Shift Work gathers a chorus from the storytelling working classes of the Upper South. In narrative poems made of sinewy, Whitmanesque lines, Bobby C. Rogers composes portraits of dwellers in the small towns, unincorporated communities, and hard-edged cities they have flown to, always packing their past with them, an inheritance as ephemeral as vapor, made mostly of memory even as it was being lived.
"Bobby Rogers's Shift Work is utterly American. Meditations on cars, land we drain and work and hunt, factories, laundromats, diners, baseball, school, all show that the decline yet persistence of the small town is not so different from the noble aging of the body. Rogers sings to us in a distinct long-lined blues of our beautiful failures and honorable gestures. Honorable and honest. His 'dreamy
John Poch, author of Texases and coeditor of Gracious: Poems from the Twenty-First-Century
