Ken Babstock's Books

Swivelmount

By: Ken Babstock

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Poems to read in the small hours before dawn, when the sirens start up again. Swivelmount’s concerns – the collapse of subject and world, eros and law, knowledge and bafflement – gain new urgency as Babstock fiercely reimagines and reassembles the remnants into a viable order. At the core of their kinetic imagery is a freefall into mourning, but also a faith in others: a Babstock poem is the voice next to you in the ER waiting room, becalmed, compassionate, darkly humorous. This is Babstock at his best. Past Praise: “This is a poetry that is so uncompromising in how it deals with traditions – of poetic forms, of dictions, of militaristic histories – that it becomes something magnificent: brittle and hard. It will change how you think.” —Juliana Spahr for On Malice “On Malice is a fascinating and elegiac rebuke to surveillance technologies and its discontents. Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet. His work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity.” —Peter Gizzi “The flavour of this poetry is complex – it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila. It inebriates quickly. It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. And it is not without its sinister edge.” —Ange Mlinko for Methodist Hatchet “I felt as if I were reading poems written with a scalpel. Methodist Hatchet swaggers with confidence, intelligence, technique, humour, and that pinioning accuracy of observation we’ve come to expect from Babstock, surely one of the most versatile, switched-on, and linguistically savvy poets of our time.” —Simon Armitage “Methodist Hatchet is as precise as it is expansive, as complex as it is companionable. It refuses to look away from the unstable nature of self and world and word. That is why Babstock is one of the most exciting lyric poets writing today.” —Sina Queyras, The Globe and Mail for Methodist Hatchet

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129

Publisher

Coach House Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1770566503

ISBN 13

9781770566507

Days Into Flatspin

By: Ken Babstock

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Days Into Flatspin

By: Ken Babstock

Days into Flatspin is Ken Babstock's extraordinary second collection and it reveals a poet in full flight, fearless and technically brilliant. Diving into and then beyond what is seen or the coma of looking as one poem calls it, Babstock veers into the inner core of things, animals, and places through portals that exist all around us -- clothing, banisters, marshes, locks, wounds. And these are always entry points, always a means by which to go forward and further into, forcing decisions about whether to continue on or retreat and revealing that we rarely have any choice at all. Babstock opens everything to investigation, rupturing the limitations of the eye and the strictures of the poetic form: a sonnet is built from a Frisbee game, a love poem inspired by a cow, a gash inhabited by a field of crickets. And throughout his poetic landscape is a solitary bird -- watching, passing overhead, biding time, always present. Days into Flatspin is a soaring collection.

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House of Anansi

Published Date

ISBN 10

0887849156

ISBN 13

9780887849152

Airstream Land Yacht

By: Ken Babstock

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Airstream Land Yacht

By: Ken Babstock

In his brilliant third collection, award-winning and critically-acclaimed poet Ken Babstock finds momentary stays against our gathering darknesses in the irrepressible, acrobatic, free play of the mind. Poems of conscience collide with the problems of consciousness, the concrete and the conceptual find equal footing, and formal beauty mixes with imagistic brinksmanship as the speaker attempts to leave our "homes half-sheathed Tyvek" and "drift into the pain of our neighbours." Like Babstock's earlier work, Airstream Land Yacht testifies to the harrowing beauty of everyday experience ("a leather recliner star /gazing on the free /side of a yard fence," "shopping /carts growing a fur of frost," a grounded kite "nose down in the crowberries and fir") while introducing an expansiveness of inquiry with linguistic bravado and a quiet grace. The clutch of love poems contained here are key to unlocking the larger collection -- itself a love song to the wordless world.

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114

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House of Anansi

Published Date

ISBN 10

0887849164

ISBN 13

9780887849169

Mean

By: Ken Babstock

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Mean

By: Ken Babstock

Mean is a stunning exploration of the threshold and divide between our primeval origins and the meanness of our everyday lives. In this collection, the pastoral collides with the concrete terrain of motorbikes, prisons, and chainlink to capture our constructed isolation and our buried, yet resonant, connection to the land and seascapes that surround us. Ken Babstock's poetic voice is wholly original -- searing and pure in its realism, evocative and affecting in its search for a place to call its own. Mean won the Atlantic Poetry Prize (1999) and the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award (1999).

