The Odyssey Bookshop: Anna V. Q. Ross

Join us on Wednesday, April 26 at 7 PM as Anna V. Q. Ross presents her new collection, Flutter, Kick. She will be joined in conversation by Andrea Lawlor.

About the Book

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 didn't know it." Wary and watchful, never resigned, Flutter, Kick maps the spaces for compassion we carve in a dangerous world.

About the Author

Anna V. Q. Ross’s most recent book, Flutter, Kick (Red Hen Press), won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award. Her previous books include If a Storm (winner of the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry), Figuring (Bull City Press), and Hawk Weather (winner the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Society). She is a Fulbright Scholar, a Mass Cultural Council fellow, and poetry editor for Salamander, and her work appears or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. She teaches at Tufts University and through the Emerson Prison Initiative. Anna lives with her family in Dorchester, where she runs the poetry and music series Unearthed Song & Poetry and raises chickens.

About Andrea Lawlor

Andrea Lawlor teaches creative writing at Mount Holyoke College, is the recipient of a 2020 Whiting Award for Fiction, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. Their publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Vintage/Knopf).

Visit https://www.odysseybks.com/event/anna-v-q-ross-person or email events@odysseybks.com for more information.