A fragmented, surrealist novel of loss, nostalgia, and childhood secrets from the award-winning poet and author of A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent.
A wonderful dream and a horrific nightmare, a fuzzy consciousness of pain and family, Pockets is a novel of fragments—both literally and figuratively. In a series of prose-poem chapters, the nameless narrator, in a largely Jewish 1960s suburb in the northern reaches of Toronto, repeatedly enters the world, as if for the first time. His landscape is one of bicycles with banana seats, Red Skelton, trilobite fossils, and overwhelming loss. Among shadows that both comfort and threaten, a brother who drifts through the sky, he finds his narrative full of pockets of emptiness he can't help but try to fill.
A heartbreakingly personal and brilliantly evocative work, Pockets redefines the novel, delivering infinite scope in something diminutive and pocket-sized. It is a work to be read and reread for its poetic beauty and hidden gems of revelation.
Industry Reviews
"Each brief page of this brief, surrealistic novel brims with the unexpected, the astonishing, the odd . . . Pockets is a beautiful little book." - The Murdock
"These untitled micro-chapters fit together like Lego blocks built by William S. Bourroughs and his wild Brion Gysin friend. Stuart Ross simply never fails to delight, surprise and inform as he entertains . . . Today's Book of Poetry doesn't really know any other poets like Stuart Ross. But if you were to take Kurt Vonnegut's imagination, a Garrison Keillor sense of the storyteller and candy twisted it all together with a generous dose of wit and wisdom from Randy Newman and his melodious lamentations, you would be nearing the mark." - Today's Book of Poetry
