Natasha Ramoutar, "Baby Cerberus" (Buckrider Books, 2024)

Summary

Podcast Summary: New Books Network – Natasha Ramoutar, "Baby Cerberus" (Buckrider Books, 2024)
Date: February 15, 2025
Host: Holly Gattery
Guest: Natasha Ramoutar, Poet

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Episode Theme Overview

This episode features an insightful conversation with Natasha Ramoutar about her second poetry collection, Baby Cerberus. The discussion delves into the interplay of nostalgia, pop culture, mythology, and the weight of heavy themes like love, loss, racism, and colonization. Through her poems, Ramoutar weaves the ephemeral and the enduring, centering joy and kinship while reflecting on what connects and tethers us as individuals and communities. The episode emphasizes the craft of writing sentimentally and authentically, exploring time, memory, form, and the tender complexities of caring and loss.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Artifacts as Portals to Timeless Love

[03:38-05:49]

• Holly opens by asking Natasha about using "artifact" (e.g., Tamagotchi) as a lens to examine the enduring qualities of love versus our fleeting relationships with trends.
• Natasha explains her fascination with obsolescence in pop culture and how objects with expiration dates—like Tamagotchis—can become timeless through memory and emotion.
  • "What happens to those things we leave behind? ...Tamagotchi is this sort of relic that gives you this insight and this moment into the speaker and the subject and their relationship." – Natasha Ramoutar [03:59]
  • She views such objects as both disposable and eternal, serving as nostalgic conduits.

2. Poetry’s Unique Relationship With Time and Memory

[06:24-08:42]

• Holly remarks on poetry's unparalleled ability to explore time and memory and asks Natasha about the role of pop culture in these explorations.
• Natasha discusses the cyclical nature of trends and pop culture as both a lens to the past and a predictor of the future.
  • "With poetry I feel like there’s more space to play in the idea that time can be cyclical or anachronistic, that you can kind of exist in a moment and outside of it." – Natasha Ramoutar [08:26]
• She contrasts this with fiction’s linear storytelling, celebrating poetry's flexibility.

3. Writing (and Editing) the Sentimental Without Cliché

[09:10-12:39]

• The discussion turns to sentimentality: how to write feeling-rich poetry that is authentic rather than clichéd.
• Natasha talks about her experience working with editor Paul Vermeersch, emphasizing specificity and unique perspective over familiar tropes.
  • "The more specific and in touch with yourself and your speakers of the poems that you can get, I think that’s where you can kind of do away with the sort of cliched phrasing that it's easy to fall into." – Natasha Ramoutar [12:04]
• Editing became a process of digging deeper and making sentiment individual and true rather than generalized or overdone.

4. Live Reading: The Title Poem "Baby Cerberus"

[13:34-16:06]

• Natasha reads "Baby Cerberus," the poignant title poem, about the grief of losing a beloved pet fused with myth and memory.
  • "The first line of my eulogy is this. I would cross the river Styx for you. I would. I honestly would." – Natasha Ramoutar [15:44]
  • The hosts and Natasha discuss the editorial decision to include the line "I would. I honestly would," adding intimacy and youthfulness to the poem’s conclusion.

5. The Craft of Form, Rhythm, and Marrying Content to Structure

[17:28-21:40]

• Holly admires Natasha’s inventive use of poetic form—how poems visually and acoustically embody their meaning.
• Natasha explains she often starts with rhythm or an image, then considers how line breaks, pacing, and even erratic structures reflect the content emotionally and physically.
  • "It often comes from the marrying of the content and the form and what sort of, like, emotional affect in the body I want my readers to have..." – Natasha Ramoutar [21:16]
• She details, as an example, her poem “Rats Don’t Run The City, We Do,” where increasing line tension mirrors the feeling of urban compression.

