[11/17/26] Sharpe, Zoe Imani: Figure Eight

Wendy's Subway, paperback

Publication Date: November 17, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

Zoe Imani Sharpe’s debut poetry 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 is a poet, teacher, and workshop-maker based in Tkaronto (Toronto), Canada. Her poetry and essays have appeared in YYZ Artists’ Outlet, carteblanche, and The Capilano Review, among others. Her recent collaborations include the digital anthology Bout That Life(Gallery TPW), the creative-process workshop WhAt She SAid: Promiscuous References & Disobedient Care (Contingencies of Care, OCADU), and the ongoing intersubjective text, Power, Baby! (with Claire Freeman-Fawcett).

Figure Eight moves through Toronto and the body with a rare compositional instinct: the ability to bring distant things into sudden proximity and 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