Figuring - Tapa blanda

Poetry. Editor's Selection in the 2015 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. The poems in FIGURING probe the gulf between self and other as they explore themes of motherhood, landscape, domesticity, and childhood, and the violence—both intimate and global—that shadow all of these. A mother overhears her children playing "Containment Drill" (the classroom procedure to prepare for a school shooting), a young girl believes she will grow wings when she enters puberty, young boys shoot each other on a neighborhood street in what appears at first to be a game of tag, a woman fears for her sanity while she does laundry, children mimic hurricane disaster relief operations on the playground, and bulletproof school supplies are advertised on the news. Interwoven series of self-portraits and reportage chronicle the moment of contact or collision between the individual and surrounding world, grappling with issues of implication and complicity.

Anna Ross is the author of IF A STORM (Anhinga Press, 2013), which won the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook, Hawk Weather (New Women's Voices Prize, Finishing Line Press). She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Squaw Valley Poetry Workshop, and Grub Street. FIGURING (Bull City Press, 2016) was named a finalist for the 2105 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Quarterly, The Paris Review, Poetry Daily, Southwest Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pangyrus, and other journals. She teaches in the Writing, Literature & Publishing Program at Emerson College and is a contributing editor for Salamander. She lives in Dorchester, MA, with her husband, daughter, and son.