Books
The poems in Baby Cerberus are ethereal, soul-stirring and suffused with a playful intelligence. this collection traces joy and kinship across a multitude of lives and lived experiences. Shifting deftly from classical mythology and folklore to video games to speculative futures, each poem 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 a riddle, always inviting the reader to play along, tugging on the invisible threads between us all, trying to find what tethers us together and, in turn, what keeps us here. Joyous and multilayered, this is a book that’s fast enough for the speed of information and powerful enough to stop you in your tracks.
This collection was released by Wolsak & Wynn in October 2024. It was previously titled It Keeps Us Here.
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“Experimenting with forms, surprising the reader with its unexpected imagery, and conjuring emotion out of the most unlikely subjects, Ramoutar’s striking and uncommon lyricism offers a new vision of eco-poetry that strives to re-kin-dle human interconnectedness with each other and with the more-than-human world. A collection to discover.”
—Green Linden Press
“Never predictable, and always enthralling, [Baby Cerberus is] a mighty return for this exciting new voice. And is sure to add another layer to the author's already impressive CV as a poet, editor, and curator of new literature.”
—Open Book
Shortlisted for the 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Bittersweet is a collage representing both a reconstructed homeland and Scarborough, Ontario. This poetry collection considers memory using photographs, maps, language, and folklore. Bringing together definitions, recipes, cartography, photo albums, and oral stories, it meditates on themes of obscured and suppressed history, theft, time, and liminality.
This poetry collection was released by Mawenzi House in September 2020.
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“With an especially skilled use of internal rhymes, Ramoutar’s collection evokes balanced moments of ache, joy, and rumination.”
—Quill & Quire
“[This collection] honour[s] multiple geographies and generations and their generosity bestows knowledge and compassion as headwaters for perception, belonging, justice, and action.”
–Arc Poetry Magazine
“Bittersweet is a full palate of experiences where Ramoutar, with intelligent, nuance, depth and sensitivity, offers us poems of a stylistic range and flavourful variation. She presents us a diasporic and immigrant experience that has many notes, with the notion of what is bittersweet highlighting the paradoxes of belonging and avoids oversimplification. Ramoutar’s tastebuds are delicate and fierce, and she makes us see the landscapes of Scarborough and of memory with the same encompassing capacity.”
—2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Jurors
FEEL WAYS is a breakthrough anthology of works by writers of Scarborough, Ontario. It is inspired by the suburb of Scarborough, shedding light on its myths and stories. The collection includes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Co-edited by Adrian De Leon, Téa Mutonji and Natasha Ramoutar.
The anthology was released by Mawenzi House in April 2021.
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“This book is like a mixtape of Scarborough stories that belong to the streets and trails and concrete as much as to the authors whose fierce visions bring them to you. The force of Feel Ways is the dailyness that the voices of these new writers raise above the single stroke of often obliterating stories.”
—Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst and Voodoo Hypothesis
“Who better than the shining trio of Adrian De Leon, Téa Mutonji, and Natasha Ramoutar to curate this original tribute to the ache and love of a place? Feel Ways is proof again that here, where we have lived, there is beauty, fierce laughter, and enduring life.”
—David Chariandy, author of I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, Brother, and Soucouyant
“From the heartbreak of love to buying mangos out of white vans on the weekends, these are love letters to Scarborough and to all of us who live here, who have escaped, or who have chosen to stay. Whatever your feelings are about the suburbs, Feel Ways forces us to be seen for all our ugly and all our magnificence.”
—Eternity Martis, author of They Said This Would Be Fun