The Animate Veil, by Gregory Ross

Poetry, prose, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The Animate Veil is a collection of questionable visions. Passing sights that make you wonder if what you’ve seen is real or just the playful foisting of an internal world run amok before the mind’s eye.

Unsettling, comical, narrative, dreamlike, often appearing and vanishing with the flashbang of a satori slap, each of the poems in this collection were born from the tumult and motion of an active mind draped across the physical plane perceived. These are poems of subliminal drift and visual movement, hallucinations tethered to a metamorphic reality where identity, space, and time have given up their reins to the fluidity and dance of the unconscious theater alive in the wind.

“Pull back this veil and enter a world where Schopenhauer and Whitman arm wrestle in the desert, argyle socks limp down sidewalks, and houses are built of apple cores. Part walking meditation, part fever dream, The Animate Veil opens with a stolen rabbit, ends with a melting snowman, and along the way Ross wrestles with language and meaning-making in ways only a poet-wanderer can: “What would it taste like to sink my teeth into a star?” he asks above the roar of dizzying, unforgiving winds, along suburban streets, near the edge of oblivion. At the heart of these poems is the beautiful truth of witness and the wild witness of dream.”

—Alexis Orgera, author of Dust Jacket

Gregory Ross is a peripatetic poet and music journalist from the northwestern woods of New Jersey. Author of the chapbook Notes from the Parking Lot of Lost Hopes and Dreams (Alien Buddha Press, 2024).