Sassy Ross

Sassy Ross was born in Castries, St. Lucia, a country in the Caribbean. She lived her earlier years in the Caribbean and grew up speaking a mixture of English and French patois. It wasn’t until she was ten years old when she moved to the United States, arriving first in Virginia. She attended Pennsylvania State University and began writing poetry, focusing on a nostalgia for the past, geography and the languages and voices she left behind. She moved to New York and received her MFA in poetry from NYU.

She was nominated for a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship when she was studying poetry at NYU. She taught Creative Writing at NYU, and also taught high school English at the Student Center program in New Orleans. She was a member of the Nommo Literary Workshop at the Student Center in New Orleans. She received second place in the Katey Lehman Creative Writing contest She served as the former managing editor of Calabash, a NYU publication. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Caribbean Beat, the Caribbean Review of Books, Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters, Poetry International, Kalliope, and online journals like Mélange and Timbooktu.

Poetry: Patching Up: "Brother to Sister" and "Sister to Brother", "Fig" from her collection "Herself, an Empire of Trees", "Soursop", "Poinciana", "Coconut", "Breadfruit", "Blood Ties", "Dancehall Nights", "The Rottweiler", "The Return", "My Grandmother's Room", "Cellular Odyssey", "Acoustic", "History Shelves", "Hewannora", "Summer Nights", "Reverence", "The Greenest Block", "Two birds", "In the Small Hours", "Barefoot & funky: With questions & other somethings", "Portrait of My Mother".

Sassy Ross’s poems hinge on the echoes of a past she left behind in the Caribbean. She remembers the landscapes of St. Lucia, and explores the central themes of home in relation to her departure, and return. She balances the dichotomies of hyphenated slaves dives into her mother-daughter relationship, and mother-father relationship .Among many themes that arise throughout her poetry, displacement, language, conflict, and trauma arise from the perils of the island and her past.

Her conversational poem between a brother and a sister, displacement is clearly evoked through language. While the sister speaks in English, her brother speaks in a St. Lucian dialect. Ross intentionally displaces the brother and sister not only by language, but by distance as well. In the poem, the sister is returning to the Caribbean for her brother that she left behind and plans on taking him back with her to the U.S.

It is in the brother’s voice, in Ross’s poem Brother to Sister, where a sense of memory of the Caribbean is revealed. Conflict is revealed through the separation of their family and the traumas that resulted in effect. The brother’s pained memory of his sister is of her leaving when he was a young boy. He writes: “And I chased you, tried to grab hold of your swinging hands, but the more I reached the faster you walked, and the space between us stretched so fast and so wide.”

He remembers his sister’s urgency to leave, but doesn’t fully understand why. The space between them is not only physically wide, from the United States to the Caribbean, but their ability to connect is also further distanced by their different upbringings, and clashing of cultures.

The sister’s response to her brother, in Ross’s poem Sister to Brother, shows how nostalgia becomes a place of remembering the struggles that came with the conflicts of being in St. Lucia. She is aware of her reason to return, which she writes, It was not for the island that I returned Though I needed to see the rugged hills again, The curving harbours With their seaweed scents . . . I returned solely To take your hand And to take you away.”

She revisits the landscape of the island and admits the need to revisit its beauty, but ultimately has returned for her brother. She speaks of the pains that accompanied her anxieties of leaving her brother and the years they have wasted being apart from each other when she writes, “I planned on telling you that whenever I pressed seashells against my ear it was never waves I would hear but your boyhood in a surge of laughter so loud and so clear it travelled all the way to America.”

Her poetry life reveals the perils of her childhood. She doesn’t stroll down memory lane as a means to glorify her childhood memories, but explores the complexity of her past and how it was marked by the need to survive. References to the drug culture in the Caribbean arise, as her memory is shaped by her father and his addiction. “The Rottweiler,” is a poem where she and her mother, “searched parking lots where one “Could trade turntables for a fix,” for her drug addict father, she later describes as “a thief who had his own set of keys” (“The Rottweiler”).

Her relationship with her father, and her feeling of connect/disconnect with him is shown in her poem, “History Shelves”. Her skepticism in feeling a part of him but apart from him at the same time, and she is infatuated by his words and capability to convey, she reveals, “I feared that we were both cut from the same cloth, he with a monkey on his back, and I, a junkie for words I could not pronounce” (“History Shelves”).

Furthermore, her liberation in her voice and language is seen at the end of the poem, where she is able to find her own understanding of identity and self without the burden of her father validating it for her through his rendering of words, she has found her own lyric. At the end of “History Shelves” she writes:

"I have not transgressed, my voice repeated In prayer, but when you awoke, Father, You bent words, usurped the role of deity To whom I pled. Your hands, still a father’s hands, Shook history’s shelves to their foundations. I’d almost forgotten the volumes that we lost."

Excerpts from her poems are taken from Coming Up Hot an anthology of Caribbean poets where Sassy Ross appears.