Pots and Other Living Beings is a literally and visually compelling first poetry collection by upcoming Indigenous artist annie ross. The text combines socially conscious poems with geographically grounded photographs, each describing an aspect of living in the postmodern, neoliberal age. All compositions emphasize in evocative ways our times’ disillusions and disenchantments, promised and failed utopias, material and cultural ruins, alienations and dispossessions. The work stems from the poet’s gathering of thousands of photographs and field notes during a research trip to the Southwestern United States, exploring the founding, making, dreaming, and proliferation of nuclear weapons since the 1940s. The poems in Pots and Other Living Beings hint at and reflect upon the food, arts, schools, hospitals, family farms, and alternate existences peoples could have enjoyed if our resources, imagination, time, and energy had been directed towards l i f e, in all of its forms.

annie ross (Maya/Irish) works with and in communities, and is in love with Mother Earth and all of her Natural and Supernatural Beings.

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"This is documentary poetry and poetic photo-essay at its best. ross ... feels her way carefully across the landscape of the US South West — a landscape scarred by colonization and the military industrial complex and its atomic desires."
—Stephen Collis, Winner of the 2019 Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize.

"Here is one of the great strengths of poetry: its ability to carry such small things in a beautiful container of words, to celebrate the minutiae of everyday life."—PRISM international

"[Ross] skillfully challenges our ideas about how depictions of history, culture, and even language can reinforce prejudice."
—Adrian Dix, Georgia Straight

"Pots and Other Living Beings holds the ache of hard embrace. annie ross is a corn mother, anima of all sharp-teethed legacies of living earth and sky beasts. She is grinding stones, mixing rust and resins to our changing customs.
—Elizabeth Woody Author of Seven Hands, Seven Hearts and Luminaries of the Humble

"Ross merge[s] writing, visual arts, grammar, and science in ways that expand our idea of poetry."
—Adrian Dix, Georgia Straight

"In annie ross’s premier collection, images speak silently to one another, the poet speaks of the images and weaves, and we the readers watch and listen and finally begin to help in the weaving. A nimble, broken love song, a gathering song, full of grief and full of admiration."
—Joanne Arnott, Author of Halfling Spring and A Night for the Lady