Editor’s Selection in the 2015 Frost Place Chapbook Competition
Available here: Bull City Press
“Anna Ross’s poems blaze with the terror of the next moment. Even in the heart of happiness, the unspeakable lurks. A child dies; a bullet flies from another child’s gun. Her self-portraits are our mirror shattered by beauty and the other.” —Barbara Hamby
“Figuring asks us to figure up environmental and human losses and to figure out our culpability in the ways things and people are lost. In these poems, in which the perspective is so often looking down from or looking up at the sky, we feel both the smallness and the bigness of our world and its dangers. Ross is a poet for whom counting each loss—figuring it both personally and politically—is an act of witness. Hers is a compassionate, warning voice we need to hear.” —Melissa Range, author of Horse and Rider and Scriptorium
"In most self-portraits, the maker renders in order to stay and preserve the self against transience. In Figuring, however, Anna Ross’s self-portraits urge change and undoing, which beget the continual act of remaking identity: as mother, as body, as part of nature. “You think of bodies made and unmade / within you—the ones who found breath, / the ones who didn’t know the place they’d left,” she writes. In fact, these poems seem to argue that domestic work is the act of creation and re-creation, and that the mother, like the fox leaving behind the “den where . . . blue-eyed kits / burrow themselves in sleep,” is continually “unmasked / by sun” to a sense or image of self, and then another and another." --Emilia Phillips, author of Signaletics and Groundspeed
Available here: Bull City Press
“Anna Ross’s poems blaze with the terror of the next moment. Even in the heart of happiness, the unspeakable lurks. A child dies; a bullet flies from another child’s gun. Her self-portraits are our mirror shattered by beauty and the other.” —Barbara Hamby
“Figuring asks us to figure up environmental and human losses and to figure out our culpability in the ways things and people are lost. In these poems, in which the perspective is so often looking down from or looking up at the sky, we feel both the smallness and the bigness of our world and its dangers. Ross is a poet for whom counting each loss—figuring it both personally and politically—is an act of witness. Hers is a compassionate, warning voice we need to hear.” —Melissa Range, author of Horse and Rider and Scriptorium
"In most self-portraits, the maker renders in order to stay and preserve the self against transience. In Figuring, however, Anna Ross’s self-portraits urge change and undoing, which beget the continual act of remaking identity: as mother, as body, as part of nature. “You think of bodies made and unmade / within you—the ones who found breath, / the ones who didn’t know the place they’d left,” she writes. In fact, these poems seem to argue that domestic work is the act of creation and re-creation, and that the mother, like the fox leaving behind the “den where . . . blue-eyed kits / burrow themselves in sleep,” is continually “unmasked / by sun” to a sense or image of self, and then another and another." --Emilia Phillips, author of Signaletics and Groundspeed
Winner of the 2012 Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry
Available here: Anhinga Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble
"A masterfully written collection that reads with growing psychological complexity, If a Storm is a crescendo of poetry. Anna Ross is a strong poet of eye and ear. Her close investigation of the nature of motherhood and the motherhood of nature are compelling. Assured and unrelenting, these poems build into a singular voice that continues to echo long after the final poem." --Julianna Baggott, judge
"Calmly exact, without being at all fussy or guarded, Anna Ross's poems possess a subtle watchfulness (and a strange sense of being watched in return -- by the world and its creaturely life!). One hears in their music a responsiveness and empathy that is unusual these days -- their tone a tender gravity that is restorative and true. A music that signals real care for how and where we live."
-- David Rivard
"Lyric poetry attends to the life that goes unrecorded underneath the world's visible stories. Anna Ross's If a Storm does so with a combination of searching description (chiefly of the natural world) and a deceptive nonchalance. Ross's innovation is that she knows that such attention of mind and body now exists in the world as an anxiety, an "underneath": a privacy of thought that has become, for so many real and imagined reasons, anxiously secret. From intimate confessions of the failure of judgment, especially in the face of loss ("Instinct or pattern will blind us") to a sonnet sequence whose incantatory last poem gives the collection its nervous title ("Flight"), to moving accounts of pregnancy, travel, and other transitional states of being, If a Storm turns this tense and shareable intuition into a rich investigation of the world."
-- Katie Peterson
Review of If a Storm at Publishers Weekly
"The poems in Anna Ross's Hawk Weather refresh our sensitivity to the beauty of the natural world in all its enormity and minuteness. Tirelessly attentive to its sensual particulars--as well as to their correspondence to each other and to human thought and feeling--Ross's poems are exquisitely crafted, wise, patient, affirming, and full of care. As it is "impossible // to see a flying thing / and not think of a spirit rising," so it is impossible, when reading this scrupulous, hard-won collection, not to be reminded of the wonder of there being a world to begin with--and of our responsibility to preserve it."
--Timothy Donnelly
available from Finishing Line Press or on Amazon
--Timothy Donnelly
available from Finishing Line Press or on Amazon