6. Memorable Quotes & Moments

• Holly’s reflection on sentimentality and cliche:
  "What I’m perceiving as sentimentality in a negative sense is often just people relying on old cliches. It’s not me being opposed to sentimentality, it’s being opposed to lazy writing." – Holly Gattery [12:45]
• Poetic reading and the emotional resonance of the conclusion in "Baby Cerberus."
• Natasha on poetry as mantra:
  "There are certain poems... that are just really relaxing and melodic and almost like a mantra to read out loud." – Co-host [22:36]

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Notable Quotes With Timestamps

• "What happens to those things we leave behind? ...Tamagotchi is this sort of relic that gives you this insight and this moment into the speaker and the subject and their relationship."
  — Natasha Ramoutar [03:59]
• "With poetry I feel like there’s more space to play in the idea that time can be cyclical or anachronistic, that you can kind of exist in a moment and outside of it."
  — Natasha Ramoutar [08:26]
• "The more specific and in touch with yourself and your speakers... you can kind of do away with the sort of cliched phrasing that it's easy to fall into."
  — Natasha Ramoutar [12:04]
• "The first line of my eulogy is this. I would cross the river Styx for you. I would. I honestly would."
  — Natasha Ramoutar (from "Baby Cerberus" poem) [15:44]
• "It often comes from the marrying of the content and the form and what sort of, like, emotional affect in the body I want my readers to have..."
  — Natasha Ramoutar [21:16]
• "What I’m perceiving as sentimentality in a negative sense is often just people relying on old cliches... it’s being opposed to lazy writing."
  — Holly Gattery [12:45]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:34] — Episode and guest introduction
• [03:38] — Artifacts, love, and nostalgia in poetry
• [06:24] — Time, memory, and pop culture’s cyclical nature
• [09:10] — Writing sentimentally yet avoiding cliché
• [13:34] — Reading of "Baby Cerberus" (title poem)
• [16:06] — Poem editing stories and youthful voice in poetry
• [17:28] — Form, rhythm, and structure in poetry
• [22:36] — Poetry as mantra and emotional re-reading
• [23:34] — Closing thanks and book recommendation

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Overall Tone & Takeaways

The episode is intimate and intellectually engaging, with both host and poet maintaining a conversational, collaborative spirit. Natasha Ramoutar openly discusses the vulnerability, risk, and revision embedded in her creative process, while Holly allows the conversation to remain both analytical and affective. The interplay between childhood artifacts, myth, and the emotional undercurrents of time and loss positions Baby Cerberus as a collection balancing deep feeling with experimentation—never shying away from play or profundity.

Recommended for:

• Poetry lovers interested in process and craft
• Readers who resonate with pop culture’s place in literature
• Anyone seeking to understand how nostalgia and sentimentality can be reimagined in contemporary poetry

Transcript

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[Natasha Ramatar]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Holly Gattery]

Hello everyone and welcome to nbn. I'm your host, Holly Gattery, and today I'm excited to be joined by Natasha Ramatar. Natasha is a poet and she has recently had her second collection of poetry released with Walzack and Wind. The poetry collection is entitled Baby Cerberus. Soul stirring and playful, Baby Cerberus traces joy and kinship across a multitude of lives, flitting from myths and folklore to video games to imagine futures. Each piece asks us to consider how we care for one another as we move through sentient galleries, swashbuckling adventures, and the doors of Atlantis. The collection reorients us in each section with the riddles as two lost souls try to find each other through time. These poems tug on the invisible threads between us, trying to find what tethers us together and in turn, what keeps us here. While Baby Server centers fun and nostalgia with allusions to video games, Internet lore and Tamagotchis. There are still heavy themes throughout which address misogyny, racism and colonization. The unique integration of literary topics with some of the more pop culture references distinguishes this beautiful collection in the minds of so many readers.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

And it also expands what I believe.

[Holly Gattery]

We can ask of poetry. Welcome to the show, Natasha.

[Natasha Ramatar]

Hi, welcome. Thank you so much for having me here.

[Holly Gattery]

Oh, it's wonderful to have you. So I'm just going to share a little bit more about you, Natasha, for our listeners. Natasha is a writer of Indo Guyanese descent from Toronto. Her debut collection of poetry, Bittersweet, was published in 2020, but Moenzi House and was shortlisted for the Gerard Lampert Memorial Award. She is the editor of an anthology of Scarborough Literature. She is a senior editor with Augur magazine and serves on the editorial board at Woolsack and Wynn. So, Natasha, my first question for you is rather specific.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

I was wondering if you would speak.

[Holly Gattery]

To the use of artifact to explore the timelessness of love and devotion as opposed to our temporal relationships with stuff and trends. I'm thinking specifically of the poem Tamagotchi, how it serves as a tender testament.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

To this through line of the poetic and pop culture that runs through your collection. So perhaps we could start there as a jumping off point.

