96 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
Poetry / American-General | Poetry / Places | Social Studies / Regional Studies
Shift Work gathers a chorus from the storytelling working classes of the Upper South. In narrative poems made of sinewy, Whitmanesque lines, Bobby C. Rogers composes portraits of dwellers in the small towns, unincorporated communities, and hard-edged cities they have flown to, always packing their past with them, an inheritance as ephemeral as vapor, made mostly of memory even as it was being lived.
Bobby C. Rogers is the author of Social History and Paper Anniversary. His honors include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Witter Bynner Fellowship at the Library of Congress. He teaches at Union University and lives in Memphis.
“These are the songs of those we have neglected to our peril, people who do ‘piecework / on top of small farming to bring in a little pocket money’ and rely on ‘the providence of a distractible God.’ Now these forgotten Americans have achieved immortality in poems that are somehow both pitiless and as comforting as a country breakfast on a cold morning.”
—David Kirby, author of National Book Award finalist The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems and Help Me, Information
“Bobby Rogers’s Shift Work is utterly American. Meditations on cars, land we drain and work and hunt, factories, laundromats, diners, baseball, school, all show that the decline yet persistence of the small town is not so different from the noble aging of the body. Rogers sings to us in a distinct long-lined blues of our beautiful failures and honorable gestures. Honorable and honest. His ‘dreamy divagations’ (Bishop’s phrase) wander almost seamlessly in and out of various personal history and imagery so precisely drawn we feel he is showing us our own lives. Stemming from a line of poets such as James Dickey, David Bottoms, and B. H. Fairchild, Rogers is among our very best narrative poets because his voice is lyrical, compassionate, neighborly, and keenly aware of its own fine making.”
—John Poch, author of Texases and coeditor of Gracious: Poems from the Twenty-First-Century South
“In Bobby C. Rogers’s third book of poems, we hear so many vivid, unforgettable voices: distressed, tender, raucous, dreamy, sardonic, sorrowful, nostalgic. It’s very rare to read a collection that inspires you to read it and reread it—to savor, think over, and relish it—such as this one does. With urgency formed out of the bewilderment of daily labor, with a majestic expressiveness, and with bold, expansive lines brimming, end to end, with so much variety, like quests from one side of a sentence to the other, Rogers includes so many emotions in each poem, it’s hard to believe only one person wrote them all. Shift Work is fresh evidence for what it means for a poet to be a witness of proud humanity.”
—David Biespiel, author of Republic Café and The Education of a Young Poet and editor of Poems of the American South
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