Mormei Zanke

A Collection of Ephemera: Natasha Ramoutar’s Baby Cerberus

In Baby Cerberus, the poet Natasha Ramoutar invites the reader to explore different timelines, realities, artifacts, digital planes, mythologies, and dreams. At first, these formulated spaces rendered on the page feel fantastical, alien even (well, there is a poem written from the perspective of an extraterrestrial life). But as one reads on and begins to play in Ramoutar’s imagination, one is met with a universal truth: the beauty and pain of impermanence. Through her clear-eyed and earnest collection, Ramoutar suggests that by simply being alive, one is obliged to confront this dichotomy.

Natasha Ramoutar. Baby Cerberus. Hamilton, ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2024.

When taken as a whole, Baby Cerberus feels like a bundle of ephemera, as though Ramoutar has sifted through her past and carefully pasted each passing memory and feeling into the bounds of this book. Here one finds Reddit threads, marginalia, lists, old Game Boy cartridges, redacted government memos, riddles, notes to self… Ramoutar understands the poem itself as ephemera, writing in “Tamagotchi,” “In a thousand years, this poem will be forgotten too…”

There is an immediacy to the collection, a self-imposed pressure from an author who doesn’t want to forget, and yet, is working against the erasure of time. Through this lens, the poems become a kind of personal record, a valiant attempt to document the fleeting and intangible. In “Palimpsest” she writes, “This time, I’ll come home to the evidence of us.”

While there is joy and gratification in this act of notetaking, the author acknowledges the risk of rumination and the perils of stepping too far into one’s past. The reader can feel disoriented at times, through Ramoutar’s purposeful use of repetition, unordered lists, and intrepid enjambment. “But the past doesn’t care for linearity,” Ramoutor writes, “nor consistency / sometimes I misplace a sweet taste / with the smell of sea air / or the touch of grass” (“Playing FFXV at 2:00 a.m.”).

In Baby Cerberus, Ramoutar offers fragments, a taste of the past that with every page begins to feel like the reader’s own. With Ramoutar as proxy, the reader is invited to recall both the sorrow and enchantment of living in transience; and the necessity of passing time to create something new. Like a snake that sheds its skin, Ramoutar shows us the possibilities of rebirth: “look here, this seam / the miscreased page, / the way ridges bloom / new folds / how we have made anew / receipts of old…” (“Craft a Ship”).

Bios

Mormei Zanke is a writer who currently resides in New York City. She earned her MFA in Literary Reportage at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her poems and writing have appeared in publications including The Globe and Mail, KGB Lit, Kyoto Journal, PRISM international, and The Sunday Long Read. In 2021, her poem “Okinawa” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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