[Natasha Ramatar]

Absolutely. So for me, I think when I think about our current kind of, like, environment and the way that we exist with pop culture and trends, it's that there's such a high turnover, so there's always the, you know, the latest toy or the latest game, the latest new music, the latest sort of TikTok trend that's happening. And when I was thinking about Baby Cerberus and some of the jumping off points and the images, I was really curious about what happens to those things that we leave behind. And in one case, I think there is. It's kind of a way within the Tamagotchi poem. It's this sort of relic that gives you this insight and this moment into the speaker and the subject and their relationship. And so it's this sort of way in. But at the same time, it's thinking about the way that these kind of items that are. That have an expiration date on them, whether that's in a material sense with the Tamagotchi literally resting away, or the idea of a kind of trend like Tamagotchis that go out of style and, you know, they're no longer of interest, the way that those can be both at once, something that is going to expire and disappear, but also something that gets to be timeless. And there is a lens on that as well, with both the kind of timelessness of the emotional aspect between the. The subject and the speaker, but also the kind of idea of it being a kind of nostalgic way in to the past.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

I love that answer. I was just reading over as you were talking about Tamagotchi, the first few lines of the poem, which are, in.

[Holly Gattery]

A thousand years, this poem will be forgotten too, like an unopened email in the trash, or a dream lost to vicious waking.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Like, that's just gorgeous. And there's this just tender nostalgia over something. You know, I just think of a Tamagotchi and think of all the Tamagotchis that must be in landfills right now. And your poem really beautifully captures that nostalgia and that longing and how. I mean, just the.

[Holly Gattery]

An underlying.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

An underpinning of just waste and thoughtlessness. It is just really wonderful. So my next question, and this is a personal fascination of mine, the way poetry, arguably better than and clearer than any other art form, explores time and memory. So many of your poems directly and indirectly play in this sandbox. Tamagotchi, which we just talked about, and we were a tapestry. Just name a couple.

[Holly Gattery]

My question to you is how you think exploring pop culture is uniquely positioned.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

To allow us to think about time and how we remember.

[Natasha Ramatar]

So sort of similar to my answer with the artifacts, something that I feel like time is one of those themes that I'm always preoccupied with, whether it's this collection or working on my last collection. Bittersweet time seems to be the theme that I can never escape. And in the same way that in thinking about an artifact like the Tamagotchi you're looking, you get a window into the kind of expiration date and decay, but also the nostalgia. I think of the poems in Baby Cerberus as this window to time that get to live in sort of three different modes that they get to be often in the past. So looking back at these things that we're very fond of, looking into the kind of presentation and I think as well, especially the way that things like pop culture trends happen to be a bit more cyclical in nature. So you see things like fashion trends like a crop top or bell bottom pants, like come come back into fashion.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

So the way that.

[Natasha Ramatar]

That is both past, present and in a way predictive of the future, if. If it's something that is cyclical. So I think often I come from a background in terms of like education in writing fiction. And when writing fiction, I feel like I often think of time as linear from point A to B. But with poetry I feel like there's more space to play in the idea that time can be cyclical or anachronistic, that you can kind of exist in a moment and outside of it.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

I think about time a lot too. And I agree that poetry is a really fitting and agile form to explore time and its non linear form. I was reading somewhere recently about the scientific reasons why we experience time differently as we age too. And I mean, at 43, it was a little bit depressing for me. But I was thinking there's a poem in this for anyone listening.

[Holly Gattery]

You can read this article on Scientific American.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

You can just google it. My next question for you is about writing the sentimental. So I'm fascinated by the ways in which poets explore sentimentality without getting bogged down in the often cliche that surrounds the sentimental poetry and writing in general. And your poems, Baby Servers to me are rooted in sentiment and sentimentality, but don't feel cloying or cliche. What did you do to. To make this happen? What advice do you have to perhaps other poets who are trying to write sentimentality into their poems or reflect a feeling of sentimentality that they just genuinely feel, but creating in a way that's organic to the experience without feeling sappy or cliche, which this is maybe just a personal thing, maybe a sign of me being deeply emotionally constipated. But I feel like it really detracts from the way we uniquely and universally experience sentiment, sentimental emotions like love and longing.

