No Press is proud to announce the publication of

from SIGINT by Ken Babstock

Published in a hand-bound edition of 80 copies (only 40 of which are for sale), from SIGINT is available for $3 including domestic postage (+ $2 non-Canadian postage). To order please email derek beaulieu.

These sonnets “occur” inside the abandoned NSA Surveillance station on the summit of Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain) in Berlin, Germany. A manmade mountain, Teufelsberg is the result of the Allies’ decision to pile massive quantities of the postwar rubble of Berlin on top of an SS Engineers’ College, designed by Albert Speer, and left unfinished after the war. The poem makes use of diction adapted from Walter Benjamin’s records of his son’s language acquisition between the ages of 2 and 6. The italicized “incident reports” that appear in lieu of a traditional sonnet’s closing couplet point to collisions between light aircraft and common swifts in what would have been Soviet air space.

Ken Babstock’s first collection in 1999, Mean, won him the Milton Acorn Award and the 2000 Atlantic Poetry Prize. Babstock worked as Poetry Faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts and currently lives in Toronto. Babstock’s collection, Airstream Land Yacht, won the Trillium Book Award, was shortlisted for the 2007 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, and was nominated for the 2006 Governor General’s Award for poetry. Babstock’s most recent collection, Methodist Hatchet, won the 2012 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize.