Days Into Flatspin

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.