Performance Bond by Wayde Compton

Performance Bond by Wayde Compton

In Performance Bond, Wayde Compton, among the most progressive and experimental poets in Canada, defiantly and eloquently confronts the globalization and commodification of Black culture.

With poetry inspired by the insistent cadences of hip-hop and jazz, Compton fuses language, history, and contemporary Black politics. He deals with Black diaspora at the outer rim of geography and culture, concerned with the legacy of the slave trade, the memory and origins of hip-hop, and the ramifications of urban renewal on North America's inner cities.

Performance Bond, is supplemented with a CD that is a recording of Compton's musical performance of one of the book's sections, "The Reinventing Wheel," featuring the turntable mixing of his reading of the poem, prerecorded on vinyl, with musical beats, breaks, and samples.

Wayde Compton is a poet from Vancouver who has published the poetry collections 49th Parallel Psalm and Performance Bond, as well as the anthology Bluesprint. As part of the Contact Zone Crew, he and Jason de Couto perform turntable-based sound poetry. In Vancouver, he teaches English at Emily Carr University and Coquitlam College.