Stuart Ross's Blog, page 18

You Exist. Details Follow. reviewed in Matrix

Nice review of You Exist. Details Follow. appears in the current issue of Matrix, a punchy litmag out of Montreal. I've been very fortunate over the years. My books tend to get some attention. There are so, so many great books of poetry that barely get reviewed in this country.

REVIEW: You Exist. Details Follow.

Posted by Jeka on February 26, 2013
You Exist. Details Follow.
By Stuart Ross
Anvil Press (2012)

Reviewed by Lise Gaston

In Stuart Ross’s seventh book of poetry, You Exist. Details Follow., details are the signifiers of existence—an existence made strange. 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. These poems inhabit the clean lawns and cul-de-sacs of suburbia, but squints at them askew, listens to the birds chirping in a minor key: “A dog barked at me. / Who is that dog? / What is telling me something / from inside a badly sewn dog suit?” The poems nestle in the wider concerns that envelop suburbia: economics, politics (“It is two thousand ten. / I look around for something / to prorogue”), and the looming worry that existence itself could be wiped clean in a second, some imaginable disaster purring in the corners. Sometimes humour bounces off the profound; sometimes it slides into the intimate, such as in “6:31 a.m.:” “Rain pelts the tent. / Spider silhouettes overhead. / My feet are tangled / in sleeping bag. / I can’t recall / your smell.”

Ross wields the line to effect the precise tone that he wants: in the book’s first, eponymous poem, short enjambed lines of simple diction are interrupted and slowed with Latinate language and caesuras: “You are your / far-off limbs, wandering / amid the sequined detritus, / the indignant, toxic beach. / It is true: I have changed.” 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. Ross creates his greatest absurdities through unexpected pairings of nouns and adjectives, sometimes to react against more traditional poetic themes—such as a Canadian pastoral: “I am / a pointy landscape, / a waterfall of quivering farms.” Despite a predominantly first person speaker and a fairly consistent voice, we cannot latch on to a permanent speaker: only appropriate for this unbalanced world. Forms vary from prose poem to loose sonnet, with all sorts of free verse in between. Ross is at ease with line breaks: he usually breaks them at logical pauses, but sometimes leaves us tilting into the short enjambed lines that rush us down a slender poem.

Alongside the incongruous images, there are threads of thematic continuity that ground the reading in collective experience and emotion. A major thread is child-parent relationships, which carries easily into the surreal. Through the child’s eyes, the parent can be larger-than-life: in “Fathers Shave,” the razor blade “rips the welcome / mat off our porch, the / grass off our lawn.” Alternately, a lost parent is either touchingly grieved for or slowly forgotten as life’s details pile up with their distractions and demands, outrageous but also mundane: “His mother’s fall got farther away. Hardwood floors / replaced the carpet. At his cousin’s bar mitzvah, / his father danced with a woman he’d never seen.”

Over and out.

Mansfield Press spring 2013 launch — Tuesday, March 12, in Toronto!

This Tuesday we launch the spring 2013 titles from Mansfield Press. Three new books under the "a stuart ross book" imprint — Teeth: Poems 2006–2011, by George Bowering; Mother Died Last Summer, by David W. McFadden; and Water Damage, by Peter Norman — as well as one book under the larger Mansfield umbrella, Summer Sport: Poems, by Priscila Uppal.


Needless to say, I'm pretty excited. And ever grateful to Denis De Klerck for making me part of this great literary press, and to the authors who've entrusted us with their work.





Over and out.

My anti-bullying video. In which I put the "ant" in "anti".

So that guy who loves Billy Collins (a little too much) put up an anti-bullying poetry video and got about 5 million hits in a week. Seriously.

So thought I'd give it a try.




Over and out.

New York-bound!

Looking forward to the Alfred Starr Hamilton launch and tribute at St. Mark's on February 18!

Any tips on great indie bookstores in NYC would be mighty appreciated!

Ladies & Gentlemen, Mr. Al Purdy

A very exciting fundraising event! With thanks to Jean Baird for her dedication and imagination around this cause. Over and out.

