Bøger af Ken Babstock

Marooned in the shiftless, unnamed space between a map of the world and a world of false maps, Ken Babstock’s poems cling to what’s necessary from each, while attempting to sing their own bewilderment. Methodist Hatchet sets the currencies of living, thinking, and writing on a level plain. The symbolic currencies of natural and engineered worlds — the monetary, cultural, intellectual, and experiential — mimic, dog, and evade each other in a brilliant play of contingency and consequence. 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 its frames of reference, Babstock’s fourth collection 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 heart of Babstock’s playful, fierce, intelligent book. Methodist Hatchet is an exhilarating new work from one of our most celebrated poets.

"e;Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet, his work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity, it's all good."e;Peter Gizzi"e;The flavor of this poetry is complexit 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."e;Ange MlinkoWith 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 cannotfinish reading it. Ice caughtin the can, later, the well. Whatshall I be worried about,the coward well and the ice doessuch a lot. They know nothingof cantilevered blown-out shellswho feed their worrylike veal barns. The dome's aerialmy lodestar and icon, the squirrelat dusk in the post-informational gloamingcan never not finish reading it as songKen 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.