Paper Anniversary

"Much of the best American poetry is local in origin but national or international in significance. Think of Frank O'Hara's New York, James Wright's Ohio, Ted Kooser's Nebraska. Bobby Rogers says in a poem `all art is folk art, made with whatever is at hand,' and his poems are set mostly in Memphis and elsewhere in the Middle South. Like all good poems, though, they travel to large subjects: the limits of language, love and its absence, joy."---Ed Ochester, 2009 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize judge

"Bobby Rogers has the avuncular voice of a pool hall sage and the wisdom of generations of grandmothers. His poems are full of the best news, the kind the soul, as W.C. Williams attested, can get nowhere better than in the life of the lively mind. I think any reader will find this an auspicious, welcome arrival."---Dave Smith

"In his superb Paper Anniversary, Bobby Rogers is a near mystic of the domestic because love of family and landscape is connected to the eternal---and if not the eternal, our longing for love to last. His moving, widely thoughtful, and commodious poems are full of joy tinged with elegy."---Andrew Hudgins

"Combining a sprawling contemporary colloquialism with the aesthetic yearnings of a consciousness that seeks to understand itself through poetry, Paper Anniversary reminds us of the enduring power of narrative. In this postmillennial era when meaningful human voices grow increasingly less audible and more frustratingly inarticulate, can there be anything more important than that?"---Kate Daniels