Pockets: A Novel

By Stuart Ross

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781773050898

Book preview

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Reviews for Pockets

[datrappert · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Slender "novel" is no more than a short story, really. But in less than 90 pages, some with only a sentence or two on them, it paints an interior portrait of a boy--sometimes a man--and his brief memories and impossible images. Perhaps, like Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, he is unstuck in time. His thoughts return to his dead brother, who floats through the sky outside his window, or to his dying mother's hospital room. Meanwhile, those of us who grow up in the Sixties, will appreciate the contemporary references--the Beatles, Red Skelton, a Pontiac Tempest, and so on. While there isn't really a lot going on here, the book succeeds in taking you to a place outside yourself, and it is a place that despite the occasional hallucinatory images and deliberate nonsense, is completely real. At the end of reading it, I just had to nod my head and think, "Well done."