Saturday by Margaret Ross

Not available until September 2024

"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

Margaret Ross is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program. Her first book, A Timeshare, was published by Omnidawn in 2015. Recent poems of hers have appeared in Astra, Chicago Review, Harper's, The Paris Review, and Yale Review, and have been anthologized in Best American Poetry and Best American Non-required Reading. Saturday will be her second book of poems.