Nothing Will Be Different
2021, Dundurn Press.
Finalist for the 2022 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for nonfiction.
Jury Citation:
“In Nothing Will Be Different, Tara McGowan-Ross unravels history and present in raw, unflinching prose that is at once funny, heartbreaking, and lyrical. A coming-of-age reflection that is searing in its honesty, energy, and depth, McGowan-Ross treads difficult topics such as death, loss, addiction, and grief with wryness, wit, and depth. With an intense voice resolutely and unapologetically her own, McGowan-Ross dares readers to come along on a death-defying, life-affirming journey.”
Tara has it pretty good: a nice job, a writing career, a forgiving boyfriend. She should be happy. Yet Tara can’t stay sober. She’s terrible at monogamy. Even her psychiatrist grows sick of her and stops returning her calls. She spends most of her time putting out social fires, barely pulling things off, and feeling sick and tired.
Then, in the autumn following her twenty-seventh birthday, an abnormal lump discovered in her left breast serves as the catalyst for a journey of rigorous self-questioning. Waiting on a diagnosis, she begins an intellectual assessment of her life, desperate to justify a short existence full of dumb choices. Armed with her philosophy degree and angry determination, she attacks each issue in her life as the days creep by and winds up writing a searingly honest memoir about learning to live before getting ready to die.
Scorpion Season
2019, Insomniac Press.
“McGowan-Ross is a master.”
- Meredith Grace Thompson for Cloud Lake Literary
In this narrative in verse, a failed academic with a dead-end domestic labour job disappears into her own consciousness in an attempt to distance herself from her circumstances. Up against poverty and political tyranny that seems to worsen by the day, she finds solace in substance abuse and destructive relationships. But as the boundaries between fantasy, reality, her past, and her present start to break down, she's left to figure out what in her life is within her control and what is simply written in the stars. A meditation on grief, pleasure, free will, and totalitarianism, Scorpion Season is an experimental and genre-bending book of poetry about a strange time to be alive.
Girth
“Girth is doing insurrectionary poetics in a way I rarely see in Canada […] when Canada has its revolutionary moment, this work will be a vital archive.”
- Daniel Sarah Karasik, author of Plentitude and Hungry
2016, Insomniac Press.
Disordered eating. Tear gas. Coked-out sex. This is life during a student strike. Girth is an uncomfortably honest poetic account of a woman's body, suspended between reflection, action, and self-destruction.
Anthologies
Best Canadian Poetry 2020
a simple instruction — which was also the first runner-up in the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize as judged by Billy-Ray Belcourt — anthologized in the 2020 edition of Best Canadian Poetry, edited by the legendary Marilyn Dumont.
Speech Dries Here On The Tongue: poetry on environmental collapse and mental health (forthcoming April 2025)
Edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasquira Revulva & Amanda Shankland, this anthology explores the impact of the threat of impending environmental catastrophe on our collective psychic landscape. I believe that my contribution is the best single poem I’ve ever written.
Anthologie de la poesie actuelle du femmes au Québec 2000-2020
Preparee par Vanessa Bell et Catherine Cormier-Larose.
Letters from Montreal: tales from an exceptional city
Edited by Madi Haslam, this anthology contains a short essay about experiencing far-left political failure at a burrito restaurant near the Concordia campus.