Paper Anniversary

Bobby C. Rogers is professor of English at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. His poems have appeared in the Southern Review, the Georgia Review, Image, Shenandoah, Puerto del Sol, and numerous other magazines. He is the recipient of the Greensboro Review Literary Prize in Poetry and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Much of the best American poetry is local in origin but national or international in significance. Think of Frank O'Hara's New York, James Wright's Ohio, Ted Kooser's Nebraska. Bobby Rogers says in a poem 'all art is folk art, made with whatever is at hand,' and his poems are set mostly in Memphis and elsewhere in the Middle South. Like all good poems, though, they travel to large subjects: the limits of language, love and its absence, joy.