Saturday - by Margaret Ross (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"What beautiful lucidity these poems have, what quiet, firm intelligence. Margaret Ross' poetry has the vivid characterizations and scenic quality of stories, but with another more mysterious quality that is disturbing and ineffably moving." --Mary Gaitskill

Margaret Ross' 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, Saturday explores various forms of intimacy and estrangement in unforgettable ways.
Margaret Ross is the author of one previous collection, A Timeshare (Omnidawn, 2015). Her poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in Granta, the Paris Review, Poetry, the Yale Review and Best American Nonrequired Reading. The recipient of a Stegner Fellowship, a Fulbright grant and a Henry Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry & Translation Fellowship, she was most recently a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago and will teach poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop this fall.

Review Quotes

'Saturday' sets out to capture the accrual of moments through which injustice is both learned and naturalized.--Benjamin Paul "Brooklyn Rail"

The poems in Margaret Ross's 'Saturday' are extraordinary renderings of consciousness. She presents a world that feels unlivable, but the visionary quality of her aesthetic makes an argument for sensory experiences, landscapes, and art that might, on rare occasions, fortify us in the midst of life's inherent turbulence.--Mia George "The Adroit Journal"

The writing doesn't disguise superficiality with abstruseness. It uses words you're not supposed to use in serious poems, like love and stars and happiness, words that can easily slip into the asinine in a less assured voice. The complexity of the ideas presented in the collection and the layers of thought make simple terms startling and clear.--James Butler-Gruett "Fence Digital"