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House of Anansi

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ISBN 10

0887849148

ISBN 13

9780887849145

Swivelmount

By: Ken Babstock

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Swivelmount

By: Ken Babstock

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129

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Coach House Books

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ISBN 10

1770566503

ISBN 13

9781770566507

Days Into Flatspin

By: Ken Babstock

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Days Into Flatspin

By: Ken Babstock

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House of Anansi

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ISBN 10

0887849156

ISBN 13

9780887849152

On Malice

By: Ken Babstock

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On Malice

By: Ken Babstock

On Malice is watching you—new poems about and by surveillance, from Griffin-winning Ken Babstock.

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Coach House Books

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ISBN 10

1552453049

ISBN 13

9781552453049

Methodist Hatchet

By: Ken Babstock

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Methodist Hatchet

By: Ken Babstock

Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Trillium Book Award Marooned in the shiftless, unnamed space between a map of the world and a world of false maps, the poems in Methodist Hatchet cling to what’s necessary from each, while attempting to sing their own bewilderment. Carolinian forest echoes back as construction cranes in an urban skyline. Second Life returns as wildlife, as childhood. Even the poem itself -- the idea of a poem -- as a unit of understanding is shadowed by a great unknowing. Fearless in its language, its trajectories and frames of reference, Methodist Hatchet gazes upon the objects of its attention until they rattle and exude their auras of strangeness. It is this strangeness, this mysterious stillness, that is the big heart of Ken Babstock’s playful, fierce, intelligent book.

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House of Anansi

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ISBN 10

1770891587

ISBN 13

9781770891586

Airstream Land Yacht

By: Ken Babstock

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Airstream Land Yacht

By: Ken Babstock

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114

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House of Anansi

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ISBN 10

0887849164

ISBN 13

9780887849169

Mean

Poems

By: Ken Babstock

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Mean

Poems

By: Ken Babstock

Mean is a stunning exploration of the threshold and divide between our primeval origins and the meanness of our everyday lives. In this collection, the pastoral collides with the concrete terrain of motorbikes, prisons, and chainlink to capture our constructed isolation and our buried, yet resonant, connection to the land and seascapes that surround us. Ken Babstock's poetic voice is wholly original—searing and pure in its realism, evocative and affecting in its search for a place to call its own.

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House of Anansi

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ISBN 10

0887846343

ISBN 13

9780887846342

On Malice

By: Ken Babstock

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On Malice

By: Ken Babstock

Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet, his work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity, it's all good."—Peter Gizzi "The flavor of this poetry is complex—it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila. It inebriates quickly. It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. And it is not without its sinister edge."—Ange Mlinko With poems on perfect blue and a sonnet sequence situated on a derelict NSA surveillance station on a Berlin hill, On Malice assembles evacuated forms, polysemy, prayer, and perverse chatter into poems that enact our paranoia. Channeling Walter Benjamin's son, William Hazlitt, John Donne, and Dick Cheney, they are lyric in their sonic and affective register but coldly methodological in their invented structures and illusions. You finish reading it. You cannot finish reading it. Ice caught in the can, later, the well. What shall I be worried about, the coward well and the ice does such a lot. They know nothing of cantilevered blown-out shells who feed their worry like veal barns. The dome's aerial my lodestar and icon, the squirrel at dusk in the post-informational gloaming can never not finish reading it as song Ken Babstock is the author of Methodist Hatchet, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. His previous titles, Mean, Days into Flatspin, and Airstream Land Yacht, hold nominations for the Governor General's Award and the Winterset Prize. Poems from this book have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

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Coach House Books

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ISBN 10

1770564012

ISBN 13

9781770564015

Methodist Hatchet

By: Ken Babstock

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Methodist Hatchet

By: Ken Babstock

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House of Anansi

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ISBN 10

1770891587

ISBN 13

9781770891586

Ken Danby

The New Decade

By: Paul Duval,Ken Danby

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Ken Danby

The New Decade

By: Paul Duval,Ken Danby

Offers a profile of the modern Canadian artist, looks at recent watercolors, paintings, sketches, and lithographs, and discusses his technique

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196

Publisher

General Publishing Company Limited

Published Date

ISBN 10

0773720308

ISBN 13

9780773720305

Book's by Ken Babstock

Swivelmount

Swivelmount

Days Into Flatspin

Days Into Flatspin

Airstream Land Yacht

Airstream Land Yacht

Mean

Mean

Swivelmount

Swivelmount

Days Into Flatspin

Days Into Flatspin

On Malice

On Malice

Methodist Hatchet

Methodist Hatchet

Airstream Land Yacht

Airstream Land Yacht

Mean

Mean

On Malice

On Malice

Methodist Hatchet

Methodist Hatchet

Ken Danby

Ken Danby

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