Dear Leader - Damian Rogers (Coach House Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Dear Leader.  Damian Rogers.  Coach House Press.  Toronto, Ontario.  2015.

Today's book of poetry would by lying if we pretended to know exactly what Damian Rogers is going on about with every page in Dear Leader.  But Dear Reader, what fine, fine music.  Rogers can cook.

Dear Leader is hot to the touch when you pick it up because it is so beautifully crammed with electric images and incandescent moments of truth that they rumble up on one another and create sparks, they make heat like an engine.  Today's book of poetry has been down this road before, back on March 6, 2015, we looked at Damian's book Paper Radio.

You can see that here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2015/03/paper-radio-damian-rogers-misfit.html 

Today's book of poetry was a big, big fan of Paper Radio, everyone on our staff simply loved it -- so Dear Leader really doesn't come as a surprise but it certainly is grand, it certainly is welcome.

List poems come and go but Rogers nailed Today's book of poetry to our seat when we read this beauty.

Poets in the Public Domain

Found delirious on the streets of Baltimore. Died days later.

Shipwreck at the age of 40.

Typhoid fever. 44.

Orphaned at 14, dead from tuberculosis at 25.

Lost at 27 on a French hospital ship anchored in the Aegean Sea.

Sister stabbed mother to death in a fit of anxiety.

Drowned at the age of 30.

Worked at the post office until death at 37.

Died of fever in Greece on way to war.

Went down sailing at age 29.

Died of pneumonia while commanding a hospital in Boulogne.

Stabbed to death in bar fight.

Killed in action one week before war ended.

Asylum.

Drank to death.

Jumped off an ocean liner.

Overdosed on sleeping pills.

Drowned swimming in Lake St. Clair in August.

Sick with Grave's Disease for many years. Died of breast cancer.

Small pox.

Swallowed by a sudden storm after seeing Doppelganger.

...

Damian Rogers has a bit of the Midas touch because these poems are golden.  Rogers is a poet you could easily follow into the dark reassured by her certain footsteps and that incandescent thing that she seems to know.

Sun Ra.  Damian Rogers dedicates a poem to Sun Ra in Dear Leader!  I'm listening to him now as I type this, we all know that Sun Ra and his Arkestra will be blowing wild at the end of the world but only Rogers is singing about it.  Whew.

Our three poem limit here at Today's book of poetry is being bent today to allow for the following two poems to be seen together.  

Good Day Villanelle

You ran naked out the door.

The neighbours laughed; I chased you down.

I hardly see you anymore.

I know you're busy.

Did I tell you when you were little how

you ran naked out the door?

You got halfway down the street

before I caught you in my arms.

I hardly see you anymore.

I think I told you this before:

I was giving you a bath and then

you ran naked out the door.

It happened fast.

The neighbours laughed.

I hardly see you anymore.

You have to watch a baby close.

I remember once -

You ran naked out the door.

I hardly see you anymore.

...

Bad Day Villanelle

I swallowed something hard and dark.

It wasn't food. It moves around.

The doctor wants to cut it out.

I feel it now it's on my hip.

It's very painful when it shifts.

I swallowed something hard and dark.

I'm telling you

it's money that

the doctor wants. To cut it out

will save my life.

I need your help.

I swallowed something hard and dark.

He ran my body through five tests.

Then the doctor told me straight.

I'll died if they don't cut it out.

I'm telling you it has to go.

There is no medicine that works

on something quite this hard and dark.

The only road is cut it out.

...

In Dear Leader Baudelaire measures what counts and Yoko Ono may indeed by a witchy wonder.  In Damian Rogers' world Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright's coat can reign in reason.  These poems move from the personal to the universal and back again in the blink of an eye, in the space between two lines.

Today's book of poetry thinks that Dear Leader is full of kaleidoscope poems, multi-faceted and full of light.

Dear Leader

As you know, I did not join the Hole in the Universe Gang

or follow Father Yod of the ridiculous robes. I flowed

through my crises beautiful as a bruise, and alone. A man I loved

drove his motorcycle off the fat lip of Big Sur into glittering

oblivion. A new nation of Penelopes practiced the art of the loom,

planting a never-finished forest in which wildflowers bloomed

on the backs of jean jackets and hand-sewn throw pillows,

while I waited for you to choose me. The waitress at the health

food restaurant was a lemon-scented sun to my Death Valley

moon. I swooned as out the window your dark cluster rose

in the sky. How glorious was your shining forth from the horizon

when you detonated the Two Lands with your terrible rays!

