Works & Days (Winner T. S. Eliot Prize 2010)

About this book

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 days 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 "Dont just sing;split us open" is the two-headed imperative in Readers meticulously crafted dazzling book that elates while it simultaneously interrogates and shivs us. Although Raders 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 Raders 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 collections opening poem!). But we are in such good hands: the best party is always in the lifeboat.---Patty Seyburn