Marooned in the shiftless, unnamed space between a map of the world and a world of false maps, Ken Babstocks poems cling to whats necessary from each, while attempting to sing their own bewilderment. Methodist Hatchet sets the currencies of living, thinking, and writing on a level plain. The symbolic currencies of natural and engineered worlds the monetary, cultural, intellectual, and experiential mimic, dog, and evade each other in a brilliant play of contingency and consequence. 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 its frames of reference, Babstocks fourth collection 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 heart of Babstocks playful, fierce, intelligent book. Methodist Hatchet is an exhilarating new work from one of our most celebrated poets.