My 2013 New Year Poem

I don't recall how long I've been doing this, but here is my annual New Year poem.

POEM FOR TUESDAY (January 1, 2013)

It is 2013. We are returning to old values.
It is 2013. Cats are taped carefully to their dogs.
It is 2013. Clothes are self-cleaning, like dishes and ears.
It is 2013. There is a white man in the Black House.
It is 2013. Commander Snout has arrived to offer us the option of a second nose on our face or in a convenient nose purse.
It is 2013. The clouds are shaped like apologetic codfish.
It is 2013. When I try to shave, the mirror plays games with my face.
It is 2013. This has never happened before.
It is 2013. The prime minister is a sociopath flapping his arms in a vat of blood pudding.
It is 2013. Facts have been replaced by fast food.
It is 2013. A woman awakes to find her son climbing a birch tree outside the living room window, then getting unsteadily to his feet on a precarious branch and holding up a sign that says: “I want to be an appliance like my father before me.”
It is 2013. You hang like a brilliant moon over a field of grateful cartographers.
It is 2013. The weather has made poetry unnecessary.

Stuart Ross
Cobourg, Ontario, Canada


Over and out.

My Indie Lit Market haul

The Meet the Presses collective was very pleased with the Indie Literary Market we put on this past Saturday. Attendance was pretty shaky for the first hour or two, but then things got very busy. Would have liked to see more books selling, but overall the presses seemed happy with the event.

I wish I'd picked up more items myself, but here's a list of what I did come home with — both from the presses' tables and a couple of individual writers who were there with some stock in their bags:

Michael e. Casteels, cemantics (Puddles of Sky Press)
David Peter Clark, feathereDinosaurs (shuffaloff/Eternal Network)
Graeme Clarke, Thirst and Other Stories (Horse of Operations)
Warren Clements, The Charles Arthur Stories: Tales of a Man to Whom Things Happen (Nestlings Press)
Sonia Di Placido, Exaltation in Cadmium Red (Guernica Editions)
Howie Good, Strange Roads (Puddles of Sky Press)
Spencer Gordon, Feel Good! Look Great! Have a Blast! (Ferno House)
Adrienne Gruber, Mimic (Leaf Press)
Beth Learn, jabberodge (learn/yeats & co)
Micah Ling, Settlement (Sunnyoutside)
Rampike Vol. 21 No. 2, ed. Karl Jirgens
Michael Sikkema, The Sky The (Serif of Nottingham Editions)
Cordelia Strube, Milosz (Coach House Books)
Carolyn Szpak, Garland Get Your Gun (Horse of Operations)
Hugh Thomas, Opening the Dictionary (above/ground press)
J. A. Tyler, the zoo, a going: (THE TROPIC HOUSE) (Sunnyoutside)
Christine Walde, The Black Car (baselinepress)

I do think the Meet the Presses formula of a curated literary market makes for a fantastic event. And now that we are also administering the bpNichol Chapbook Award (congratulations to Adrienne Gruber, author of Mimic from Leaf Press!), the Indie Literary Market has even added importance.

Over and out.

Indie Literary Market & bpNichol Chapbook Award: Toronto, November 17

Very excited about this.
Over and out.

Mansfield Press Fall Launch — November 5, Toronto

Excited about Monday night's Mansfield Press launch in Toronto! All four titles are books I brought to the press, and three of them are appearing under the "a stuart ross book" imprint. The launch happens November 5 at 7:30 at the Monarch Tavern, 12 Clinton Street.

For the first time, Mansfield is releasing two fiction titles in one season. One is Paula Eisenstein's first novel, Flip Turn. It's chilling stuff, narrated by a young swimmer whose teen brother has killed a girl. But it's a playful book as well, and intriguingly structured. The other fiction title is Sarah Dearing's long-awaited third novel, The Art of Sufficient Conclusions. I know this book has gone through several incarnations; I remember Sarah reading a stunning excerpt from the manuscript at the Words in Whitby festival about seven or eight years ago. In this one, the narrator discovers that her father, in his childhood, was "sold" to a sculptor in England.

