Why have a poetry launch when you can throw a poetry party?

Join us on Tuesday, March 24 at the Drake Underground in celebration of Damian Rogers's new poetry collection, DEAR LEADER.

The fun all starts at 7 p.m. Shortly after, Damian will be interviewed by Vanessa Dunn of VAG HALEN, and then Mike Belitsky, Buck 65 Rich Terfry, Jason Collett, Lynn Crosbie, Aisha Sasha John, Taylor Knox, Hoa Nguyen and Simone Schmidt will each perform a poem from DEAR LEADER. DJ Brutisme Amanda Burt will provide music for the party, which you can dance to while holding your newly purchased copy of DEAR LEADER, hot off of the Coach House Heidelberg presses.

This event is FREE to attend, and all are welcome.

Learn more about DEAR LEADER: http://www.chbooks.com/catalogue/dear-leader

'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