Editor/Publisher: Alison Ross
Alison Ross venerates verse. She has published poesie in Maintenant, Uut Poetry, Indefinite Space, Visual Verse, Poetic Diversity, Brownstone Poets Anthology, Al-Khemia Poetica, Concrete Mist Anthology, otoliths, Sein und Werden, X-Peri, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Unlikely Stories, Of/with, Dead Snakes, Yellow Chair Review, The Kitchen Poet,
First Literary Review – East, Window Cat Press, Fowl Feathered Review, Full of Crow, Sugar Mule, ken*again, Mad Hatter’s Review, Calliope Nerve, The Blue Hour, Zombie Logic Review, MungBeing, The Medulla Review, Counterexample Poetics, Eviscerator Heaven, Word Riot, Up The Staircase, The Battered Suitcase, Blue Fifth Review, Bolts of Silk, Laika Poetry Review, Haggard and Halloo, Disingenuous Twaddle, Cerebral Catalyst, Black Heart Magazine, Menagerie, A Little Poetry, Muse Apprentice Guild, Mad Swirl, Wings of Icarus, and Nova Express.
Alison has been a featured poet at Surreal Poetics. Furthermore, she had a poem, “Chopin,” included in the book, Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse. And even more furthermore, to her giddy bemusement, Alison’s poem, “Kahlo Sky,” was nominated for Best of Net – and another poem, “the moon is a disc of despair,” was nominated for Best of Net by Poetic Diversity. She also had a manuscript longlisted for the 2012 Erbacce Prize, and another manuscript shortlisted for the 2014 Erbacce Prize – among 20 others, down from 5,000 entries. These nods, especially the latter, greeted her with Rave-levels of ecstasy; she is still donning her Dr. Seuss hat and twirling around the dance-floor in mad merriment.
Alison’s chapbooks, Clockwise Cats and Miro’s Poesie, were released with the venerable Fowlpox Press. These works will subvert your dissonant dystopia into a euphonious utopia of Zen-Surrealist bliss.
Alison’s additional chapbook, Clockwise Cats: The Prequel, was released with Feline and Nothingness Press; links to it can be found in a post on the Clockwise Cat website titled “Feline and Nothingness Press (Chapbook Publisher).”
Alison’s latest chapbook (published around 2017, we think), Monster Sermons, was published by dancing girl press.
Alison also curated/edited the selected poems of Nathaniel S. Rounds, entitled, Nation of Nate: A Dongpo Pork Mixtape of Melancholy and Madness.
And, finally, Alison has been a featured reader of her verse at Bound to be Read Books (twice), Brownstone Poets (twice), New Orleans (Virtual) Poetry Festival, and the Decatur Book Festival Local Poetry Stage (which she had to cancel due to illness, but she was still invited to read, so there). She was also a roundtable presenter at The New Orleans Poetry Festival in 2017.
Alison also praises progressive political polemics. She once wrote regular radical rants and scathing satire for Democracy Means You. She has published similar tirades in Exquisite Corpse, Fringe Magazine, Bad Subjects, Fear of Monkeys, Muse Apprentice Guild, Democratic Underground, Creative Loafing, and When Falls the Coliseum.
Alison has additionally published movie reviews, book reviews, music reviews, and feature articles in online periodicals such as PopMatters (where she is a semi-regular contributor), Five 2 One, Literary Orphans, MungBeing, Nostrovia! Poetry, Laura Hird’s webzine, Black Heart Magazine, and such print publications as Pop Culture Press (Austin, Texas) and Planet Atlanta. She used to write for technical magazines and corporations, but found that task more dishearteningly dull than watching a classroom full of teenagers drool at their desks while she attempts to impart to them the merits of literature. And this, incidentally, is why she does that now instead of sitting in a cubicle the size of a midget’s closet scribbling articles about the oh-so-intoxicating worlds of industrial engineering and computer manufacturing. Pedagogy ain’t easy, but it beats being cruelly confined to corporate cages.
When not rabble-rousing through her verse and invectives, Alison revels in reading, visiting museums, swimming, bicycling, ransacking thrift stores, listening to really loud music, watching movies and plays, dining out, eating tomatoes, eating artichokes, drinking wine (ed. note – not anymore; long story, and no, I am not an alcoholic), traveling, decorating her home, advocating for human and animal rights, snoozing, snoring, and communing with her temporally-incorrect feline friends, Quetzal and Soleil (ed. note – they both passed, so now it’s Zuri).
All of Alison’s work on this site and in Symmetry of Birds, her brag-blog (linked below), is copyrighted; please do not reprint without permission.
Alison aims to sublimate her jealousy toward savvier scribes by publishing them here at Clockwise Cat. So far, this exercise has worked really well; she no longer cowers in the corner when confronted with a really spanking piece of poetry or prose, but rather celebrates the cerebral genius of the authors, and gleans inspiration from their gifts.
Author’s Brag Blog (Poetry, Rant, Review Publications)
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars….” (Jack Kerouac)
