Shifting Baseline Syndrome

Aaron Kreuter is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Comparative Study in Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University. He is the author of Shifting Baseline Syndrome; You and Me, Belonging; and Arguments for Lawn Chairs.

"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 author's radical Jewish ancestors over a pint and a piss. Shifting Baseline Syndrome is a book of poems to wake us up and rewild us." Shazia Hafiz Ramji , author of Port of Being "Catastrophists take heart... Assured, savvy, a shade neurotic, Aaron Krueter's holding court as the party winds down. Galloping from Queens to the Walls of Jericho, from the MEC parking lot to the Marianas Trench, from Westeros to the Cheesecake Factory, Kreuter splices a loopy narrative for our age of context collapse. What're you in the mood for? Dark comedy? Alien sci-fi? Biopic? Reality TV? Cozy up on the couch with the remarkable Shifting Baseline Syndrome . It's binge-worthy." Matthew Tierney , author of Midday at the Super-Kamiokande "In Shifting Baseline Syndrome , everything is television: culture, the self, grief, memory, language, media and joy. And vice versa. The outside is inside, our inside is out. Movies, rivers, Florida, catastrophes, illness, grandparents, memory, cheesecake, forest fires. Let's turn on the ontology channel, doomscroll the human, bingewatch some epistemology fails. An inventive supercut of astute surfing, Aaron Kreuter's poems surprise, move, intrigue and delight even as they take us deeper into the disimulacrum of our contemporary moment. These are poems bright as raytubes, big screens the size of lives." Gary Barwin , author of For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New & Selected Poems and Yiddish for Pirates and Scotiabank Giller Prize and Governor General Award finalist