I starved till my bones shone, and your voice rang in my ear.

...

Dear Leader felt like a robust visit from a rock star poet pillager priestess.  Damian Rogers drank everything in our office and then shot out the lights when she left!  We should be so lucky. 

Today's book of poetry felt shaken and just the right amount of stirred.

Damian Rogers

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Originally from the Detroit area, Damian Rogers now lives in Toronto where she works as the poetry editor of both House of Anansi Press and The Walrus, and as the creative director of Poetry in Voice, a national recitation contest for Canadian high-school students. Her first book of poems, Paper Radio, was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

BLURBS

‘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

Damian Rogers

Reading from Dear Leader 

at the AWP, Minneapolis, 2015

Video: Tim Kahl

chbooks.com 

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DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

Asbestos Heights - David McGimpsey (Coach House Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Asbestos Heights - The Canonical Notebooks.  David McGimpsey.  Coach House Press.  Toronto, Ontario.  2015.

You just can't stop reading David McGimpsey once you start, his poems are like potato chips you've kept in the freezer, perfect salty and crisp.  

Asbestos Heights is what happens when one of the best poets in the land riffs in hungry excitement. Trying to tell you what it is about would be like pointing to a set of encyclopedia set in witty type, a baseball box-score sheet in strict limerick form and all the menus from all of the best burger joints from here to end of time, and saying "here, read this."

Pomegranate

There are two kinds of people in the world:

those who say they love to eat pomegranates

and those who tell the truth. But, yes, they're red,

and healthy foods taste either red or red.

Steak, cherry popsicle, red velvet cake.

Full of such health, I stayed up all summer

sketching a fringe play called Dangling Apricocks

and collapsing somewhere near Jolicoeur.

When somebody looks over their glasses and says,

'Look at it this way, m'sieur, you have a scar

but at least you still have most of your face,'

what can you say but, 'D'you like daiquiris?'

Healthy red medicines, or even those blushed

Pepto pink, die in the Canadian cold;

you can't keep Diet Coke at home for fear

the deliciousness will dull you to God.

...

These poems are peppered with characters like "Herman 'Babe' Melville" and McGimpsey cracks me up.  I guess you could say that there is baseball in here, you'd have say it, but it would be a bit like saying that there's hockey in the Canadian dream.  Baseball is just one of McGimpsey's personae.  It could just as easily be astronomy - McGimpsey is going to soar regardless up into that stratosphere where we, the reader, simply want more.

Take this morning's reading.  Milo simply would not sit down.  Of course every poem he read sounded like a love poem and he was aiming them all at Kathryn.  It was very touching and very funny, Milo was playing the giant ham in love and it was endearing.  Milo's reading and McGimpsey's poems have left everyone in the office feeling better.  Somehow these poems imbue the reader with some of the poet's confidence.  How charming is that?

Walt Whitman

Whitman saw great things in the 'game of base'

and predicted that one day there'd be a team

in Albany called the Angel-Snappers

who would play shirtless in the summer sun.

When the rules disallowed 'soaking'

(throwing a runner out by throwing at him),

the fun of Whitman's game was gone,

and he died good in Camden, New Jersey.

Nineteenth-century baseball, as you know,

featured spectacular mustachio play

and ad endorsements were for 'stropping,'

'hamboiling,' 'stonerail fixing' and 'unsnaking,'

Whitman's baseball rap has no real substance,

of course; his thoughts on the game exist

to comfort all washed-up peanut-tossers,

long assured they were unfit for poetry.

...

David "The Crown Prince of Canadian Poetry" McGimpsey is going to absolutely delight his current legion of fans with Asbestos Heights and gain new poetry armies of followers from anyone who opens the book.

Today's book of poetry is convinced that no poet in Canada, or anywhere else for that matter, writes with more joy than our esteemed David McGimpsey.  These poems sparkle with Coltranesque wit, McGimpsey riffs through scales that include all the known notes and a few of his own.  It is splendid stuff.

Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen kept four wrens in

her apartment in Toronto, once even sewing little Beatles

outfits for them.

Daily, I curl into whatever fries

and curd combination keeps me alive,

and by alive I just mean witlessly

reply-tweeting to Alyssa Milano.

