Toronto Star Gathers Poetry Collections for Housebound Adventurers

At Toronto Star, Barb Carey recommends new poetry collections by John Steffler, Lauren Turner, Ken Babstock, and Natasha Ramoutar for the restlessly quarantined. About Babstock's Swivelmount (Coach House Books), Carey notes that the poems in this (his sixth) collection, "slide deftly through shifts in focus." More: 

The Toronto poet, who won the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection “Methodist Hatchet,” is prodigiously eclectic and draws on a range of subjects, including literature, art and science, as he muses on the social, technological and economic structures we live within — and on our connection to others. His wording is tight and rhythmic, and his imagery is resoundingly evocative: in a poem that subtly touches on grief, he writes of terns, “nicking the horizon with dark blades”; elsewhere, he describes the exertion of cycling with “quads/of bagged cement.” In one poem, he refers to the art critic John Berger, and wanting to “unstitch habitual//sight.” In these deeply searching poems, Babstock himself constantly strives to expand perception.

Read more at Toronto Star.