Böcker av Stuart Ross

The sky¿s the limit in these funny and sad head-in-the-clouds poems.The 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.

Poetry. Finalist, Acorn-Plantos Award. Winner, Exit Through the Giftshop Award (2013). Best Poetry of 2012 selection, Winnipeg Free Press. 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 confessionalism 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 poems from Ross's ongoing auto-biographical Razovsky series, one-line poems, centos, fractured sonnets, poems composed through surrealist strategies, and more. Ross's absurdism doesn't rely on unconnected sentences, abstract thought, or an unusual, elevated vocabulary: rather, his poetry delights in the silliness of concrete mundanity....The collection thus begins by launching us into a happily disjointed mind, into images connected as though by sparking, duct-taped wires, buzzing weird electrical fires of thought.--Matrix Magazine A voice all his own. Stuart Ross unleashes his refreshing snark in his latest collection of poems...He runs the gamut from his own brand of absurdist expressionism to fond childhood memories and poetic confessions....Ross wisely and parenthetically writes: (Tension is a good thing sometimes. For example, you should stick it in art.) Stuart Ross loves that tension, fortunately for his readers.--Uptown I personally believe Stuart Ross may be Canada's most important poet...Ross could be called a 'narrative surrealist' but that, like most labels, does not adequately capture the gymnastic feats of construction he employs. At his best Ross combines images and emotions with the same alacrity of a Max Ernst or Salvador Dali. The literal is a sheer curtain that surrealists drape like a fabric or a fold in time. Ross gives a master class in almost every poem in the delicate art of balancing truth from fiction, what we imagine from what we know to be real...For me, there is no poet as entertaining as Stuart Ross and very few as smart. Ross builds a new universe with You Exist. Details Follow. and we get to travel in it like explorers entering a new dimension, luckily it comes with instructions and a guide map for home. Stuart Ross looks at the world through a different lens, how extraordinarily lucky we are that he shares that view with us. --Michael Dennis (blog)

Poetry. In MOTEL OF THE OPPOSABLE THUMBS, Stuart Ross continues to ignore trends in Canadian poetry, further following 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 Béla Bartók's String Quartet No. 4! Get a room and enjoy.

Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer takes up where Stuart Ross's Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer left off in 2005. Memoir, tirade, unsolicited advice - this new volume is drawn largely from Stuart's notorious "e;Hunkamooga"e; column that ran in subTerrain, but also includes pieces from his blog as well as previously unpublished work.Here they are together in their offbeat brilliance: snarky, provocative, funny, outlandish, and self-deprecating, these "e;confessions"e; are urgent dispatches that disrupt the too often polite conversation concerning Canadian literary matters. In these pages, Ross says what so many others only think.Praise for Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer:"e;For a quick and dirty breath of fresh air, it's difficult to beat renegade urban poet Stuart Ross's latest effort. Ross has the battle scars and knows poetry isn't about flowers and meadows, it's about blood and guts."e; (Steven Knight, Quill & Quire)"e; a wonderful book-funny, outrageous, and acute. I'll even say it's the best short-essay collection about the writing life that I've read in ages. Every aspiring writer should read Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer, just to find inspiration. And so should every established writer-just to keep humble."e; (Lynne Van Luven, Malahat Review)"e;Of greatest interest are the postscripts that follow many of Ross' essays. Of particular note are those endnotes which deal with the results of his publishing certain columns-such as losing his publisher, or losing friends from the writing community. This fallout, however, may have been expected as Ross is frequently acerbic and trenchant in his criticism, but no less witty or correct for being so."e; (Stephen Cain, Canadian Literature)

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 devour his neighbour's house; a tourist finds both love and a dead frog in Nicaragua; and, in one particularly 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, Ross, a veteran of the Canadian literary underground, unleashes his arsenal of pathos, absurdism, humour, and cantankerousness.Poetry.

The first book of fiction since 1997 from the consummately underground Stuart Ross blends a characteristic penchant for experiment with the measured skill of a seasoned, highly disciplined craftsman. Ross's stories hold a mirror to the absurdities of 21st-century earth. His is an absurdism so true that it becomes real.