Sam Ross: How It Feels Brattleboro Literary Festival, October 19, 2019   In Sam Ross’s poem “Time Expanding the Air Forcibly,” an unnamed someone looks at a photograph and remarks, That’s how it felt, / but not how it looked. To which the poet responds, “How could that be?” Yes — how can a feeling be truer than the image that provoked it? The poems in Sam Ross’s debut collection, Company, are pulsing with the sights and sounds and smells of life, precise and clear as though we’re seeing and hearing and smelling them right now, and for the first time. But, as happens in dreams, those sensations are refracted through time and memory, and somehow they are shorn of their daytime context and meaning, somehow infused with strangeness and wonder and a powerful, lingering sense of significance that is just beyond the grasp of logic. Ross’s poem “Struck” begins:                Sometime, still, I hold my hand to my eyes                so the sun becomes another thing sewn up                tied inside. I am making a mystery                where none exists. Ah, but now it does exist, in much the way that “each exhalation in the cold became a charmed shape” in another of Ross’s poems, “After Assault.” In fact, all of the poems in Company work that kind of magic — making a mystery where none exists, lingering as charmed shapes in the cold. It’s no mystery, though, that poet Carl Phillips chose Company as the 2017 winner of the Four Way Books Poetry Prize — these are poems that will get under your skin and change the way you feel about our broken, beautiful world. Please welcome Sam Ross.   © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont October 2019   top of page   other essays   e-mail to Mike   Fox Paws home page