Active Reception

"Active Reception knows that to be monstrous is to threaten the order of things and invites the reader to conspire: to enter or embrace one’s own capacity to be entered, to transform, to be implicated in all the juicy possibilities."—The Rumpus

"These are the conceptual renderings of a gay choral orgy versed in language poetry. The release of rhythmic momentum is a delightful journey we follow to completion. A sonic pulse, a generously erotic beat. The past is something that isn’t over. Like heirlooms, bottoming is passed down from one generation to the next. Intergenerational pleasure is a modular form of queer kinship."—Adroit Journal

"Encountering Active Reception is a playful challenge, a flirt drawn out beyond its limits. I am unmoored by every slash, all ruptured phonetics and syntax, find joy in the multiple routes made possible in and out of sense-making and associative logics."—Full Stop

"Active Reception—a book of words or worlds, holes or wholes—is visual ecstasy and Noah Ross is a true radical."—Action Books Blog

"The phenomenology of bottoming has rarely if ever received as brilliant a sounding or as voracious an investigation as Noah Ross gives the subject in Active Reception. Encountering this sense-expanding poem, this radical recital, I’m given delirious incentive to rethink my own relation to bodies, inside and out. Head-rushes and heart-rushes of affinity, of consanguinity, and a flushed sense of rekindled possibilities (for art, politics, sexuality) are the happy consequences, for this reader, of taking in the full measure of Ross’s call to action. The book’s visual and prosodic inventiveness matches its hot insistence on writing the body accurately, musically, with an appetite for the irregular mark and the unrestricted (yet tightly measured) flood."—Wayne Koestenbaum

"This is a book of ambitious and wonderfully playful structures, fully realized as a book one can enter at any point, but not possibly, or easily, leave."—rob mclennan

"Noah Ross’ Active Reception is a corporeal tapestry, a verso clench of membrane. Figuring the asshole not as absence or empty voicelessness, but as a form of the body’s narrative capability, Ross articulates gossip, disease, joy and dissolution in mucal blossom, snapped taut by typewriter ribbon. For him, the void is affective trap as much as it is a path of material discernment—a space where balances of labor, erotics, and power are liquidated in the queer mingling of blood and come as much as they’re made discrete, parceled out in a series of uneasy structural relations. Both a sensuous act of objection and an art of sensing oneself as object, what Ross posits is no ascetic ideology nor wasteful orgy, but a true perversity of politics. Active Reception mirrors the slick ways in which we absorb and inhibit the violence of capitalist and carceral logics. How we love each other; an airless density, its thin ecstasy of paper cut. I can’t, I gag for it."—Trisha Low

"Looking for a biblio high? Open this book. Watch an erotic, operatic, love-prone blossoming of architectonic, choreographic, historically futurist, empathically political, deeply liturgical, intellectually juicy, gravely hilarious, serious play. Active Reception voices and graphs spirits and humors flowing from pre-Chaucer to post-Spenser to present tensile Noah (Ross), thanks to whom—at last!— CINAEDORUM CARISSIMORUM can come out as pansy dear via Google Translate. Ross’s ecstatic lexicon activates gorgeously erudite choruses '[in trappings at the limit].' They sing neon nights and daze in 'a brilliance of clamoring.'"—Joan Retallack