruined and rebuilt, to suggest the vicissitudes of memory and time as architectures of the self.
Zoe Imani Sharpe’s Figure Eight is the 2024 Open Reading Period Editors’ Pick.
About the author
Zoe Imani Sharpe is a poet and artist working across language, moving image, reciprocal forms of education, and collaborative projects. Her recent poetry and essays on art can be found in C Magazine, The Capilano Review, YYZ Artists’ Outlet, and elsewhere. Her social practice work has been supported by Gallery TPW, Whippersnapper Gallery and Triptych Curatorial Collective, among other artist-led organizations. Based in Tkaronto (Toronto), Canada, her first book is Figure Eight.
Praise
Figure Eight moves through Toronto and the body with a rare compositional instinct: the ability to bring distant things into sudden proximity, letting them vibrate. What first appears as white space between units, figures, artworks, histories, and materials begins to blur. Sharpe’s poems trust the cuts and strange adjacencies to reveal an urbanism where grief moves barefaced through architecture.
—Nour Bishouty
Zoe Imani Sharpe’s Figure Eight is traversed by an impossible metabolization. With a language so resiliently attuned to the topological restlessness of the port city—language live-wired to the groundlessness of its economic stratifications—Sharpe’s writing is trampled and trampoline, salivary and saline, glimpse and glitch. Here, I encounter the music of egoless thinking, the music of the port’s inner ear canal. A new glory lives in this book, a time of day we have yet to name and a new lyric for the commons.
—Valerie Hsiung