I'm not saying I suddenly got too old.

I was too old years ago. That was clear

when I started buying things - anything -

that promised cheap relief of ankle pain.

My mother would cry if she knew how

much money I waste on taxis. I pray

I get through lunch without hearing someone

say, 'I, the Duke of Poetry, spit on you!'

I cry when I listen to those country songs

written at the height of the Iraq War.

I mean, those are the only things that ever

move me to tears now that my friends are gone.

...

Today's book of poetry declares today David McGimpsey Day!  These poems will swipe that smile right off of your face and replace it with a smirk.

O Captain, my Captain!

NOTE:  You have to read what Michael Robbins says in the BLURB below.  What he said.

David McGimpsey

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David McGimpsey is the author of five collections of poetry includingLi'l Bastard which was named one of the 'books of the year' by both theQuill & Quire and the National Post and was shortlisted for Canada's Governor General's Award. He is also the author of the short fiction collection Certifiable and the award-winning critical study Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture. Named by the CBC as one of the 'Top Ten English language poets in Canada,' his work was also the subject of the book of essays Population Me: Essays on David McGimpsey. He lives in Montréal.

BLURB
"David McGimpsey is unfuckwithable, poetrywise, and I'll stand on John Ashbery's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that."
     -  Michael Robbins

David McGimpsey

Reads at the opening night of VERSeFest

2011, Ottawa, Ontario

video: versefest's channel

chbooks.com 

432

DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

Otter - Ben Ladouceur (Coach House Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Otter.  Ben Ladouceur.  Coach House Books.  Toronto, Ontario.  2015.

Today's book of poetry had written an entire blog/appreciation of Ben Ladouceur's absolutely incendiary first book, Otter, but I called an editorial veto to that tri-blurb blasphemy.

Instead I will start by telling you that Otter has more weight per line than any book I've read since I started this blog.

Nuncle

Our century brims with abstractions, with
clashes: I want to know its taste.
So I chase chocolate with white wine. pair
tilapia with a most acidic merlot.
My evening has been ghastly. I just got

some dark post. A former comrade found his way
to the Seven Sisters, where the moon
huffs waves fro and fro and fro, its breath
cerulean, embossed by frost; where the moon
makes the chalk cliffs cerulean too.

Blind since Amiens, he was led
by a servant of the Red Cross
whose face, I'd wager, was something to touch.
My comrade gave a measly sermon, then
jumped. The little letter told me so. A sermon

fell with is flapping eyeless body
to the sea and still, I'd wager, adheres to the lip
that has lost blush. I'm sorry to tear
up like this. If my wife saw this despicable
spectacle, she'd punch me with her rings

on. Once, in Dvinsk, the suicide and I
found a house already deserted. Latvians
had shat on every surface before their
departure. He turned his bright face away from what
a kettle housed, locked eyes with me and spoke.

I have one son within my marriage, one without it.
How ghastly that half my pedigree shall occupy
our world, and half shall orbit. At once
we made for the nearest bed, and I'd wager
you know what we found there.

...

Today's book of poetry usually chooses three poems for inclusion, today I've chosen fifteen.  Otter is stunning stuff but although these poems all come from Ladouceur's very strong voice any combination of the fifteen reduced to three would most likely lead the reader to expect a different book.  I won't reproduce all fifteen, even though Milo is begging me to.  But I will share a few choice lines as appetizers:

     Crickets scraped song off their bodies with their legs. "OK"

     At night touch me when day breaks.  "Printout Found In Bottle Found In The River Aare"

     All the most beautiful things are things we rarely feel the weight of. "Gibraltar Point"

     I did love him, the crimson acne flecked across his neck, he was like a man a guillotine had made
     an attempt at. "I Am In Love With Your Brother"

Now try this on:

Salutations From Abitibi

Alone clouds refused to cohere.
They darkened the city in blotches.
They rendered the city dalmatian.

I forgot my lover on the bus.
The brakes woke him up
at Abitibi and he found work there.

All year mosquitoes bit his fumbling frame.
The bites were like Grecian constellations
seen on a clear taupe day.

My Zippo was on his person.
I was planning to quit with the smoking
but how shall I now singe the frays

of my only warm coat? When winter arrives
the mosquitoes will expire
and material will cover the bodies of men.

