In Dominoes at the Crossroads Kaie Kellough maps an alternate nation—one populated by Caribbean Canadians who hopscotch across the country. The characters navigate race, class, and coming-of-age. Seeking opportunity, some fade into the world around them, even as their minds hitchhike, dream, and soar. Some appear in different times and hemispheres, whether as student radicals, secret agents, historians, fugitive slaves, or jazz musicians.

From the cobblestones of Montreal’s Old Port through the foliage of a South American rainforest; from a basement in wartime Paris to a metro in Montréal during the October Crisis; Kellough’s fierce imagination reconciles the personal and ancestral experience with the present moment, grappling with the abiding feeling of being elsewhere, even when here.

Kaie Kellough has lived in Vancouver and Calgary, and has been based in Montréal since 1998. He is a bilingual author, editor, educator, and performer. His be bop inflected words syncopate Canada's multiple solitudes. Kaie has dubbed and inked his way across Canada and into the United States. He is the author of Lettricity (Cumulus Press, 2004) and the editor of the Talking Book anthology (Cumulus Press, 2006). He was writer in residence for the 2005 Toronto International Dub Poetry Festival and the subject of a short documentary titled Ebon Flow in 2009. In 2011, Kaie recorded a suite of the poems in Maple Leaf Rag with instrumental accompaniment for the album Vox: Versus, which is available throught iTunes.

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