Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry

Dean Rader

In Dean Rader’s second full-length collection, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, the poet considers the malleable identities of self and society—simultaneously sculpted and fluid, transformed by the push and pull of politics, culture, and the capriciousness of the moment. His poetic expansiveness draws from a worldwide range of subjects—landscape, Paul Klee, parenting, romance, media culture, Oklahoma, race, labor, and economic class—and transforms the universal into the personal, the rational into the deeply felt, facts into fables, the private act into public statement. Incisively humorous and probingly curious, Rader is aware of the modern pressure of the audience and, turning Whitman somewhat on his head, invites a great unexplored readership to fully participate in the creation of an utterly distinctive poetic space, while revealing himself to be a singular poetic talent.

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ISBN: 9781556595080

Format: Paperback

American Self-Portrait I

Give me the sheriff star pinned to the mermaid

and that tiny piece of wood from your throat.

Give me the saw blade, the plastic cat’s-eye.

Give me the flash drive of your tongue:

 

I want to save everything. Even the goat horns

you strapped to the skull of the little girl,

and yes, both of her hands. No, I don’t really

know what that means, but so what?

 

I’ll take the boneyard and all its yellow flowers,

I’ll take the pisspot, the necklace of petal fire,

and while I’m at it, I’ll take the body’s wafer:

I’ll take whatever breaks down beneath its own sad weight—

 

whether it’s this life or a bad party. Your tangy

pelt, your twitch. You want my sandwich,

hey, get in line. This isn’t the Army, but I’ll march.

I want your shoulder holster, I want your mouth of bullets.

About the Author

Dean Rader has written, edited, or co-edited eleven books. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and Landscape Portrait Figure Form (2014) was named a Best Poetry Book by The Barnes & Noble Review. Three books appeared in 2017: Suture, collaborative poems written with Simone Muench (Black Lawrence Press); Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, edited with Brian Clements and Alexandra Teague (Beacon); and Self-Portrait as …

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Reviews

“Dean Rader’s ingenious new collection, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, is lyric poetry for the digital age.” —Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronicle
 
“The peaks of [Rader’s] varied terrain are those with the most immediate stakes, where his generous personality meets political urgency, as in his series of American allegories, which interrogate whiteness through the ’68 Olympics and use Hieronymus Bosch to think about poverty… Indeed, few poets capture the contradictions of our national life with as much sensitivity or keenness.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“We come to poetry to take pleasure, and to ingest and face profundities in shapes our ears and eyes prefer to prose. How does Dean Rader help make sense of them all? Dear Reader, count the ways.” —Barbara Berman, The Rumpus
 
“Dean Rader… writes with urgency, insight and humor. These strains come together seamlessly in his latest volume, the captivating Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry.” —San Jose Mercury News