new from above/ground press: BIRD SNOW ON HARD TRACKS, by Stuart Ross

BIRD SNOW ON HARD TRACKS
Stuart Ross
$5

A yellow ice bird will soon turn
the red night mist into feathered mice

Grey days chatter and chirp among the falling rocks
A flurry of silence buttons the gently flowing air

The naked tree among cold January crickets
brings a yellow yellow yellow horizon

to the dead railway bridge beneath
a trace of blackened caterpillars

Author’s Note: This poem was assembled using all the words from Nelson Ball’s quietly magnificent collection Bird Tracks On Hard Snow, including dedications and titles. I took liberties in capitalizing and lowercasing words. And in using spaces mid-line in place of a period; Nelson did that only in a few early poems. Dashes are the only punctuation I brought from that book to this poem. Nelson got to see the first half (more or less) of this poem before his death in August 2019. He seemed amused in his quiet way by this remix. —SR

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April 2023
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover drawing: Barbara Caruso

Stuart Ross is a writer, editor, writing teacher, and small press guerrilla living in Cobourg, Ontario. The recipient of the 2019 Harbourfront Festival Prize and the 2010 Relit Prize for Short Fiction, among others, Stuart is the author of over twenty books of poetry, fiction, and essays, most recently The Book of Grief and Hamburgers (ECW Press, 2022) and 70 Kippers: The Dagmar Poems (with Michael Dennis; Proper Tales Press, 2020). I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub, his third fiction collection, appeared from Anvil Press in fall 2022. Stuart has taught workshops in schools across the country and was Writer-in-Residence at Queen’s University and the University of Ottawa. His work has been translated into French, Norwegian, Slovene, Russian, Spanish, and Estonian. He occasionally blogs at bloggamooga.blogspot.ca.

This is Ross’ third chapbook with above/ground press, after ESPESANTES (2018) and NINETY TINY POEMS (2019).

Report from the Ross Society (ed. rob mclennan), an assemblage of writing in response to the work of Stuart Ross (above/ground press) appeared in 2022.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com