Horatio

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter to a mother from her son, beginning from the riddles of distance: “Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.” The son goes by Little Dog, a moniker his grandmother gave him as an act of protection. Evil spirits—the thinking went in her Vietnamese village—would skip over the weakest, easiest prey if they were named something hideous. “To love something,” Little Dog ruminates in his letter, “is to name it something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive.” […]

In his debut collection Company, Sam Ross focuses on what lingers, exploring the idiosyncratic and at times seemingly indiscriminate nature of memory. When suffering takes many shapes and sizes yet appears as persistent fact, how may we forge memories that shimmer, so that love matches the loss? The answer often appears in the company we keep. Ross captures how delicate and dangerous connection can be—especially sexual connections and the truths they reveal—yet Company offers testimony for not turning one’s back on those intimate ties that bind. Ross’s poetry is refreshingly crisp and unaffected, taking the quotidian and the extraordinary as part and parcel. His tone […]