[Natasha Ramatar]

I think for Baby Cerberus, this was something that came up a lot during the editing stage. I had brought my. My first draft of the manuscript to work with Paulette Woolsack and Wynn. And something that I had mentioned that I was interested in but also concerned about was that a lot of people seem to see my writing as earnest and as sentimental, which are things that I really, really like in my work. I think it's really valuable to me personally as a writer. But I also worried about kind of winding myself into a space where it feels cliche or overdone or things like that. And the advice that my editor gave to me was just to start from some of the images and start from some of the themes and that the kind of sentimentalness or the earnestness that that'll naturally come out. I also think during the editing stage, a lot of what I was looking at was trying to find areas honestly where I could do better. And I think with themes like love and longing, those are the types of stories that we see told time and time again and the types of poems that we see written again and again. And so I think when it's something that we're so constantly consuming, we can fall into the traps of things like tropes or things like cliches sort of ways of phrasing. And something that was helpful to me was. Was looking at those spaces and finding areas where I'm like, oh, I think this phrasing here feels a little bit similar or derivative, so how can I make it better? But also thinking about, in terms of phrasing and in terms of, like, line by line structure, is this unique to me? And is this the way that I experience things like love and longing and other sort of sentimental emotions? Because the more specific and in touch with yourself and your speakers of the poems that you can get, I think that's where you can kind of do away with the sort of cliched phrasing that it's easy to fall into.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah, you raise a good point. And that's me sitting here while you're talking, listening to you, thinking about how.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

What I'm perceiving as sentimentality in a negative sense is often just people relying on old cliches. It's not me being opposed to sentimentality. It's being opposed to lazy writing. And I thought, I fall victim to it too. I wrote something the other day where I said something was as sweet as honey, and I was like. Like. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's just been done and done and done. What's another way to say that? Like, dig deeper, go deeper. So I love that advice that Paul gave you. Shout out to Paul Vermeesh at Waldag and Wynn. A wonderful editor and a wonderful poet in and of himself.

[Holly Gattery]

Hopefully I'll have him on the show soon.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

My next question for you is actually a request. I was wondering if you would be.

[Holly Gattery]

Interested in reading from your collection for us.

[Natasha Ramatar]

I would love to read from my collection. Any specific requests?

[Co-host/Interviewer]

I would love you to read Baby Cerberus, the title poem is, I think especially those last lines are beautiful. And example of how a very intense emotion. Like, I'm not the only one. I saw reviewers of your book saying that the poem made them cry. But it's like, if the language is very simple but incredibly sophisticated and you just express things that are so uniquely expressed the way that you would express them, that it's. I think it was a really wonderful example of it being, like, embracing and channeling and leveraging that species specificness that you're talking about.

[Natasha Ramatar]

Yeah, I'll read Baby Cerberus then. And then after I have a fun story about the last two lines. Baby Cerberus. Twice I've read eulogies for blood relatives, tempering the steel in my voice. But right now, I can't pen a word for you without waves churning inside. I was 12 when you first appeared, tongue lolling out the side of your mouth, your teeth sinking into every pair of shoes, shredding Stephen King paperbacks to confetti. Every wrong was undone with a wolfish scream and grin or the begging of your puppy dog eyes. You were always chunky, huddled into the curves of my body, the vacant space of an outstretched arm, your snout pressing against my bent knees. But in the end, you are only flesh and fur, barely clinging to a skeletal frame, sleeping away most days in stupor. In this myth, Baby Cerberus curls up to Persephone, lets her cry into his soft fur, licks her hand, rests his three heavy heads across her lap. I'd like to remember you like that. A young girl's best friend and confidant. I am sitting on the concrete blocks for you to zoom up and down. Notebook balanced on my knees, pen in hand. I'm trying to find the words to memorialize you. The first line of my eulogy is this. I would cross the river Styx for you. I would. I honestly would.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Still gives me the goosebumps. I'm sitting here watching my dog, who had just been, like, giving the eye to be quiet and giving me the eyes, and you're reading this. I'm like, oh, that's just right there. So now you have to tell me the story about the eyes.

[Natasha Ramatar]

So one of the most fun edits to this poem. There were a lot of places in the first draft where there was kind of that sentimentality without specificity. So Paul and I did a lot of really zoning in, working on the rhythm of it, where the enjambments came in, as well as making some of those images more specific. But my favorite edit that we did is that the poem originally ended at the first line of my eulogy is this. I would cross the river Styx for you. And it ended at, I would cross the river Styx for you. And Paul had the suggestion of adding, I would. I honestly would. Thinking about the idea of a sort of like, teenage kind of voice with the speaker and what it would sound like to bring it back to that speaker and reground the poem at the end there. And I think it's just the it is the perfect ending to the poem. I'm so happy that he suggested that change.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Yeah, I mean, that beautifully articulates, I think, what an unspoken feeling I have here is. It's something such a. A youthful expression to. To include there.

