Valley of Want

by Ross White

VALLEY OF WANT is a song in celebration of the difficulty of naming, of seeing, of putting one's finger on the elusive thing one feels is true. Graceful and witty, these poems are grounded in the thrilling stillness of nature and the contours of human connection through our self-performances, through our monsters, through our stories, through the language that makes us unmistakably ourselves. Poetry.

Genres: Poetry

37 pages, Paperback

Published January 15, 2022

About the author

Ross White is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize for Poetry, and three chapbooks, Valley of Want, How We Came Upon the Colony and The Polite Society. He is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, where he hosts The Chapbook, a podcast devoted to chapbooks. He teaches creative writing, podcasting, publishing, and grammar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. With Matthew Olzmann, he edited Another & Another: An Anthology from the Grind Daily Writing Series. He also has a boutique design firm, Spock & Associates, and a weekly trivia show and podcast, Trivia Escape Pod. Follow him on Mastodon: @rosswhite@bullcity.space

Reviews

[Shannon Wolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ross White’s poetry (and friendship and art and work in the literary community) mean a lot to me so it was lovely to wake up with these poems today. They are primarily about sickness and suffering and longing but I think my favorites also point the reader toward hope, like the one about his wife’s nickname—did y’all know a group of ladybugs is called a loveliness?!

All that, and the most beautiful cover I’ve ever seen (designed by White himself)!