Natasha Ramoutar is an Indo-Guyanese writer and editor now living in the Scarborough region of Toronto. Ramoutar earned a Master of Professional Communication from Toronto Metropolitan University. She is a senior editor with Augur Magazine and serves on the editorial board at Wolsak & Wynn.
Poetry
Baby Cerebus
Hamilton: Wolsak & Wynn, 2024.
PS8635.A46 B33 2024
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
The poems in Baby Cerberus are ethereal, soul-stirring and suffused with a playful intelligence. Natasha Ramoutar’s second 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.
Poetry
Bittersweet
Toronto: Mawenzi House, 2020.
PS8635.A46 B58 2020
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Ma misses the sun, warmth and colors of their faraway homeland, but her daughter sees magic in everything — the clouds in the winter sky, the “firework” display when she throws an armful of snow into the air, making snow angels, tasting snowflakes. And in the end, her joy is contagious. Home is where family is, after all.
Bittersweet is an exciting, accomplished collection of poems evoking both a reconstructed homeland and Scarborough (Ontario). Using memory—intimate as well as collective—prompted by photographs, maps, language, and folklore, Ramoutar meditates on themes of obscured and suppressed history, time, and liminality. Her poems journey from home to home to home, from Toronto to Guyana to South Asia; and Scarborough remains omnipresent, with a mix of identities and a strong, active, and boisterous youthful presence.
Awards and Honours
2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (Finalist)