Margaret Ross was born in New York City. Her work has been recognized with fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Breadloaf Writers' Conference and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she earned an MFA in 2011. She is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.

Books by Margaret Ross:

Other poems on the web by Margaret Ross:
"A Timeshare"
"Devil's Optics"
Two poems
"Godwits Migrating"
"Terms of Venery"
"Decay Constant"
"How the Water"

Margaret Ross's Website.

About A Timeshare:

"Syntax is above all things the art and craft of time: the master syntactician can shuffle time and stutter it, slow it down and speed it, reverse it, retract it, and delay. This brilliant book introduces Margaret Ross as a syntactical artist of the highest order and degree. 'A Timeshare' is more than virtuosic. It surpasses the great masters of the future, and heralds the great masters of the past."
—Eleanor Catton

"Margaret Ross's profound and moving collection is a wonder, a trove, a hive—it hums with the life of other species and with that of our own—' of late' it begins, 'countdown' it instructs, ' in the meantime' it says to describe the room it has in which to breathe. And yet breathe it does—as if every breath could be one of the last—though without urgency, with dignity, and an amount of imaginative compassion for that which it would capture in language which make us feel how uniquely aware this poet is of what that term gestures towards. The acutely brilliant sharp-edged skill by which to endure the act of description—and what it might bring unexpectedly into view—has rarely been as clear-headed. Short of quoting whole poems—so seamless in their formal acuity one cannot easily do so—one wants to just say: go hear this voice. It is a brand new voice. You have not heard anything like it before. It will show you ways to live in this world you have not imagined. Go willingly, as it does. Its patience is heartbreaking and its courage equally so. As for its brilliance—there seems to be no quarter where the human mind has sought to corner the real that Ross' poems do not master and enlist in her urgent need to understand where we might stand in our mistaken special standing as a self-conscious species."
—Jorie Graham

"A Timeshare channels that crepuscular space between waking and dreaming. 'Could you tell which was your own if you were asked to touch ten silent faces in the dark?' Margaret Ross asks in poems full of intense yet meditative wonder. They emit the ghostly ambience of 'voices wafting past their sentences' and 'notes across a promissory silence.' It's as if someone was singing from the shadows, or the shadows themselves were singing throughout this stunning, truly singular debut. A Timeshare is a remarkable book."
—Terrance Hayes

"Like all genuine first books, A Timeshare tells the story of its own inception—the summoning of the poet to a mode of speech sufficiently capacious, strict and free to harbor emerging selves. Ross captures the moment that has captured her, overfull, contradictory, alive with memory, fact, fear, rage, history, science, commodity-desire and spirit-anxiety. Hers is a voice of brilliant capacity and vision, moving, necessary and true."
—Mark Levine

"In Ross' remarkably wrought and intensely arresting first collection, A Timeshare, we finally meet a poet who knows that syntax is a Doomsday Clock. Here are poems 'opening in real time,' whose hypotactic gears are turned darkly by a stunning, desolate imagination. These brilliant poems are the fine, uncanny inner workings of the soulful, moving mind of a real poet."
—Robyn Schiff