Dean Rader

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize Dean Rader reaches beyond artistic description to engage Twombly's work in conversation.In 2018, just a few weeks after his father's death, Dean Rader made a pilgrimage to the Gagosian Gallery in New York to see a retrospective of Cy Twombly's work, In Beauty It is Finished: Drawings 1951-2008. The exhibit led to a poem that would become the genesis of this book -- from loss and fear to regret and beauty, Before the Borderless: The Cy Twombly Cycle reaches for the embodiment of emotion and the aesthetics of possibility.Through a range of experimental forms, including a series of octets, Rader writes to decode the gestures and energies in Twombly's drawings and paintings. He reaches past observation and admiration to create a game of echolocation, reflecting Twombly's infinite scrawls as "saddle stitch, spaghetti curl, white whirl." Even as Rader searches for proximity, examining the gaps between symbols and what they signify, the collection remains unmistakably autobiographical. From the wheatfields of his Western Oklahoma upbringing to questions of loss--first his father and then his mother, who passed only weeks after Rader finished the manuscript for this book--the poems in Before the Borderless are both elegy and prayer, for Rader's parents, for his children, for the world.Blurring the distinction between canvas and page, Twombly's work often includes lines of poetry from many of the authors who shaped Rader's work -- John Keats, Sappho, Federico Garc a Lorca, and Rainer Maria Rilke. As Rader's poems are paired with 50 color images of Twombly's paintings and drawings, the line between looking and reading is blurred. Before the Borderless awakens in the space between language and silence to pose provocative questions about art and its power to heal.

The World Is a Text is a popular composition textbook devoted to helping students to understand a variety of non-traditional texts and develop their skills as creators of texts. It teaches critical reading, writing, and argument in the context of pop-culture and visual examples, showing students how to “read” everyday objects and visual texts. The book shows show how texts of all kinds, from a painting to a university building to a pair of sneakers, make complex arguments through their use of semiotics, and shows students how to make these arguments in their own essays. This new compact edition is rich with images, real-world examples, writing and discussion prompts, and examples of student writing. New to the edition are chapters on fashion, sports, and nature and the environment.

"The endurance of the sonnet sequence over the centuries is in no small measure due to a paradox: it is a form that revels both in its fluidity and in its structural exactitude. The sonnet sequence is also apt to engage us because it is typically an expression of solitary yearning, just like the blues. Petrarch longs for his unattainable Laura; Son House laments his dead beloved. In SUTURE, Simone Muench and Dean Rader turn this latter convention of the sonnet sequence on its head, transforming a mode that seems predicated on an essential loneliness into a collaborative effort, one that is rambunctious, wry, companionable, jittery; and, above all, emotionally capacious. Muench and Rader write with an elegant but mysterious synchronicity-like octet and sextet."-David Wojahn

By writing honestly about the difficulties of self-representation, Rader represents himself as a writer who cares deeply about his audience and his craft. --ZYZZYVARader's poetry asks how to be an artist in a nation founded on and still struggling with the demand for representation and what poetry as a medium means in an era of representational sprawl. --JacketWikipedia articles are never finalized. In Dean Rader's energized and inventive new book, the poet considers identity of self and society as a Wikipedia page--sculpted and transformed by the ever-present push and pull of politics, culture, and unseen forces. And, in the case of Rader, how identity can be affected by the likes of Paul Klee's paintings and the characters from the children's stories about Frog and Toad. Rader's cagey voice is full of humor and inquiry, warmly inviting readers to fully participate in the creation.From How We Survive: A Tryptich: This afternoon I took a napwearing a costume that looksjust like me. Inside it I felt like another person who happenedto know so many things about me, like my preference for almonds overcashews, how sometimes, whenI am in a strange room, I imaginehopping from one piece offurniture to the next . . .Born in Oklahoma, Dean Rader has published in the fields of poetry, American Indian studies, and popular culture. He is a professor of English at the University of San Francisco, and writes regularly on literature and politics for The San Francisco Chronicle.

A frog and a toad walk into a book of poems. They meet Paul Klee, Hieronymus Bosch, Adrienne Rich, Sesshu Toyo, Mark Twain, all of them escorted by Dean Rader. There are adventure poems, landscapes, assassins, self portraits, there are what some might call "ideas" mixed with some very funny moments, and what we might quite seriously call "emotions." This collection will engage those interested in innovative, arresting, humorously engaging poetry.