Join Hub City Bookshop in welcoming Ross White, director of Bull City Press, in celebration of his debut book of poetry! White will be in conversation with Scott Gould. You don’t want to miss this chat about baseball, art, and mortality, so meet us at the bookshop!
About the Book
Ah, yes, the simple pleasures of a junk drawer, the small gods and tender votives they contain. Each tiny nuisance of our history, each fascinating button, leaking pen, soy sauce packet, screw driver. “True son to both Wallace Stevens and Frank O’Hara,” Ross White’s debut Charm Offensive reveals to readers his junk drawer, his smitten seconds, laments, and casual, witty uncertainty on the afterlife.
Opening with a cardiogram–White’s humiliation of his “white belly” and the jokes he shares with his wife over his aging body–and ending with a psychic’s prediction that his life will end at 52 (heart troubles) – White scours time, tenderness, and the mighty (godly) pleasures of overlooked things.
A collection of travel through pasts (Michaelangelo’s David) and futures (when White, too, will be fossilized into something refreshing to future archeologists), through road rage and bumper-sticker Jesus, stillness and the two swans nearly touching in negative space that hold his racing thoughts at bay, the birds he tends back to health and his relationship between dread and satisfaction–everywhere petrified into Charm Offensive White reckons with spoil–bodies, war, the Ford-tough Savior, animal stuffing, in-flight magazines, and the afterlife as a high school in Kansas, proving his line:
“Time is always fully automatic,
measured not in units but in the space
between finishes.”
About the Author
Ross White is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize, and three chapbooks: How We Came Upon the Colony, The Polite Society, and Valley of Want. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. He is Director of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-hosts The Chapbook, a podcast devoted to tiny, wonderful things. Follow him on Mastodon: @[email protected].