DEAN RADER / Works & Days Launch Party

Emotionally and intellectually engaging, Dean Rader’s debut collection of poetry undertakes provocative questions about identity in original, ambitious, and playful ways. In a style that is at once both traditional and experimental, these poems map the terrains of high and popular culture with serious meditation and wry humor. Characters in Rader’s interactive landscape include Wallace Stevens, Michael Jackson, Dorothea Lange, Arvo Part, and even Frog and Toad. Like its namesake, Works and Days by the Greek poet Hesiod, Rader's work takes on the great issues of any era -- our attempts to make sense of dreams, duty, and the divine. 

Dean Rader is professor of English at the University of San Francisco where he held the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair. He has published widely in the fields of poetry, literary studies, American Indian studies, and visual and popular culture. He has received the Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize (2007) and The Sow’s Ear Poetry Prize (2009). He regularly contributes op-eds and book reviews to the San Francisco Chronicle and blogs at The Weekly Rader, SemiObama and 52 Gavins.  A native of Weatherford, Oklahoma, he now lives in San Francisco with his wife and son. Check out Dean's website at http://deanrader.com/

“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 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