Works & Days (New Odyssey Series) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

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

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