Winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry  The poems of  Company  navigate misperception, memory, and threat while engaging with an electrifying sense of possibility:  "What I want is you to see what is backlit, behind me. Not the silhouette-- but the negative space I make blocking light." Ross's book is sensual, political, ghostly, and frank; what a close friend or beguiling stranger might whisper in your ear in the corner of a crowded party to make you say, "Tell me more." "Ross pitches nothing less than a stubborn belief in tenderness and in the patience both to look everywhere for it and to trustingly wait for it ('I would learn rare//and love and want and wait//I had to start at the beginning.') This is a debut both tough and tender, the poems of a man who has been made to look away from the world plenty, and has found a way to look steadily back." - Carl Phillips, Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry judge "Sam Ross is an important poet because he writes of important matters: the life and death of kindness, survival under attack, the exquisite price of humanness." - Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books " Company displays a clear care for precision and a delicate approach to sentiment. . . . Ross captures how delicate and dangerous connection can be--especially sexual connections and the truths they reveal--yet Company offers testimony for not turning one's back on those intimate ties that bind." - Lambda Literary [Ross's] poems play with color as a Polaroid's flash plays on a smile, with neon-bright illumination. . . . In these poems, the sun is a tricksome, unpredictable lighting crew; the colors feel brighter, and more potent. - Rain Taxi [Ross's] poems are deceptively quiet against our over-saturated moment, bursting with their own possibility. - Hobart Sam Ross's poems have appeared in Tin House, New Republic, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and other journals. Winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry, selected by Carl Phillips, he received his MFA from Columbia University, where he was a Graduate Teaching Fellow, and has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Robert Wilson's Watermill Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He was born in Indiana and lives in New York City.