Calling Kaie Kellough an ancestral voice is maybe presumptive or even paradoxical, considering the bold aesthetic leaps in his work, and his widening reputation as a necessary innovative voice among a rising generation of writers in Canada. Whether it be in the circuitry between voice, image, and jazz of his collaborative “UBGNLSWRE” with musician and composer Jason Sharp and Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, or in the lyrical torrent of his Magnetic Equator, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize (McClelland & Stewart, 2019), Kaie’s poiesis is undeniably futurist. It’s from the futurism of his writing, however, that the ancestral surfaces. He is attuned to the frequencies of many Black histories unfolding all at once. The ‘past’ still reverberates with the same intensity. By weaving memoryscapes across continents in Magnetic Equator and the fiction collection Dominoes at the Crossroads (Véhicule, 2020), Kaie’s work splashes in history’s restlessness. History never knocks politely. It seeps in through the floorboards. Kaie is unafraid to go down with its tide.