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Damian Rogers


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Damian Rogers, portrait.

Damian Rogers, portrait.

Damian Rogers, bookcover.

Damian Rogers, bookcover.

Event: The Sound of Literature

Bio: Damian Rogers is the author of Dear Leader (Coach House Books, 2015) and Paper Radio (ECW Press, 2009). She is the poetry editor at House of Anansi Press, the creative director of Poetry in Voice/Les voix de la poésie, the poetry editor at The Walrus and co-host with Jason Collett of the music and literary performance series the Basement Revue.

Book: Dear Leader

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