[Holly Gattery]

That's again, shout out to Paul.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

I mean, I. I always say that there's so many writers who, you know, thank. Thank their editors. Like a lot of sports people. You can tell who watches sports, or any. Not sport. I'm talking about sports people, you know, think Jesus or God. You know, that's the way I see writers thanking their editors. You know, I'm obviously not very. I'm obviously not someone who watches a lot of sports. I'm like, the sports thing is when people. Sports. And I think the last sport I saw somebody doing that in was rugby. So I. There we go. I named a specific sport, and that somebody did. Okay, so my last question for you and for everyone listening. We're talking with Natasha Ramatar about her beautiful and touching and tender collection of poetry, Baby Cerberus, which was published recently by Wolsack and Window. So let's talk about form. So I really admired the way you played with form in this collection, which seems like a perfect complement to the exploration of pop culture and how pop culture deeply reflects and influences who we are. Would you tell me about your process of giving yourself over to the faithfulness with form and creating form that has a feeling of wildness, which it does, that always also carries this feeling of measure and control.

[Natasha Ramatar]

So with form, where a lot of the time I start with if. If I'm not thinking about working on something that is in a fixed form or. Or kind of like fixed on the page. If I have, like, a specific image in mind, where I normally start with is actually rhythm. And so as I'm writing, I'll often be thinking about either the kind of natural break in speech that would happen if I was reading it out loud, or alternatively, if I'm starting with an image or a metaphor, kind of a central. A central description, I'm thinking about where that fits in the larger poem. And so I really like that you described some of the works in here, as in forms, as erratic, because I think for some of the poems, it's very much that. It's thinking about where the rhythm speeds up and sort of scatters versus other poems, where it stays quite even. Some where I'm looking at almost a sort of like, sing songy rhythm versus ones that are super all over the place. And one of the ones That.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

I.

[Natasha Ramatar]

Was thinking about with that was the rats don't run the city. We do, which is another pop culture reference around a video that circulated on social media with the New York Sanitation officer or commissioner talking about the rat problem in New York City. And so the poem starts off with kind of longer lines, and then as you get closer to the end of the poem, it gets more. More and more. The line breaks become much quicker. The rhythm of it becomes a lot more tense. And I was trying to think about both in the poem itself, where I wanted those kind of rhythmic breaks to be, but also marrying the content to the form. And so that poem is all about the kind of, like, stifling feeling of things getting worse and worse, more expensive to a place that I love. And that's something that appears in several poems as a theme of, like, what it means to not have space or to go back to a space. And it's completely changed in a way that kind of pushes you out. So when I'm thinking about this erratic kind of rhythm or erratic form, it often comes from the marrying of the content and the form and what sort of, like, emotional affect in the body I want my. My readers to have, but also in. In their breath and in. In the way that they get to experience and read the poems.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

It's a defining characteristic of your poems to me, is that not only do they use their stage very mindfully, so the poems, you know, that are condensed, they're condensed for a reason. When they sprawl, they're smalling for small, sprawling for a reason. These aren't arbitrary choices. But the. The poems also have this intense sophistication that demands that you read them slowly. But it's not an oppressive or ostentatious sophistication, and I really just enjoyed that. About your poetry is how many times you can go back to them and especially go back and read them out loud. I have this practice around my house where if I'm feeling frustrated or if I just want like a five seconds out. I have poetry books all over my house, and yours is one of them where I'll just stop, pick up a.

[Holly Gattery]

Book, and read out loud one poem.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

And there are certain poems, and your poems are very given to this, that are just really relaxing and melodic and almost like a mantra to read out loud. So I can definitely see how you've put a lot of attention into the way that they look and especially the way that they sound. So thank you so much for answering that question. It just makes it all the more enjoyable to go back and reread your poems knowing that. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not out of my mind. This is intentional. And even if I. Even if I was out of my mind, I'm allowed to read into it whenever I want to. That's the relationship between me and the book. Right. So, Natasha, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about your glorious collection, Baby Cerberus. Everyone. You can pick it up everywhere.

[Holly Gattery]

Books are bought and borrowed, and again, it was published by Wolzach and Wynn.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Natasha, once more, thank you so much for joining me today.

[Natasha Ramatar]

Yeah. Thank you so much. And thank you for the lovely conversation.