My 2026 New Year's Poem

For the past few decades, I've been writing a new poem on New Year's Day and sending it out by email. Used to be by Canada Post, but my list got to unwieldy. 

My poem for this year is below. I admit, writing this one was the biggest New Year's Poem struggle I've had in years. You should see the one I threw back.

STRANGE LAND (a poem for January 1, 2026)

 

Behold! An angelic blob

alighted before me

and reached out a hand.

It had this “Let me gently

 

guide you into the uncertain

future” kind of look on its face.

An idea alighted in my brain.

I looked into the distance

 

in astonishment, and when the blob

followed my gaze, I disappeared

behind the nearest tower

of freshly plowed snow.

 

There did I shiver and

I grasped my own hand

and led me through the slate

night, into the next blinding

 

morning. This was 2026,

which old people think

sounds like science-fiction and

young people think is whatever.

 

(Speaking of science-fiction, it’s

been more than 50 years since

that camp counsellor, Ken C—,

punched me in the head while

 

I was reading Stranger

in a Strange Land in bed

because I was the only kid

not pretending to sleep.)

 

I admit I want to punch

2025 in the head

and encourage 2026

to just lay down its head

 

and pretend to sleep.

If I need the angelic

blob’s help,

so be it.

Stuart Ross

Over and out.

50 Years of Publishing

Still getting it through my skull that I have been publishing for 50 years, ever since Books by Kids put out The Thing In Exile in 1975, when I was 16. The book included about a dozen poems each by me, Mark Laba, and Steven Feldman. We had a launch with champagne (my first champagne!) and we did a little reading tour of schools and the book even got a few reviews.

I'm working on a small Proper Tales Press chapbook to commemorate this birthday. It will contain my dozen poems from The Thing In Exile, plus a short essay about the circumstances around and process of its publication. I gotta say, my poems are not to bad for a teenager!

Over and out.

A rare review of The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky

 Wonderful to see this kind appreciation of The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky by Khashayar Mohammadi!

Promo for my reading at St. Lawrence Writers Festival, Brockville, Ontario, September 6, 2025

 

My 2025 New Year's Poem

 EARTH ANGLE (poem for January 1, 2025)

 

Everything in here is angles. In the glare of

day and the dead of night. The way

the walls meet the ceiling. The rectangularity

of the windows and squareness of the panes.

The dresser is angles. The chair

is angles. The mirror in the corner,

angles. The light fixture is perfectly

circular, a sneaky angle disguised as an anti-

angle. The cobweb stretches across

the ceiling at a 52-degree angle. The merest

draft and it’s 53 degrees. The paintings

by Barbara Caruso contain angular
shapes in precise colours on canvases

mounted on wood squares and rectangles

built for her by Nelson Ball. Where

the paint flakes off the ceiling above,

it does so at deliberate angles. The clothes

hanging from hangers: their per-

pendicularity is angular.

                                      And I am this dollop,

riddled with bristles and filled with guts

and aqueducts, lying on a rectangle,

typing on squares within a rectangle, my

roundish head propped up at

an angle against a wall that holds

a window through which, if I were

a periscope, I could see a few

blackbirds pecking at the hard snow

covering the parking lot next door,

looking for stray seeds or frozen snails.

One of the birds says to another,

“Happy new year.” “What’s,”

the other says, “a ‘year’?” Then

all the birds laugh and perform

an extraordinary terpsichore

I swear I’ll never forget.

 

 

Stuart Ross

1 January 2025

New short stories popping up all over the place!

 I've been working for a few years on a collection of very short stories. A few of them have seen print, including in the NYC-based The Nu Review, edited by Jordan Davis. Another has popped up in Calgary-based filling Station. Two more appeared in Ampersand Review, out of Sheridan College. 

Hey, there was one in the now dearly departed Taddle Creek, too, a Toronto literary gem.

And a couple have shown up online. A few years ago, one of the stories appeared on Talking about Strawberries All of the Time.

And just this morning, another one emerged on The Glacier Journal, and I couldn't be happier.

I'll be in Banff for a few weeks this winter, and maybe I'll get that MS finished! Let the bidding war begin!

Over and out.

Chris Banks reviews The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky

 Gratitude to ace poet Chris Banks for his thoughtful, generous, lengthy review of The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky — on his amazing review blog, The Woodlot.

Chris writes:

The Sky Is A Sky In The Sky by Stuart Ross is a thorough exploration of the various forces that animate Ross’s poetry–things like wordplay, artistic allusions, a kind of surrealist dexterity that cannot be imitated, but which can only be honed over forty plus years of writing. No one writes a Stuart Ross poem except for Stuart Ross.

You can find the full review right here.

And here's the astonishing book trailer I created!

Over and out.