Flutter, Kick

(Paperback)

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In her award-winning second book, Anna V. Q. Ross transforms motherhood into a lens, examining narratives of girlhood, migration, trauma, and inheritance. Compassing home and horizon, this tightly woven, image-rich collection plumbs the political within the domestic and traces the routes of the past within everyday life. A bruise becomes a flower and then a flag planted to claim an adopted land; the hull of a Viking ship becomes the fuselage of a plane carrying an immigrating mother home; the daily routines of carpools, math homework, and bedtime stories are interrupted by memories of abuse and reports of school shootings and environmental collapse. But at heart, these are poems of reclamation, reminding us that in those days, we were fast and best, but didnt know it. Wary and watchful, never resigned, Flutter, Kick maps the spaces for compassion we carve in a dangerous world.

Reviews

"Ross is especially good at the dismount; her last lines stick the landing in a way that launches the reader into new understandings, new truths, the ones that cant be spoken all the way." --Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe

Author Bio

Anna V. Q. Rosss previous poetry collections are If a Storm and the chapbooks Figuring and Hawk Weather. Her awards include the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry, the New Womens Voices Prize in Poetry, and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Sewanee Writers Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work appears in Harvard Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and other journals. Anna is the poetry editor for Salamander and teaches at Emerson College. She lives with her family in Dorchester, MA, where she runs the performance series Unearthed Song & Poetry and raises chickens.