Saturday by Margaret Ross
Saturday by Margaret Ross
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Margaret Ross’s highly anticipated second collection of poems, Saturday, chronicles a brute education in love and decorum through ceremony starter kits, basement classrooms, and a mission school turned art camp, seeking to “touch the myth beneath the fiction.” Dexterous and musical, Ross writes stunning lines with unmistakable precision. These poems accrue from fleeting details, think in images, and resist simplifying the nature of feeling. In emotionally raw scenes lit by yearning, cruelty, wonder, and delusion, Saturday explores various forms of intimacy and estrangement in unforgettable ways.
"What beautiful lucidity these poems have, what quiet, firm intelligence. Margaret Ross's poetry has the vivid characterizations and scenic quality of stories, but with another more mysterious quality that is disturbing and ineffably moving." —Mary Gaitskill
"The deep originality of Margaret Ross’s uncommon poems is to present a dramatic composite of feelings, ideas, and unconscious terrors as they are caught up in dynamic relations with truly differentiated others and othernesses. Her voice is brutally attuned to senses of understanding, likeness, and difference; how do we learn desire, love, the self, and the self from the world? The range of imaginative identifications found in these imperturbably beautiful poems is astonishing. 'Do I / have feelings I have always had / and try to make the world / look like it gave them to me?' wonders one speaker. The poems are poignant yet unsentimental, level yet full of self-surrender—you walk around in a daze after putting down this book." —Sandra Lim
"I have awaited Margaret Ross’s second book since I first read her first book. Ross’s poems, like Paul Celan’s poems, are representative of an irreplaceable vision, though Ross’ poems are explosions of vision, whereas Celan’s poems are implosions of vision. In Saturday, Ross’ achieves a new perfection of her art, which was perfect in her first book—the poems in Saturday are different enough from the poems in A Timeshare to require a new perfection; they are both more expansive and more bodily, they see the everyday more clearly even as they more readily recognize the impossible in the ordinary. Saturday is a book that both justifies my expectation and renews it." —Shane McCrae
"Can you imagine being seen in the way that Margaret Ross sees people and things?—that is, in the moments just before and immediately after everyone else sees you, if they do, including you? It would be terrifying, denuding, and yet it would be exhilarating, metamorphosizing. Because her attention reveals life’s true, unconscious composition, including its perpetual search of how to compose itself. Saturday is this, is witness to the interstitial, is slapstick melancholy, is the meticulous revision of the unrevisable rough draft of living, is 'trying to get down under the immortal dailiness / and touch the myth beneath the fiction.'" —Brandon Shimoda
Margaret Ross is the author of one previous collection, A Timeshare (Omnidawn, 2015). Her poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in Granta, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. The recipient of a Stegner Fellowship, a Fulbright grant, and a Henry Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry & Translation Fellowship, she was most recently a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago and will teach poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop this fall.
