Shifting Baseline Syndrome [Paperback]

A satiric and searing collection of poetry obsessed with television, oceans, Jewish history, and time.

Nature isnt dying
its simply revising
its target audience

InShifting Baseline Syndrome, Aaron Kreuter asks the hard questions: will the Anthropocene have a laugh track? Is it okay to marry your eighteenth cousin? How different would the world look from outside the life-frame of the human? What is it like to have an acid trip in a portapotty? Is it the end . . . of Earth? Of capitalism? Of television?

Throughout Kreuters sophomore collection, the TV remote is never far.

Shifting Baseline Syndromeis both searching and searing, veering between satire and sincerity, history and prophecy, and human and non-human worlds. As these clash ecstatically with loathingand with the end loomingKreuter demonstrates why well keep doing what weve always done: hoping, for once, that the series finale will be good.

Aaron Kreuter is the author of the short story collection You and Me, Belonging (2018) and the poetry collection Arguments for Lawn Chairs (2016). His writing has appeared in places such as Grain Magazine, The Puritan, The Temz Review, and The Rusty Toque. Kreuter lives in Toronto and is a postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University. Shifting Baseline Syndrome is his second book of poems.
 

With a punk sensibility, Kreuter confronts the Anthropocene slantwise through X-Men and ancestry with biting humour, surprise, and tenderness. We discover primal interconnectedness, diasporic cousins, and the authors radical Jewish ancestors over a pint and a piss.Shifting Baseline Syndromeis a book of poems to wake us up and rewild us. Cozy up on the couch with the remarkableShifting Baseline Syndrome. Its binge-worthy. These are poems bright as raytubes, big screens the size of lives.