Hilarious, harrowing, and very, very strange: nobody does poetry like Stuart Ross. In this compelling and lively collection, the follow-up to 1996’s The Inspiration Cha-Cha, Stuart Ross hones his surrealistic pen to a sharp and dangerous point. The world of Farmer Gloomy’s New Hybrid is one of darkly comic transmutations, wild flights of paranoia, and even the occasional flash of pure bliss. With the same energy and unsettling humor that makes Ross such a popular live performer, every piece in this volume — whether it’s about an apocalypse at an abandoned drive-in cinema, a runaway shopping mall that seeks refuge in a small boy’s bedroom, a tourist in Central America who finds his fate in a bowl of murky soup, or a man who transforms into a cartoon mouse before a job interview — is both a provocation and an escalation. In pieces like the collection’s centrepiece, the long-poem “Sitting by the Judas Hole,” Ross continues to challenge our perceptions of everyday banalities. Always unique, always entertaining, no one in Canada writes poetry quite like Stuart Ross.

Stuart Ross published his first literary pamphlet on the photocopier in his dad’s office one night in 1979. Through the 1980s, he stood on Toronto’s Yonge Street wearing signs like “Writer Going To Hell,” selling over 7,000 poetry and fiction chapbooks. A long-time literary press activist, he is a founding member of the Meet the Presses collective, Editor at Mansfield Press, and for eight years was Fiction & Poetry Editor at This Magazine. He is the author of two collaborative novels, two story collections, seven poetry books, and the novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, which co-won the 2012 Mona Elaine Adilman Award for Fiction on a Jewish Theme. He has also published a collection of essays, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer, and co-edited the anthology Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament. Buying Cigarettes for the Dog won the 2010 ReLit Award for Short Fiction. His most recent poetry book is You Exist. Details Follow. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario.

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