Dear Leader

Damian Rogers

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781552453087
• eBook ISBN: 9781770564138
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

I'm ill-equipped
  for this. I sit
    by a fake fireplace

that frames a real flame.
  I've been crossed
    by two crows today.

‘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: "O Lion, I am / an old handmaiden; I will not lay the pretty baby in the lap / of the imposter." Simple but evocative, at once strange and plain, Rogers's poems of address ricochet off the familiar "Dear Reader" or Dickinson's "Dear Master" ... 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 mem of memory — and the fabric we make of the uncertain in-between.’
— Hoa Nguyen, The Boston Review

‘How can we live with the kind of pain that worsens each day? Dear Leader 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.’
— Lynn Crosbie

’In Dear Leader, Damian Rogers re-invents the same-old poetic lyric to offers us one-of-a-kind insights on childbirth and party bars, rolling blackouts and old rock standards. Here, what looks at first like familiar language always reveals itself to be a rare mineral. And that’s the magic: this is a poetry that refuses to be staged or to succumb to cliché or mannerism, insisting on celebration and condemnation, caution and cosmic vibrations. “Say you’re a poet,” Rogers advises us, tongue-in-cheek, “Maybe you mean / Hi, I have a lot of feelings.” Striking that balance between one-liners and mourning is no small feat.‘
—Trillium Award Jury Citation

Praise for Paper Radio:
‘Paper Radio 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.
— Bob Holman

Originally from the Detroit area, Damian Rogers 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, Paper Radio, was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

POETS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

Found delirious on the streets of Baltimore. Died days later.

Shipwreck at the age of 40.

Typhoid fever. 44.

Orphaned at 14, dead from tuberculosis at 25.

Lost at 27 on a French hospital ship anchored in the Aegean Sea.

Sister stabbed mother to death in a fit of anxiety.

Drowned at the age of 30.

Worked at the post office until death at 37.

Died of fever in Greece on way to war.

Went down sailing at age 29.

Died of pneumonia while commanding a hospital in Boulogne.

Stabbed to death in bar fight.

Killed in action one week before war ended.

Asylum.

Drank to death.

Jumped off an ocean liner.

Overdosed on sleeping pills.

Drowned swimming in Lake St. Clair in August.

Sick with Graves’s Disease for many years. Died of breast cancer.

Small pox.

Swallowed by a sudden storm after seeing Doppelgänger.

POEM FOR ROBIN BLASER

O I know your thoughts are with the gods,

so young and loose.

I sit still and watch you materialize, as your ring –

the eye of your hand – checks me out.

I feast on your approval;

my erased attachment attracts it.

The sun rolled over White Sands National Park,

a wedding dance on the trackless dunes of my design.

You see all are tamed

out of our chains in this way:

light freezes into cubes for our cocktails,

atmospheric gases are trapped on their planets.

I must keep my feet on the floor

if I’m ever to achieve your speed.

You blew smoke at me and smiled.

Nothing is so easy.

THE PERFORMER SPEAKS TO HER PERFECT APPRENTICE BENEATH THE ARCHES

Step one: understand the universe.

The trick is to slip into a trance, to stay

in a somnambulant state while smiling.

Do a little soft-shoe. Bend your head.

Then excavate the audience for parts.

Get in there and eat their hearts out.

But don’t listen to me. I remember

a time when fame was not particularly

prized, though stages were reserved

for the fearless. It was us against them

back then. Now I don’t know. I want

to go home and study the viscous slick

on the surface of my coffee before I quit.

Take my face paint and hot plate, finish

the dish of small fruits in the freezer.

I’d like it if we could be friends. Friend,

please give me time to gather my gear.

I never believed they’d see me leav...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• About this Book
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Epigraph
• ONE
• TWO
• THREE
• FOUR
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author