At least I received a blank postcard
on the birthday of my lover, its message
white on white: I am alive I am alone

I am not willing to speak. Some men
are darkened, in the long run, by sun.
Others, more quickly, by clouds.

...

Queer, Queer, Queer.  That is meant as a compliment to Ben.  For the rest of you it a label that you must remember and then immediately forget.  These poems are Queer, have a Queer agenda, and are great Queer poems.  Remove the label, they are just great poems.  All poems work better without labels and these gems would rise to the top of the pile in any company.

Ladouceur is an erudite Eros and these poems glitter with the sheen you get when bodies collide.
Ladouceur has no trouble at all finding the beauty regardless of the beast.

Marigold

As some scrotum
skims my tongue
like a dusted bulb
that might later do
an impressive bloom

I think of Paul
Monette in a bathtub
that's in a kitchen
asking his hosts
to scour his skin pink.

Paul later held his lover
Roger as he lost his
eyesight and enough
blood to give
a fruit bowl a fulcrum.

He is ambiguous here.
Some men can get away with
ambiguity. Tonight it is best
to forget whose bowels
are whose. Whose words.

I want to lose my legs
between our chests.
That is how little
room I want to ask
the world for. I'll be home

before dawn. Home
is the word that come closest.
There's a door I will enter,
a grey bar of soap. A rosiness
I'll scrub my way to.

...

Ben Ladouceur has a poem titled "All Men Are Equal" and nothing could be more true.  But all poets are not created equal.  Not be a long shot.  Ben Ladouceur's remarkable debut Otter will simply push him towards the head of the class, any class.

Great poetry.

Ben Ladouceur

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Ladouceur is a writer originally from Ottawa, now based in Toronto. His work has been featured in Arc, The Malahat Review, PRISM international and The Walrus, and in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology. He was awarded the Earle Birney Poetry Prize in 2013.

BLURB
Formally impeccable and richly imagined, Ben Ladouceur's poems track the awe of a mind as it engages with epiphanal moments, both personal and historical. His language is filtered through an intelligence that's queer and graceful, always in search of the singular phrase and a music that startles with its precision.  As each poem unfurls, keen insight gives way to the wonder of words.  Otter is a magnificent debut.
     -  Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize

Ben Ladouceur

 Interview - OTHER MEN Wed Series

Video: OTHER MEN - a web series    

Ben Ladouceur

Tree Reading Series, Ottawa

September 14, 2010

Video: Tree Reading Series

chbooks.com

387

DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

Poem About The Train - Ben Ladouceur (Apt.9 Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Poem About The Train.  Ben Ladouceur.  Apt.9 Press.  Ottawa, Ontario.  2014.

Poem About The Train is another impressive notch in the belt of the ever astonishing Ben Ladouceur. This marvelous chapbook-type folder is just another confirmation of what many of us have suspected. The young Mr. Ladouceur is one of the most exciting new voices in Canadian poetry.

I've met Ben, I think we may have even shared a drink one evening when he still lived in Ottawa.   But I don't know Ben Ladouceur.  So it can't be considered favouritism when I tell you that Ladouceur is that rare cat who really does have his feet on the ground and his head in the stratosphere.  He makes fine poetry.

Poem About The Train is an entirely lovely romp.  This long poem is printed on individual, loose leaf sheets the size of old train tickets.  They are numbered and assembled in a lovely pocket-sized folder. The ever-imaginative Apt.9 Press continues to impress with its' expanding repertoire of inventive ways to publish poetry.

from I

To hate a place forever, just get lost there once.
               Let greens give pause
to you, let hours flee like white dormice
after a sound occurs. The wild things eat
               hours up, pendulums
hanging from the damned mouths. You'll never come back

...

Poem About The Train is one longish poem about Ladouceur's observations from one train trip.  We can be grateful for whatever journey Ladouceur chooses to take.  He will illuminate it.  The adventure isn't the trip, it is his telling of it.

Today's book of poetry would want to read a Ladouceur poem if it were about drying paint.  He just has so much to share with us, and so far, it has all been golden.  Cherse as Spencer Tracy would say.

from II

Those were the best three cigarettes I've ever smoked.
               Every future
carcinogen will lie in three shadows.
I was grateful for the company, though.
               I know you didn't have
to leave your berth; it had a window, a view.

...

Ladouceur writes a great line, and then he does it again and again and again.

He's also a horny rake and that is in here too.  Read elegant rut.

