Shift Work

Bobby C. Rogers's third book is an elegy for the ways of working that are disappearing from American lives. In rolling lines as expansive and hard for the page to hold as Walt Whitman's or the psalmists', these poems give body and voice to teachers and sanitation workers, to laborers on production lines sewing shirts and making shoes when manufacturing still meant made by hand, to weekend tree surgeons, nurse's aides, and professional wrestlers-all of them being bent by their work like leather on a last." Set in the towns and weathered cityscapes of the upper South, the verse narratives of Shift Work seine hidden lives out of silty depths of experience and loss, offering a study of how they may be caught up in words knotted from human breath and handedon in some presentable condition still wet with the truth"--