This book spans nearly 25 years in the career of one of Canada's most original poetic voices. Poems are drawn from Stuart Ross’s three ECW books, as well as previously uncollected work from chapbooks, postcards, and leaflets, and a selection of new poems appearing in print for the first time.

Poetry. Finalist, Acorn-Plantos Award. Winner, Exit Through the Giftshop Award (2013). Best Poetry of 2012 selection, Winnipeg Free Press. 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 confessionalism 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 poems from Ross's ongoing auto-biographical Razovsky series, one-line poems, centos, fractured sonnets, poems composed through surrealist strategies, and more. Ross's absurdism doesn't rely on unconnected sentences, abstract thought, or an unusual, elevated vocabulary: rather, his poetry delights in the silliness of concrete mundanity....The collection thus begins by launching us into a happily disjointed mind, into images connected as though by sparking, duct-taped wires, buzzing weird electrical fires of thought.--Matrix Magazine A voice all his own. Stuart Ross unleashes his refreshing snark in his latest collection of poems...He runs the gamut from his own brand of absurdist expressionism to fond childhood memories and poetic confessions....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 I personally believe Stuart Ross may be Canada's most important poet...Ross could be called a 'narrative surrealist' but that, like most labels, does not adequately capture the gymnastic feats of construction he employs. At his best Ross combines images and emotions with the same alacrity of a Max Ernst or Salvador Dali. The literal is a sheer curtain that surrealists drape like a fabric or a fold in time. Ross gives a master class in almost every poem in the delicate art of balancing truth from fiction, what we imagine from what we know to be real...For me, there is no poet as entertaining as Stuart Ross and very few as smart. Ross builds a new universe with You Exist. Details Follow. and we get to travel in it like explorers entering a new dimension, luckily it comes with instructions and a guide map for home. Stuart Ross looks at the world through a different lens, how extraordinarily lucky we are that he shares that view with us. --Michael Dennis (blog)

Cobourg poet Stuart Ross believes collaboration allows him to be part of poems Ñ and the kinds of poems Ñ he would never write on his own. He also believes the best poems are ones that explode the author's own intentions. In this book, Ross takes the stage in the vaudeville act that is collaborative poetry with writers from across Canada. The results are sometimes beautifully harmonic, sometimes chaotically slapstick Ñ but they are always as unpredictable as a live performance. And with the occasional exquisite pratfall. Ross's collaborators include Kasey Ball, Gary Barwin, Alice Burdick, Sarah Burgoyne, Jason Camlot, Michael Dennis, Clarice Eckford, Tanya Finestone, Verne Good, Mark Laba, Jay MillAr, Leigh Nash, Peter Norman, Jim Smith, Gillian Sze, Paul Vermeersch, Tom Walmsley and others.

"The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky is a laboratory of poetic approaches and experiments. It mines the personal and imaginary lives of Stuart Ross and portraits of his grief and internal torment, while paying homage to many of the poet’s literary heroes. It contains new entries in Ross’s ongoing Razovsky poems, prose poems, a remix of an entire poetry book by dear friend Nelson Ball, a couple of collaborative poems, some one-line poems, and lots more. In an era of thematic poetry and conceptual poetry books, this collection is a celebration of possibilities and miscellany."--

Shortlisted for the ReLit Award (2008)I Cut My Finger is Stuart Ross's first full-length poetry collection since his acclaimed Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (2003). The poems here show Ross's ever-expanding breadth, from his trademark humour and surrealism, to pointedly experimental works and poems of human anguish. Here, a poet includes a letter threatening suicide in his submission of poems to a literary journal; a businessman dons flippers to swim along the sidewalk to his downtown office; the U.S. military follows a trail of red ants to glacial redemption; the writer finds profound joy in a tower of canned niblets. But beneath the slapstick exterior of so many of Ross's poems there lurk dark threats and darker pleasures.Praise for I Cut My Finger:One of Eye's "Best Reviews of 2007""Taddle Creek Recommends" Pick (Summer 2007 issue)"... Now considered to be Canada's foremost writer of the surreal, Ross is enjoying some much-deserved recognition and has taken his place as one of the cool uncles of Canadian poetry ... Absurd, surprising, topical, surreal - his new work builds on the mythic significance and brilliance of several career-long metaphors and subjects." (The Globe and Mail)"It is surrealism at its best: written not to dispel the present but to reveal it." (Arc Poetry)"A damn-fine book in every sense of the word." (Taddle Creek)

Stuart Ross's sixth poetry collection is both an experimental departure for Ross and an offering of some of his most accurate surrealistic observations to date. Gathering into one volume three discrete poetry projects -- an absurdist Baedeker of image-driven prose poems about Managua accompanied by his original photos of decomposing cars, a formally various sequence of personal, narrative poems about the claustrophobic spaces and amorphous moods of hospitals, and a selection of cubist and abstract poems where Ross shows his experimental New York School cards like never before -- all of the poems in this book are touched by Ross's unique ability to dissolve our common-sense understanding of the world, and then distill a more potent truth from the remains of sense and reason.

Stuart Ross's eighth collection of poems delivers a gallery of emotionally charged poetry experiments along with a series of philosophical meditations on the aesthetically contrived and sometimes downright quirky poetic processes that were followed to generate the poems in this book. A Hamburger in a Gallery is deeply engaged in demonstrating how art happens, especially through a poet's immediate aesthetic engagement with other works of art. Comprised of poems written 'after' the lines and language of other artists' works, 'during' sessions of listening to other poets reading their poems, or constructed 'from' the parts and pieces of other artists' words, A Hamburger in a Gallery provides a distinctive experience of the relationship between the finished poem and the process that informed its creation. Blurring the boundaries between creative writing and creative reading, Ross has once again created an utterly original, accessible, moving and avant-garde classic. 'Now considered to be Canada's foremost writer of the surreal, Ross is enjoying some much-deserved recognition and has taken his place as one of the cool uncles of Canadian poetry.' George Murray, The Globe & Mail

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

Literary Nonfiction. FURTHER CONFESSIONS OF A SMALL PRESS RACKETEER is a continuation of the columns and essays that comprised Stuart's 2005 release, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer. Again, equal parts literary memoir, reckless tirade, and unsolicited advice for the aspiring writer, FURTHER CONFESSIONS is drawn largely from Stuart Ross's notorious Hunkamooga column, his blog entries, essays for subTerrain magazine and other online venues. We bring them together here in their collected brilliance: alternately snarky, sincere, touching, honest, and always opinionated, Stuart's confessions are essential reading for any literary confessional. This volume offers its readers a roller-coaster journey into the mind of one of Canada's most committed small press activists. Praise for Stuart Ross: One of North America's most active and fiercely independent literary populists.--Another Chicago Magazine If Stuart Ross was living and working in the United States, and writing the exact same poetry he does now he would be rich and famous. Well, famous, at least.--The Globe and Mail Praise for CONFESSIONS OF A SMALL PRESS RACKETEER: For a quick and dirty breath of fresh air, it's difficult to beat renegade urban poet Stuart Ross's latest effort... Ross has the battle scars and knows poetry isn't about flowers and meadows, it's about blood and guts.--Steven Knight, Quill & Quire ...a wonderful book--funny, outrageous, and acute. I'll even say it's the best short-essay collection about the writing life that I've read in ages... Every aspiring writer should read CONFESSIONS OF A SMALL PRESS RACKETEER, just to find inspiration. And so should every established writer--just to keep humble.--Lynne Van Luven, Malahat Review