Along with Queen Anne's Lace, osprey, eggshells and possums and beans.

Ladouceur harvests nature through the window of a moving train along the way to making his journey a somewhat epic adventure, certainly making for a fine read.

from VII

Where I'm off to, cats scavenge, throw their small-hearted
              game on the porch.
Their gifts bloat and develop seams through which
tenants take claim. They burrow in the fur
              and skin, bones and offal,
to find it. With their stingers, they can keep it.

I'll get there when the moon is halved. The dotage
              of these mountains
silhouetted to a percentage, still
cumbersome to a man like me: small, small
              of heart. From windows, herbs
will hang, and from bookcases, and from marquees.

A topless woman will come to the yard, and a
              second woman
will cut the first's brassy hair. Three geese will
chafe their endless necks with the lost trimmings.
              The first woman will take
the other's blouse and scissors and requite her.

The dogs crave heat, where I'm off to, back in sunbeams
              until the dusk,
at which point they bring you their fetching sticks.
Outlasting the simmering riptide of
              the summer, of the day.
Their coats half-moon-lit. Their coats, at least, half-lit.

...

 Poem About The Train is written in what Ladouceur has referred to as "syllabic verse heavily inspired by Marianne Moore".  At first my silly brain thought they were a form of sestina.  It is time for me to go back to school.  Whatever, the result is one of those magic tricks where form vanishes because it is used to perfection.

Today's book of poetry has nothing but jealous praise for the poems of Ben Ladouceur.

Coach House Books has just published Ladouceur's first full book of poetry, Otter, and bless their cotton socks, they sent me a copy.  It is magnificent and you will be hearing more about that here, anon.  It is, without doubt, one of the best books of poems I've read in a long, long time.

Ben Ladouceur

Photo: Pearl Pirie

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Ladouceur is a writer originally from Ottawa, now based in Toronto. His work has been featured in Arc, The Malahat Review, PRISM international and The Walrus, and in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology. He was awarded the Earle Birney Poetry Prize in 2013.

Ben Ladouceur

Tree Reading Series

April 26, 2011

Video:  Tree Reading Series

apt9press.com

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 
Today's book of poetry is a one-man operation, my staff, typists, interns, etc, are all fictional.  But I do have a secret weapon.  Frequently, just after I've posted my blog, my dear old friend, compatriot, mentor, piano-playing poet wizard and lost big brother pain in the ass buddy Ward Maxwell writes me to correct my constant spelling/typing errors.  He bats almost perfect because of all those years of editing.

All of that to say that when my blog is without error it is almost certainly because of Ward's help.
When it is full of errors - that is also his fault.  He just isn't aware of it yet.

Today's book of poetry owes an enormous and on-going debt to the thankless efforts of my pal Ward who has no idea of how much I appreciate it.  Today's book of poetry give an official hat-doffing to Mr. Maxwell, my own private Art Tatum.

You can see some of what Ward Maxwell gets up to here:
http://wardmaxwell.com/

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Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

Paper Radio - Damian Rogers (a misfit book/ECW Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Paper Radio.  Damian Rogers.  a misfit book/ECW Press.  Toronto, Ontario.  2009.

There are a few people whose opinions about poetry make me pause and take notice.

If you read this blog with any regularity you'll know that Stuart Ross (Small Press Poetry God) is a poet I look up to.  He is my friend and when he tells me to read something it brings a new urgency to the task.

Another person I listen to is Bardia Sinaee (Poet/Editor/Publisher of Odourless Press).  On one of my rare visits to Toronto I was in a secondhand bookstore with Bardia and asked him what I should read. We had been milling over an excellent and vast selection of poetry - he was without hesitation and handed me Paper Radio by Damian Rogers.

I loved it.

That was a few years ago.  As always, Bardia knew what he was talking about.

You cannot imagine my delight when Today's book of poetry got a copy of Paper Radio in the mail from ECW Press/a misfit book.  The arcane rules of Today's book of poetry only allow me to write about books sent by publishers/poets, none that I purchase.  Now I can tell you about one of the books I have enjoyed with relish but was unable to share.

Don't Look

It's like when you eat sour candy,
how the sugar-coated acid
twists your tongue into a knot.

At the Ambassador Roller Rink
no one would slow-skate with me.

A boy rolled over to you during the power ballad
and I turned into a pillar of salt.

