Stuart Ross - Böcker

CBC BOOKS' "CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2024"Imagining a vast blue expanse of what a poem might beThe Sky Is a Sky in the Sky is a laboratory of poetic approaches and experiments. It mines the personal and imaginary lives of Stuart Ross and portraits of his grief and internal torment, while paying homage to many of the poet’s literary heroes. It contains new entries in Ross’s ongoing Razovsky poems, prose poems, a remix of an entire poetry book by dear friend Nelson Ball, a couple of collaborative poems, some one-line poems, and lots more. In an era of thematic poetry and conceptual poetry books, this collection is a celebration of possibilities and miscellany."Stuart Ross doesn’t hold back, happily for us. In letting his poems go where they want to go, sometimes by leaps and bounds, he reminds us that poetic rules are meant to be broken and that the results, in the hands of a skillful poet, can be moving, or amusing, or subversive, or exhilarating, or all of the above. His work brims with surprises. From start to finish, The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky is a delightful and thoroughly engaging book." – Charles North, author of News, Poetry and Poplars: Poems/Selected Prose"Here, we’re invited to gawk at horror and kick it in the pants, but also to notice the horror within us, because we all have it, and Ross doesn’t shy away from the odd and uncomfortable. He’s easy with sentiment, honest about grief, clear about death being our final destination, and behooves us mightily to enjoy it while we can. This book contains some of Ross’s greatest love songs for the dead as well as some sideways laments for the living – in these poems we can see ourselves and our friendships, our future losses, and present mysteries examined with no preference or perfunctory reverence. Each time I read Stuart Ross’s work I feel grateful, hopeful, reminded to lift my skeleton up and enjoy the abundant wonders the world holds." – Gillian Wigmore, author of Orient"Stuart Ross is one of the most important poets to have found himself somehow on planet Earth, where readers have been rejoicing in his work for nearly six decades. He makes it seem easy: open your eyes, your ears, your heart; look into the world and write. However, to do so with such unflinching candour, many-layered humour, the deepest emotional intelligence, and rarest lyric acumen? No, you have to be Stuart Ross to bring all of everything to bear upon being alive in one’s time. To rejoice is also to mourn, of course, and these poems are afraid to do neither. Ross trusts poetry more than any of us, so poetry trusts him back: this book dazzles the very sunlight with what it knows, including of the estrangements of the self upon which poetry so often insists, and the fictitiousness of borders between the present and the past, dream and not-dream, hilarity and grief. Whoever you are, including the laws of physics, you will be startled and moved by The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky. At times a momentarily posthumous point of view propels the poems, but do not grieve (or do): the book is immortal." – Lisa Fishman, author of Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition

Nelson Ball has had a significant impact on contemporary Canadian poetry not only as a poet but as an editor, with his Weed/Flower Press in the 1960s and 70s. Certain Details provides a major overview of the breadth and many paths of Ball's poetry over six decades. This selection of his work includes his trademark minimalist poems in addition to longer works and sequences; it spans nature poems, homages, meditations, narratives, found poems, and visual poems. The book contains selections from all of Ball's major collections as well as works that have previously appeared only in chapbook or ephemeral form. In a generous and thoughtful afterword, and for the first time in print, Ball discusses his processes, influences, and aesthetics. The book is introduced by editor and poet Stuart Ross, who offers a personal entry point into Nelson Ball's extraordinary oeuvre.

In Motel of the Opposable Thumbs, Stuart Ross continues to ignore trends in Canadian poetry, and further follow the journey he began over four decades ago with his discoveries of the works of Stephen Crane, E. E. Cummings, Nelson Ball, Ron Padgett, Victor Coleman, Tom Clark, Nicanor Parra, Joe Rosenblatt, and David McFadden. Over the years, his influences have snowballed: Lisa Jarnot, Alice Burdick, Richard Huttel, Opal Louis Nations, Joanne Kyger, Bill Knott, Max Jacob, Larry Fagin, Heather Christle, Charles North, Emily Petit, Paul Guest, James Tate, Valéry Larbaud, Joe Brainard, Matthew Zapruder, Harryette Mullen, Dara Wier, Dag T. Straumsvåg, Mark Strand, Wislawa Szymborska, Mary Ruefle, John Ashbery, Sommer Browning, Jim Smith, Benjamin Peret, Renee Gladman, and more. In this eclectic, pleasurable gathering of poems and sequences, Mr. Ross unapologetically leaps from howls of grief and despair to zany incursions into surrealism and the absurd. He embraces this panoply of approaches to respond to our cantankerous existential dilemma. All that, and it's structured after Bela Bartók's String Quartet No. 4! Get a room and enjoy.

