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Paper Radio
This is a fractured memoir, steeped in the language and images Rogers was raised on: Kipling’s Just So Stories, Dorothy Parker quips, song lyrics, Beat diatribes, the visual gymnastics of cummings, Victorian children’s stories, fairy tales, and the crumbling beauty and very real danger of downtown Detroit.
Rogers’ writing is closely related to the lyrical tradition, though she’s also interested in narrative, mystery, memory, and the possibilities for language to create an emotional effect on a reader. Rogers is drawn to the nature of utopian impulses — from nineteenth century spiritual movements to 1960s radicalism to our hopes for Obama — and the ways these impulses break down.
Research subjects include: The Shakers, John Sinclair, the MC5, communes, hippie cookbooks, shamanism, Surrealism, Detroit and Joseph Cornell.
“I’m rather amazed at what Toronto writer Damian Rogers achieves in her poetry collection, Paper Radio. In her first collection of poems, Rogers is writing a density with such an enviable ease, rivaling even American poet Sarah Manguso for her clear, tight wisdom and ease of thought, but in a prevailing edge and undercurrent of darkness far more wry than cut.” — Rob McLennan
“Paper Radio is written with the confidence of a teenager carving her arm. . . . Rogers is able to execute that most important of the poet’s tasks, seeing the atypical in the typical . . . An auspicious debut.” — Broken Pencil
“Canny and crafty but also emotionally true.” — Winnipeg Free Press
“Coolly observed and image-driven, her poems are unsettling and at times enigmatic. But they can also be spellbinding, filled with striking turns of phrase . . . Paper Radio itself shakes the reader awake.” — Toronto Star
“Rogers is a storyteller at heart . . . As the title suggests, Rogers is tuned into a sublime station, free of static.” — Eye Weekly
There are no awards found for this book.
