Saturday

Margaret Ross

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

'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