Stuart Ross's sometimes poignant, sometimes outrageous third story collection deepens his exploration of the possibilities of the short story and narrative. A trio of tales probe fame through the lens of 1960s-70s French pop and disco icon Claude François; legendary Hollywood actor Lee Marvin saves the day, again and again; the citizens of a small town worship an all-knowing potato; a man dons a bib to eat his neighbour's house; a tourist finds both love and a dead frog in Nicaragua; and, in one rather educational anti-story, the author instructs readers in the art of writing the short story. In I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub, Stuart Ross, a veteran of the Canadian literary underground, unleashes his arsenal of pathos, absurdism, humour, and cantankerousness.

'Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer' is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he's sold thousands of his books in the streets, published and edited magazines, trained insurgents in his Poetry Boot Camps, and started Canada's first Small Press Book Fair. Where the media focusses only on the glamorous literary lives of its few superstars, Ross gives us a glimpse into How Writers Really Live. In 'Confessions', he declares himself the King of Poetry, explores his floundering Jewish identity, wanders into the best bookstore in Canada, offers a crash course in avoiding writing, pisses off his publishers, runs a renegade Canada booth at the International Book Fair in Managua, and begs egomaniacal young writers to stop bugging the hell out of him. Many of these essays are culled from Ross's bimonthly "Hunkamooga" column in 'Word: Toronto's Literary Calendar'. Others are written specifically for this collection. " 'Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer' is a wonderful book - funny, outrageous, and acute. I'll even say it's the best short-essay collection aout writing life that I've read in ages." - Canadian Literature

'I Cut My Finger' is Stuart Ross's first full-length poetry collection since his acclaimed 'Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected' (2003). The poems here show Ross's ever-expanding breadth, from his trademark humour and surrealism, to pointedly experimental works and poems of human anguish. Here, a poet includes a letter threatening suicide in his submission of poems to a literary journal; a businessman dons flippers to swim along the sidewalk to his downtown office; the U.S. military follows a trail of red ants to glacial redemption; the writer finds profound joy in a tower of canned niblets. But beneath the slapstick exterior of so many of Ross's poems there lurk dark threats and darker pleasures. "Many of his narrative poems can best be called surreal. With their fancifully imaginative stories and wonderfully absurdist takes on the world, it's as if you're watching bizarre cartoons on YouTube." - Prairie Fire "A damn-fine book in every sense of the word." - TaddleCreek

Each new volume by Stuart Ross is a more confounding grab bag than the last. In 'You Exist. Details Follow.', his seventh full-length collection of poetry, Stuart Ross veers in opposite directions: narrative confessional poems, and works that might be considered abstract expressionist, and a lot both in between and beyond those boundaries. Still, each poem breathes with the signature weirdness, the sharp wit and gentle awe that Ross is known for. Here you'll find new poems from Ross'songoing Razovsky series, one-line poems, centos, fractured sonnets, poems composed through surrealist strategies, and more. "A voice all his own. Stuart Ross unleashes his refreshing snark in his latest collection of poems, 'You Exist. Details Follow.' Stuart Ross is no punk kid, but he writes with a refreshing snark. It's a voice much in evidence in his latest book, a collection of poems called 'You Exist. Details Follow.' (Anvil Press). He runs the gamut from his own brand of absurdist expressionism to fond childhood memories and poetic confessions. Here are a misplaced tuba, badly sewn dog suits, and Highway 6 Revisited, about a butcher waking from a dream of meat, then dancing down a country road. Then you come across 'French Fries', a charming story of a child pretending to be asleep during a road trip: 'You smell French fries. It is time/to pretend to wake up.' In another poem, Ross wisely and parenthetically writes: (Tension is a good thing sometimes. For example, you shouldstick it in art.) Stuart Ross loves that tension, fortunately for his readers." -Uptown (Winnipeg)