No, that's wrong. I mean, I felt a lot like a sand dune. Or like
that baby food jar our family member filled with volcanic ash.

I asked the DJ to help me prove I knew the secret moves
from transforming my body into four different letters --

Y: raise your hands to the sky.
M: touch your shoulders like a mountain range.
C: pull your belly toward the door.
A: place your palms over your head and pray.

He said no. He said we don't play that song.

I said oh. I said wait, hold on;
I am changing into someone
completely different and better.

...

Paper Radio was shortlisted for the 2010 Relit Awards and the Pat Lowther Award.  And for good reason.  These poems are electric, fully charged bullets.

Roger's dexterity and intelligence spew out in machine-gun bursts of ideas.  Monster slaying lines like this: "because you woke up hating yourself and thought of me" from the poem "One Lie".

Lines like this stop me in my tracks.  Paper Radio has a stream of consciousness feel that tapers down to laser precise insight at Rogers' whim.

In The Back of a Cab

I lean my body against the door
of a car I'll never ride in again.

In the long line of stores and restaurants
I'll never visit, your name blinks
on a sign that says it has your pizza.
I've never found my name
on any sign, in any city.

So many people move around me,
invisible within the labyrinths
of skyscraper and subway.
They can't know how I planned to save us all
with the secret of human happiness,
which just this morning
I held in my hand like a rock.

But today was too long --
now all I remember is
a few lines from a song,
something about 20,000 roads,
how they all lead back to me,
here, alone in a stranger's car

in the middle of the night,
secretly hoping the driver
who politely pretends I don't exist,
would devote the rest of his life
to taking me home.

...

You, dear reader, will be like me.  So entirely in love with and swept up by these poems.

Okay, a bit out of left field, but these poems, this book, left me feeling somewhat like I'd read one of Jerzy Kosinski's better novels.  Please know the high esteem I hold Kosinski in.  And it is just a feeling, like you've been in a conversation with someone whose intelligence has covered you like a blanket and you hope to hang on to some of that wise warmth.

Milk and Honey

A cardinal flits through the branches
and the bush appears to burn.

Who are we to say we were thrown out?

We fell asleep,
the garden withered.

We turned our eyes inward
toward our dearest lies.

After weeks of late snow
last year's daffodils shove up
beside blue and white hyacinths.

The grass is so green it's shocking.

This may or may
not be true:

I'm only here
to sing for you.

...

Paper Radio gets Today's book of poetry highest ratings.  Coach House Press with be launching Damian Rogers' second book, Dear Leader, on March 24.  Rogers' has also recently been named Poetry Editor for Walrus magazine.

Damian Rogers

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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, a national recitation contest for Canadian high-school students. Her first book of poems, Paper Radio, was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

BLURBS

“Damian Rogers’ troubled teens, ecstatic utopians, and distracted deities are evidence of a powerful poetic storyteller. In Paper Radio, nature has multiple personalities, perception sits at the table with emotion and superstition, and meaning speaks in dark, mellifluous tongues. This is a poetry of attack and decay, of synchronicity and sleight-of-hand, alive with sudden, vertiginous moments of clarity. It’s rare to find a young poet so deeply invested in both her own experience and the reader’s pleasure. A splendid, memorable debut.”  Kevin Connolly

“In Paper Radio, Damian Rogers emerges as a poet of startling clarity, intelligence, toughness, and tenderness. Her gifts for aphorism, for sudden swift changes of mood and perfectly rendered emotional landscapes, are those of a dramatist. There is not a dull moment in this book — and while that alone is a high accomplishment in this age of dullness, Rogers keeps us awake to a purpose. She keeps faith with the premise of the lyric, which is that, by speaking most truly from the self, we are able to reach others and stay awake to this business of being human together.” —April Bernard

The poems in Paper Radio are very brave. Many tend to look at the past with a real understanding that there is so much there that will never be made right. But what makes them brave is the way they pivot and then drive on with hope because, well, they have to. —Joe Pernice

“Sometimes memories are so distant, we only remember them when an old friend reminds us of those last events. Damian Rogers is such a friend. She tells us of dreams that sound like our own, shooting little arrows of insight that split the heart to reveal the shocking vulnerability of life. Paper Radio is a jewel of a book that you will want to read over and over and over again.” —Greg Keelor

Damian Rogers

reading from Paper Radio

video courtesy of ECW Press

ecwpress.com 

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Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.