Dead Cars in Managua - Punchy Poetry Author:Stuart Ross Gathering into one volume three discrete poetry projects, Dead Cars in Managua is both an experimental departure for Stuart Ross and an offering of some of his most accurate surrealistic observations to date. While each project develops its own distinct world, all three sections are touched by Ross's unique ability to dissolve our common-sense u... more »nderstanding of the world, and then distill a more potent truth from the remains of sense and reason. The title section, an absurdist Baedeker of image-driven prose poems about Managua, Nicaragua, is illustrated by the author's own photos of the cadavers of cars decomposing in Managuan streets. As we accompany the author through the ruins of people and objects he observes, we smell the smells of Managua, hear flying cockroaches sound like walnuts cracking under foot, see a Belmont cigarette leap from our lips and cling to a tree. We witness the power of language to say what it does not mean exactly with great and moving precision. 'Hospitality Suite', a formally various sequence of personal, narrative poems delivered in attitudes familiar to us from Ross's previous work, explores the claustrophobic spaces and amorphous moods of hospitals. 'Eyes/ float across a room and out the window./ Outside, it is bleeding/ all over the lawn.' In this environment where memory is tinted with morphine, and where the threats of the body determine action, time and space expands and contracts at the rate of a fibrillating heart. 'You, a Person' brings together cubist and abstract poems, experiments in translation, and works written while Ross was listening to other poems. In this final section of the book, where he shows his New York School cards like never before, Stuart Ross proves himself to be Canada's best student of poets like Bill Berkson, Joe Brainard and Rod Padgett, and their uncontested equal as a poet who challenges and delights.« less