<div><i>I'm ill-equipped<br>for this. I sit<br>by a fake fireplace</i><br><br><i>that frames a real flame.<br>I've been crossed<br>by two crows today.</i><br><br>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: &quot;O Lion, I am / an old handmaiden; I will not lay the pretty baby in the lap / of the imposter.&quot; Simple but evocative, at once strange and plain, Rogers's poems of address ricochet off the familiar &quot;Dear Reader&quot; or Dickinson's &quot;Dear Master&quot; ... 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<i>mem</i> of memory and the fabric we make of the uncertain in-between.’<br>Hoa Nguyen, <i>The Boston Review</i><br><br>How can we live with the kind of pain that worsens each day? <i>Dear Leader </i>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.’<br>Lynn Crosbie<br><br><b>Praise for <i>Paper Radio</i>: </b><br><i>Paper Radio</i> 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.<br>Bob Holman<br><br>Originally from the Detroit area, <b>Damian Rogers</b> 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,<i>Paper Radio</i>, was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.<br></div>