I'm ill-equipped
for this. I sit
by a fake fireplace
that frames a real flame.
I've been crossed
by two crows today.
'Multi-vectored, Rogers's poems hum with life and tension, their speaker
poised as mother, seer, reporter and daughter. They speak of loss and
cold realities (misplaced charms of luck, a tour of an assisted-living
facility, coins thrown into Niagara Falls). They also interweave dreams
and visions: O Lion, I am / an old handmaiden; I will not lay the pretty
baby in the lap / of the imposter. Simple but evocative, at once strange
and plain, Rogers's poems of address ricochet off the familiar Dear
Reader or Dickinson's Dear Master ... Rogers's poems provide
instructions for what to leave, what to take and what to fight. They act
as selvage between the vast mother-ocean -- the mem of memory -- and
the fabric we make of the uncertain in-between.'
-- Hoa Nguyen, The Boston Review
'How can we live with the kind of pain that worsens each day? Dear
Leader explains through bold endurance, enumerated blessings and the
artistic imagination. By pasting stark truths over, or under, images of
strange, compelling beauty, Rogers creates a collage, a simulation of
the human heart under assault, bleeding but unbroken. Part Orpheus, part
pop-heroine who can "paint the daytime black," all, an original act of
aesthetic violence and pure, dauntless, love.'
-- Lynn Crosbie
'In Dear Leader, Damian Rogers re-invents the same-old poetic lyric to
offers us one-of-a-kind insights on childbirth and party bars, rolling
blackouts and old rock standards. Here, what looks at first like
familiar language always reveals itself to be a rare mineral. And that's
the magic: this is a poetry that refuses to be staged or to succumb to
cliché or mannerism, insisting on celebration and condemnation, caution
and cosmic vibrations. "Say you're a poet," Rogers advises us,
tongue-in-cheek, "Maybe you mean / Hi, I have a lot of feelings."
Striking that balance between one-liners and mourning is no small
feat.'
--Trillium Award Jury Citation
Praise for Paper Radio:
'Paper Radio jumped out at me and I can't say why, but that's what you
want poetry to do, and I never want to say why. Because it's real and
talking to me. Because it's bloody and horrifying beauty. It's the Clash
and Buckminster Fuller, Auden and Bowie.
-- Bob Holman
Originally from the Detroit area, Damian Rogers now lives in Toronto
where she works as the poetry editor of House of Anansi Press and as the
creative director of Poetry in Voice. Her first book, Paper Radio, was
nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
