Shifting Baseline Syndrome - Paperback

by Aaron Kreuter (Author)

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

Nature isn't dying
it's simply revising
its target audience

In Shifting 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 Kreuter's sophomore collection, the TV remote is never far.

Shifting Baseline Syndrome is both searching and searing, veering between satire and sincerity, history and prophecy, and human and non-human worlds. As these clash ecstatically with loathing--and with the end looming--Kreuter demonstrates why we'll keep doing what we've always done: hoping, for once, that the series finale will be good.

Author Biography

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.