Synopsis
On the road with epistemology and a company of poets and philosophers, Frog has his work cut out for him. Beginning with a funeral and ending with day's end, the poem in this ambitious collection seek not conciliation, not reconciliation, but what you could call real locale in terms of the poetic tradition. Works & Days asks timely questions, never forgetting that Self too is a fundamental part of the landscape. This is a serious book that never takes itself too seriously. It could be a primer for MFA programs everywhere.---Claudia Keelan, 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize judge
Dean Rader reads his past, reads the landscape of his native land, especially Oklahoma, through the lens of previous poets-such as Hesiod, his first tutelary guide---who lead him to a vibrant, innovative, and fresh new poetry, who point the way to his own formal making, his poignant American version of life and labor, Works & Days.---Edward Hirsch
"Don't just sing;split us open" is the two-headed imperative in Reader's meticulously crafted, dazzling book that elates while it simultaneously interrogates and shivs us. Although Rader's poems vibrate with high-voltage wit, they are equally occupied with "trespass, skin-spark, and elegy" as they lock themselves under the tongue so we may always know their necessary and sustaining song.---Simone Muench
"There is no anticipation like waiting for the poem you ordered to arrive," Dean Rader writes. Well, the poems we ordered have arrived. Works & Days is a shipment of poetic pleasure, a care package to get readers through a dark, unpoetical time. Playful, probing, frequently philosophical (and sometimes mock-philosophical, and sometimes both), these entertaining and liberating poems know their tradition and engage with it without being confined by it.---Troy Jollimore
Dean Rader's engaging alter egos take the sting out of the divided self. The reader is constantly-pleasurably-at risk, compelled to think about/laugh at the human condition, as is the woman next to the narrator in seat 7D, "Because/the next line is this:/She will die before I do..." (this, in the collection's opening poem!). But we are in such good hands: the best party is always in the lifeboat.---Patty Seyburn
About the Author
Dean Rader is professor of English at the University of San Francisco where he held the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair. He has published widely in the fields of poetry, literary studies, American Indian studies, and visual and popular culture. He has received the Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize (2007) and The Sow s Ear Poetry Prize (2009).
Works & Days is a finalist for the 2010 Texas Institute of Letters First Book Prize, and Dean was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's 2010 Louis Hammer Prize (judged by David Lehman). His poem "Twilight at Ocean Beach: 14" was named by Verse Daily as one of the Best Poems of 2010.
Rader regularly contributes op-eds and book reviews to San Francisco Chronicle, where he recently began writing a regular column for their City Brights section. His series of posts on the 10 Greatest Poets was covered by The New Yorker, The New York Times and dozens of other media outlets.
In 2009 Rader curated a special issue of Sentence devoted to contemporary American Indian Prose poetry, and in April of 2011 his innovative book Engaged Resistance: Contemporary American Indian Art, Literature and Film. From Alcatraz to the NMAI was published by the University of Texas Press.
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