“The poems in Elizabeth Ross’s After Birth take on the turbulence, epiphanies and heartbreaks of mighty change with unrelenting honesty and brio; happily and triumphantly, they steer clear of the soft-focus mawkishness that often dogs the treatment of motherhood. What we have here treats birth, child-rearing, and how the mother-body interacts with the world at large with a crackling combination of wit, tenderness, and absurdity. An incandescent and immensely pleasurable book.”
– Alexandra Oliver
“The
wit and acuity of Elizabeth Ross’s poetry in After Birth match
her poetic skill. Each poem brings a delight in the midst of hard truths, messy
moments, distasteful discoveries. Ross is writing from a particular generational
juncture – stranded between the birth of her babies and the imminence of her
parents’ deaths; between her dismay at her daughter’s Cinderella yearnings and
her father’s apprehension at “Total Blackness.” Her skill and grace in these
poems transform the quotidian into something wondrous.”
– Maureen
Hynes
Featured on 49th Shelf: Most Anticipated Spring 2019 Preview and 26 Books to Celebrate for Poetry Month.
Featured on All Lit Up: Books for Mother’s Day.
Featured on BC BookLook: “Birth effects.”
After Birth is available at your favourite bookseller or direct from the publisher.
“In the lush, vivid poems of Elizabeth Ross’s Kingdom, an agile,
engaged and astute mind offers the names for much of the kingdom of the heart. Ross carries us through the dangers and ecstasies of girlhood, with its boundaries and breaches, and into the openings and enclosures of the adult world with its “sound of something bigger.” Kingdom is the startlingly accomplished, brilliant debut collection of an important new voice in Canadian poetry.”
– Rhea Tregebov
Kingdom is available from your favourite bookseller or direct from the publisher. R