Winner, Exist Through the Giftshop Award (2013)

Best Poetry of 2012, Winnipeg Free Press

You Exist. Details Follow. is Stuart Ross's seventh full-length collection of poetry. In these poems, Ross veers in opposite directions: narrative confessional poems, and works that might be considered abstract expressionist, and a lot both in between and beyond those boundaries. Each poem breathes with the signature weirdness, the sharp wit, and gentle awe that Ross is known for. Here you'll find confounding centos, fractured sonnets, delirious lists, poems composed through surrealist strategies, a new addition to Ross's autobiographical Razovsky series, and more.

Praise for You Exist. Details Follow.:

"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)

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