Stuart Ross

Book of Grief and Hamburgers

Brilliant experimental, surrealist fiction from the award-winning author of Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew A wonderful dream and a horrific nightmare, a fuzzy consciousness of pain and family, Pockets is a novel of fragments -- both literally and figuratively. In a series of prose-poem chapters, the nameless narrator, in a largely Jewish 1960s suburb in the northern reaches of Toronto, repeatedly enters the world, as if for the first time. His landscape is one of trilobite fossils, bicycles with banana seats, Red Skelton, and overwhelming loss. Among shadows that both comfort and threaten, a brother who drifts through the sky, he finds his narrative full of pockets of emptiness he can't help but try to fill. A heartbreakingly personal and profound work, Pockets redefines the novel, delivering infinite scope in something diminutive, pocket-sized. Every reading brings new revelations.

Pockets

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. A man steps out for a pack of smokes and winds up walking around the planet; a woman sun-tanning by a pool finds herself covered in chicken feet; a guerrilla army of cows infiltrates a big city; a man hires a bodyguard to protect him from his poodle. Ross's stories hold a mirror to the absurdities of 21st-century earth; his is an absurdism so true that it becomes real.

Buying Cigarettes for the Dog

"Eclectic poems wherein the author makes unapologetic leaps from howls of grief and despair to zany incursions into surrealism and the absurd"--

Motel of the Opposable Thumbs

Barry Keating

Music and Lyrics by Barry Keating. Book by Barry Keating and Stuart Ross. Characters: 6 male, 6 female, plus 2 droids. Now released...a newly updated version! Dreaming her way into a comic book adventure in Innerspace, Eleanor saves the galaxy in this zingy rock musical. It is Eleanor, Spacepunk, the Starmites and the lizard man against the evil Banshees (weird women with dangerous hair-dos) led by Diva and Shak Graa. Diva's entrance song, "Hard to Be Diva," is a guaranteed show stopper. Every space age possibility for light hearted thrills is thoroughly exploited to delight fun loving comic book fans. "A space age Peter Pan!...Assets include Mr. Keating's eclectic pop rock score, which occasionally pauses for a sweet ballad or gospel number between the hard driving 60's style melodies...A light hearted space flight."-The New York Times"Wonderful entertainment for the young and the young at heart."-WNBC-TV "The score is irresistible."-ABC Radio "A campy adventure aimed at the latent teenager in all of us."-Christian Science Monitor

Starmites

A fragmented, surrealist novel of loss, nostalgia, and childhood secrets from the award-winning poet and author of A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent. A wonderful dream and a horrific nightmare, a fuzzy consciousness of pain and family, Pockets is a novel of fragments—both literally and figuratively. In a series of prose-poem chapters, the nameless narrator, in a largely Jewish 1960s suburb in the northern reaches of Toronto, repeatedly enters the world, as if for the first time. His landscape is one of bicycles with banana seats, Red Skelton, trilobite fossils, and overwhelming loss. Among shadows that both comfort and threaten, a brother who drifts through the sky, he finds his narrative full of pockets of emptiness he can’t help but try to fill. A heartbreakingly personal and brilliantly evocative work, Pockets redefines the novel, delivering infinite scope in something diminutive and pocket-sized. It is a work to be read and reread for its poetic beauty and hidden gems of revelation.

A Novel

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 confessional 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 new poems from Ross's ongoing Razovsky series, one-line poems, centos, fractured sonnets, poems composed through surrealist strategies, and more."A voice all his own. Stuart Ross unleashes his refreshing snark in his latest collection of poems, 'You Exist. Details Follow.' Stuart Ross is no punk kid, but he writes with a refreshing snark. It's a voice much in evidence in his latest book, a collection of poems called 'You Exist. Details Follow.' (Anvil Press). He runs the gamut from his own brand of absurdist expressionism to fond childhood memories and poetic confessions. Here are a misplaced tuba, badly sewn dog suits, and Highway 6 Revisited, about a butcher waking from a dream of meat, then dancing down a country road. Then you come across 'French Fries', a charming story of a child pretending to be asleep during a road trip: 'You smell French fries. It is time/to pretend to wake up.' In another poem, 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 (Winnipeg)

Poems

You Exist, Details Follow

"Stuart Ross is an amazing talent. In Henry Kafka he’s managed to create a landscape removed from personal memory and historical connectedness and yet whose characters are filled with passion and humour. What we have here is Millennium Now!— Stuart Ross style— fictions that are deliciously black, and at times deliciously funny."— Rick Salutin quot;Less an homage to Kafka than a re-experiencing, in the Canada in the 1990s, of Kafka’s sense of how stark, astounding, terrifying, exhilarating and utterly contigent a life can feel. The stories and images cohabit cheerfully and unconnectedly, then they all end up oddly together in the book’s final line (No peeking.)"

Henry Kafka & Other Stories

A man reflects on family memories—that may or may not be true—in this novel of “sharply composed vignettes with a keen sense of timing and humor” (Publishers Weekly). Ben is an artist closing in on forty, and it’s hard for him to be sure about the past. His parents are both dead, and his brother, who has mental issues, is a lousy source of information. So when Ben finds himself with a particularly persistent memory that keeps nagging at him, he doesn’t know where to turn to answer the question: Did his mother really assassinate a prominent neo-Nazi? In a novel that “shows maturity of vision without sacrificing the childish sense of play and absurdity his readers expect from him,” Stuart Ross sends Ben ranging through childhood summers at an Ontario cottage, teenage alienation in a Toronto suburb, a disastrous college career, and the calamity that precipitates his brother’s institutionalization—as he tries to sort through the events of his life, both real and surreal (The Globe and Mail, Toronto). “A writer with an original sensibility.” —The Vancouver Sun

Stuart Ross

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