Noah Ross / The Holy Grail (Wry n.19) 2025

Noah Ross / The Holy Grail (Wry n.19) 2025

The Holy Grail through the ages, it just keeps tumbling down, right? I guess the thing about a quest is that the experience is always new, and that you never really know what you’re actually going to find. Could be you’re after something you want, or something you’ve once lost, or maybe even something completely external to your own interiority that you’d never even thought about to begin with. Maybe something tangible, maybe something weightless. I don’t know, could be anything really. In 1965, poet Jack Spicer published a book called The Holy Grail. The Holy Grail by Noah Ross isn’t that book, exactly, how could it be? Sure, it shares a name, and there’s a familiar cast of characters, possibly reenacting their own private but related dramas. But archetypes get rewritten; the ages change, the ages stay the same. Just yesterday I was walking down the block I’ve lived on for fifteen years and swear I passed a house I’d never seen before. This book is kind of like that.

As Noah Ross writes in his Holy Grail;

We must find what we lost / Found and gone again / as empty as before as if no riddles / Just a simple yes in a castle / or a tangled forest or on the open waters / I never ventured but sent many afar to seek / No poetry, truth, signs, portents or vessels / to contain all my empty though various blood

Poet Noah Ross is most recently the author of The Dogs (Krupskaya / 2024) and Active Reception (Nightboat / 2021). He lives in Berkeley and is an editor at Baest: a journal of queer forms & affects.

8.5x11” / 16 pages / Side stitch binding / Cardstock covers / First edition of 100 copies

Cover artwork by Emily Harter