Country Music is a book about the stories the author listened to late at night around kitchen tables or campfires growing up in rural British Columbia. Mining these materials for a rural poetics—a country music—Koss begins to understand his working-class upbringing and academic surroundings through philosophical inquiries into what draws him continually back to these stories. The stories themselves, punctuated by the humour and violence of life in the mountains, offer a means of critiquing “extractiveness”—both the violence of settler-colonial capitalism and the systems of class privilege that devalue rural, working-class experience. It’s a book that wants to find a way forward through the imperfect inheritance we’re given.

Shifting between the poetic inquiries of Lisa Robertson and the vernacular improvisations of Fred Wah, the book offers an investigation of identity, family, and place akin to Kaie Kellough’s Magnetic Equator, Kate Siklosi’s Selvage, D.M. Bradford’s Dream of No One But Myself, or Jordan Abel’s Nishga.