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list price: $22.95
edition:Paperback
also available: eBook eBook
category: Poetry
published: Apr 2011
ISBN:9780887842931
publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc

Methodist Hatchet

by Ken Babstock

tagged: canadian
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.

About the Author

Ken Babstock won Canada’s inaugural Latner Writer’s Trust Poetry Prize in 2014 for a body of work in mid-career. His fourth collection, Methodist Hatchet (Anansi, 2011), won The Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry and was a finalist for The Trillium Book Award. His previous collections of poetry include, Mean (1999), winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Milton Acorn People's Poet Award, Days into Flatspin (2001), winner of a K.M. Hunter Award and finalist for the Winterset Prize, and Airstream Land Yacht (2006), finalist for The Griffin Prize for Poetry, The Governor General’s Literary Award, and The Winterset Prize, and winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poems have won Gold at the National Magazine Awards, been widely anthologized in Canada, the UK, the US, and Ireland, most recently in The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature in English, and translated into Dutch, German, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, and French. All five previous titles were named Globe and Mail Top 100 Books of the Year. Recent poems have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, and in Best of The Best Of Canadian Poetry. A book length poem, On Malice, written while in Berlin as one of DAAD’s International Artist Residents in 2011/12, was published in fall 2014 by Coach House Books to wide critical acclaim. Ken Babstock was born in Newfoundland and now lives in Toronto with his son.

Awards
  • Short-listed, Trillium Book Award
  • Long-listed, ReLit Awards
  • Winner, Griffin Poetry Prize
  • Commended, Globe and Mail Top 100 Book
Editorial Reviews

[Ken Babstock] is something like a baffled scientist investigating the limits of our comprehension . . . this book's poetic voice [. . .] represents our greatest opportunity to make sense of a seemingly schizophrenic world.

— Puritan

The beauty here lies in its simplicity ... the effect of the book is kaleidoscopic.

— Another Chicago Magazine

Methodist Hatchet is as precise as it is expansive, as complex as it is companionable . . . [Ken] Babstock is one of the most exciting lyric poets writing today.

— Globe and Mail

. . . affecting and deft . . . [a] lasting contribution to Canadian poetry . . .

— Quill and Quire

With his new book, it’s time to forgo the qualifiers and just call [Ken Babstock] what he is: the best Canadian poet of his generation.

— Walrus Magazine

…an outstanding volume – plugged in, polished, complex, and delightful.

— SubTerrain

Methodist Hatchet will be a bellwether for contemporary Canadian poetry . . . [Ken Babstock's poems] invite us to listen more closely, to bring the discernment of reading poems into our habits of reading the world.

— Rover Arts

. . . a dazzling display by a talented writer . . .

— Toronto Star

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