{"title":"Ken Babstock","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"swivelmount-book-ken-babstock-9781552454138","title":"Swivelmount","description":"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","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49613004079377,"sku":"GOR012903614","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50697841049873,"sku":"NGR9781552454138","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51036886892817,"sku":"NIN9781552454138","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52820880228625,"sku":"NLS9781552454138","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1552454134.jpg?v=1751424709"},{"product_id":"mean-book-ken-babstock-9780887846342","title":"Mean","description":"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).","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50371787555089,"sku":"CIN0887846343G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52680732311825,"sku":"NLS9780887846342","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0887846343.jpg?v=1751170674"},{"product_id":"airstream-land-yacht-book-ken-babstock-9780887847400","title":"Airstream Land Yacht","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52583128596753,"sku":"NLS9780887847400","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740503830801,"sku":"NIN9780887847400","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780887847400.jpg?v=1761046021"},{"product_id":"on-malice-book-ken-babstock-9781552453049","title":"On Malice","description":"On Malice is watching you--new poems about and by surveillance, from Griffin-winning Ken Babstock.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52667562885393,"sku":"NLS9781552453049","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52751423439121,"sku":"NIN9781552453049","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781552453049.jpg?v=1762282862"},{"product_id":"days-into-flatspin-book-ken-babstock-9780887846588","title":"Days into Flatspin","description":"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 afield of crickets. And throughout his poetic landscape is a solitary birdwatching, passing overhead, biding time, always present. Days into Flatspin is a soaring collection and delivers on every one of Babstock's early promises. He is the poet to watch, the poet whose confidence, range, and measured empathy will have a startling and long-lasting impact upon Canadian letters.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52680704131345,"sku":"NLS9780887846588","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780887846588.jpg?v=1762313788"},{"product_id":"methodist-hatchet-book-ken-babstock-9780887842931","title":"Methodist Hatchet","description":"Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and shortlisted for 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740504584465,"sku":"NIN9780887842931","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52820323041553,"sku":"NLS9780887842931","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780887842931.jpg?v=1763483695"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-ken-babstock.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}