Winner of the Kitty Lewis Hazel Millar Dennis Tourbin Poetry Prize

Always willing to take aesthetic and artistic risks, Stuart Ross is the author of some of Canada's most daring, and also most rewarding, poetry. Long celebrated for his surreal narratives and humorous wordplay, here Ross focuses more intensely on intimate subject matter?investigating the often complex, often absurd, but always powerful connections between loved ones. The care and delicacy with which he renders these portraits of family members, friends, mentors?and even himself?is nothing short of arresting. And readers?both those familiar with his work and those new to it?will admire the dexterity with which he juxtaposes such pieces with more audacious inventions.

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.

Stuart Ross' profile page

"Stuart Ross has been publishing his irreverent poems of surrealist comedy for almost 40 years. This latest collection contains plenty of his trademark wackiness ('When facts were called for, I invented them' describes his approach in a nutshell). But there's also a touching current of angst about mortality, loss and the fleeting nature of what we hold most dear." - Toronto Star

"Predominantly composed in Ross' comfortable, comforting first-person vernacular, one can easily hear Ross? voice speak through stories of reading, family, friends and writing, as well as meditative stretches around history, sunny stretches, language and the occasional pun, all rife with his familiar neuroses, complains and concerns, and a dry, absurd humour. One might say that this collection of lyrically-dense and thoughtful poems is entirely classic Stuart Ross, and one of his strongest collections, at that." - rob mclennan's blog

"I?ve read Stuart Ross for years and been impressed by his vigorously energetic surrealism while at times perplexed by his resistance to closure, in an aural if not content-based sense. But I?ve not truly been moved by his poems in the way a wide range of the pieces in his latest, A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent stirred me. Ross is taking emotive risks in a way he hasn?t as readily in the past (age? life experiences?) and the result is much more satisfying poetically." - Marrow Reviews