Both of these books blur fiction and fact. Both authors are from London, Ontario, and now live in Toronto.

In the poetry department, we're offering up the third full-length collection by Kingston poet Jason Heroux, Natural Capital. In this first two books, Jason created a tone and sense of dark whimsy that became unmistakable trademarks for him; in this book, he pushes his accomplishments into new and surprising places. The other poetry book is Jim Smith's Happy Birthday, Nicanor Parra, whose title invokes a poetry giant who happens to be a favourite we share. And an influence on both of us. This is Jim's follow-up to 2008's Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems. It's over the top.

It was an incredible pleasure to work with all four of these writers in my editorial capacity. (Mansfield publisher/editor Denis De Klerck also provided smart substantive feedback on the books. I learned a lot watching him at work.) They were all open and eager to be challenged. I'm proud of these books. I'm looking forward to helping them seep out into the world.

Anyone interested in reviewing any of these books for a print or online publication or blog should drop me a note at razovsky [at] gmail [dot] com.

Over and out.

Headaches & good things

I have a goddamn headache today. I haven't slept well in a while. My cat is walking around with a cone on his head so he doesn't sabotage the positive effects of having wandering organs surgically shifted out of his chest cavity. My dog won't stop barking.

On the other hand:

Today:

I am working on a new chapbook of poems by Nelson Ball. I've always wanted to do a Proper Tales Press chapbook by Nelson. And it turns out he'd always wanted to have a Proper Tales Press chapbook. This one is called The Continuous Present. It's a beautiful mixture of spare visual poems and linear, image-driven poems. It's a nice companion volume to In This Thin Rain , the full-length collection that came out through my imprint at Mansfield Press earlier this year.

I am also working on a chapbook of death haiku by Tom Walmsley. This will be the second Proper Tales chapbook by Tom — the first, a sequence of 15 haiku called Concrete Sky — came out a couple years ago. This new one has 36 haiku and it's called Rich and Dead as Dogs. Is that a Walmsley title or what? The poems are angry, visceral, and also sometimes funny. In a dark way. Two years ago I did a Walmsley novel through my Mansfield imprint; it's called Dog Eat Rat , and the protagonist, Trip, writes and spouts haiku. He writes and spouts haiku like the ones in this new chapbook.

By the way, if you don't have these two books from Mansfield, you would do well to order them today.

Plus, this afternoon Mark Laba sent me a new poem. So far as I know, he hadn't written any new poems since about 2005. But I was talking with him on the phone earlier this week, and I said, "Why don't you just sit down and write one?" And he did, and he sent it to me, and it's so fucking good. It was like coming home, reading a new Mark Laba poem. Maybe because Mark and I grew up on the same street in Bathurst Manor in the early 1960s.

OK, the ibuprofen is starting to work.

Which is good, because I'm also doing a reading tonight. This reading is part of a three-day festival that Sandra Alland organized here in Cobourg, where I now live and where her parents live (she's visiting for six months from Scotland). It's called the Cobourg Poetry & Literary Arts Festival (I gave her the business about "what — poetry's not a literary art?" and she explained that she meant poetry and other art that involves text, like the photos and fibre art and video art that are also part of this festival). It all takes place at Impresario, on King Street West in Cobourg. Tonight, tomorrow afternoon and Sunday afternoon. Also appearing at this festival are Zorras, Jenn LoveGrove (from the Where Are They Now? file), Gary Barwin, Pearl Pirie, Beatriz Hausner, Ted Amsden (Cobourg's Poet Laureate after the previous laureate, Jill Battson, fled town), Laurie Siblock, Karen Miranda Augustine, Andrew Kaufman, and others. PWYC.

Also typed a few more sentences this afternoon of The Pig Sleeps, a collaborative novel that Mark Laba and I wrote in the 1980s. It was serialized in Kevin Connolly and Jason Sherman's WHAT! magazine and then appeared in book form from Katy Chan's Contra Mundo Books in 1993. Mark and I are planning a 20th-anniversary (of the original book) edition. I imagine we're going to do a lot of revising and augmenting of the original text.

Time to walk the dog to shut her up.

Over and out.