Anna VQ Ross (Poetry Fellow ’18) writes poems that confront our current climate of apprehension and disconnection in an effort “to pierce it and understand it.”
In this audio clip, Ross reads her poem Almost a Mothering. She also discusses the poem’s origin as well as the questions that drive her work. (Though Mass Cultural Council interviewed her long before the COVID-19 crisis, her observations about the pervasiveness of fear in our lives are as relevant as ever.)
Listen to Anna VQ Ross. Read a transcript.
Anna VQ Ross is the author of the poetry collections If a Storm (Anhinga Press, winner of the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry), Figuring (Bull City Press, a finalist for the 2015 Alice Fay Di Casagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America), and Hawk Weather (winner the New Women’s Voice Prize from Finishing Line Press and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Society). She has received fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Squaw Valley Poetry Workshop, and Grub Street. Individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Nation, The New Republic, Provincetown Arts, The Paris Review, Southern Humanities Review, and The Southern Review, among other journals. She is poetry editor for Salamander Magazine, teaches creative writing and literature at Emerson College, and lives with her family in Dorchester, MA, where she co-hosts the poetry and music performance series Unearthed Song & Poetry and raises chickens.
Gary Whited says
Anna, I loved hearing you read your poem, “Almost a Mothering,” and speaking for what occasioned this poem, what evoked your writing it, and it is exquisite in how it listens to the vultures, as well as to the train, and the hunting by smell they engage in, and their swooping flight. Thank you so much for making this poem and for reading it.