Southern Messenger Poets

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.