Figuring

by Anna Ross

The poems in Figuring probe the gulf between self and other as they explore themes of motherhood, landscape, domesticity, and childhood, and the violence—both intimate and global—that shadow all of these. A mother overhears her children playing “Containment Drill” (the classroom procedure to prepare for a school shooting), a young girl believes she will grow wings when she enters puberty, young boys shoot each other on a neighborhood street in what appears at first to be a game of tag, a woman fears for her sanity while she does laundry, children mimic hurricane disaster relief operations on the playground, and bulletproof school supplies are advertised on the news. Interwoven series of self-portraits and reportage chronicle the moment of contact or collision between the individual and surrounding world, grappling with issues of implication and complicity.

Genres: Poetry

26 pages, Paperback

First published May 24, 2016

About the author

Anna Ross grew up in Connecticut with many travels back to her mother’s hometown of Dublin, Ireland. She is the author If a Storm (Anhinga Press), selected by Julianna Baggott for the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and the chapbooks Figuring (forthcoming from Bull City Press), which was a finalist for the 2015 Alice Fay Di Casagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Hawk Weather (Finishing Line Press), winner the New Women’s Voice Prize and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Society. Her work has twice been recognized by the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship program, and she has received additional scholarships and fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Squaw Valley Poetry Workshop, and Grub Street. Individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Reader, Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Quarterly, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Salamander, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Pangyrus, among other journals, and has appeared on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. She holds degrees from Mount Holyoke College and Columbia University, teaches in the Writing, Literature & Publishing Program at Emerson College, and is a contributing editor for Salamander. She lives in Dorchester, MA, with her husband, daughter, and son.

Reviews

[Timothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving poetry at the micro and macro level

[Marne Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

On a whim, I included this book in a recent order from this publisher. According to their website, it's not supposed to be released until May 24th, so I was a little surprised when it arrived in the mail last week! I'm not sure if they're ahead of schedule or if I was sent an advance copy for some reason. All I know is that I really enjoyed this book. Almost all the poems have titles starting with Self Portrait (for instance, "Self-Portrait with Catastrophe" and "Self-Portrait without Wings"), so I expected them to be putting the speaker front and center, but they really don't. Ross' idea of a self-portrait privileges her surroundings over her own thoughts and feelings. This creates a really unusual effect that I enjoyed working my way through.

[Speaking Marvels · Rating 5 out of 5]

from Anna's interview at Speaking of Marvels

The book contains a series of self-portraits intertwined with a second series of “report” poems. The earliest poems in the book were an attempt at self-location. I’d written most of the poems in my first book while I was in graduate school in New York and in the two or three years directly following that, and my life seemed to me to have changed significantly in the intervening time.

full interview here -- https://chapbookinterviews.wordpress....