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Landscape Portrait Figure Form
Named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2013, Barnes & Noble Review
The poems in this winsome chapbook begin with a homage to Paul Klee that says, “All art is dedicated to joy.” Indeed, Rader is once ironic and joyful in a way that speaks familiarly and also sounds unlike anyone else. Funny without being mean, smart without talking down to anyone, accessible without being pandering, these poems are full of quixotic and generous sensibility. “Nothing is harder to believe in / than belief,” Rader writes. “..and yet here / we are, / at it again / never really knowing / if we are the arrow / or the bow.”
Tess Taylor, Barnes & Noble Review
A frog and a toad walk into a book of poems. They meet Paul Klee, Heironymus Bosch, Adrienne Rich, Sesshu Toyo, Mark Twain, Colonel Sanders, all of them escorted by Dean Rader. There are adventure poems, landscapes, assassins, self portraits. There are what some might call ‘ideas’ and what we might quite seriously call ‘emotions.’ There is a book that loves the reader--there is a choose-your-own adventure poem as well as a poem in which the reader gets to select the title! There are some very funny moments, and there is some lovely, musical language.
In "Becoming Klee, Becoming Color," Rader writes: "He finds he knows shapes the way the sea/ knows its waves: the thing it flows// in and out of. He sees crimson so clearly he/ becomes crimson, black with such// clarity he turns blind. Instead of image./ Over and over he rides the color wheel// deep into his mind's night, hoping to arrive/ at the right shape." This is a good example of how the poems in "Landscape Portrait Figure Form" flirt with the metaphysical - i.e., can talking about art still be art? - while presenting something definite: an experience that comments on the artistic but also delivers it, even guiding the reader along. -- Evan Karp, The San Francisco Chronicle
Visit the full Landscape Portrait Figure Form page
Tess Taylor, Barnes & Noble Review
A frog and a toad walk into a book of poems. They meet Paul Klee, Heironymus Bosch, Adrienne Rich, Sesshu Toyo, Mark Twain, Colonel Sanders, all of them escorted by Dean Rader. There are adventure poems, landscapes, assassins, self portraits. There are what some might call ‘ideas’ and what we might quite seriously call ‘emotions.’ There is a book that loves the reader--there is a choose-your-own adventure poem as well as a poem in which the reader gets to select the title! There are some very funny moments, and there is some lovely, musical language.
In "Becoming Klee, Becoming Color," Rader writes: "He finds he knows shapes the way the sea/ knows its waves: the thing it flows// in and out of. He sees crimson so clearly he/ becomes crimson, black with such// clarity he turns blind. Instead of image./ Over and over he rides the color wheel// deep into his mind's night, hoping to arrive/ at the right shape." This is a good example of how the poems in "Landscape Portrait Figure Form" flirt with the metaphysical - i.e., can talking about art still be art? - while presenting something definite: an experience that comments on the artistic but also delivers it, even guiding the reader along. -- Evan Karp, The San Francisco Chronicle
Visit the full Landscape Portrait Figure Form page
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Works & Days
Winner, 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, judged by Claudia Keelan
Finalist, 2010 Bob Bush Memorial First Book Prize
Winner, 2010 Writer's League of Texas Book Prize
"Rader's poetry is remarkable in that it so often simultaneously attends to the reader's senses of emotional, rhetorical, and aesthetic urgency; his poems ask the difficult questions in accessible ways, ways rendered all the more effective via wry humor and an eye for the darkly poignant." Eric Weinstein, Colorado Review (September 2011)
Emotionally and intellectually engaging, Dean Rader’s debut collection of poetry undertakes provocative questions about identity in original, ambitious, and playful ways. In a style that is at once both traditional and experimental, these poems map the terrains of high and popular culture with serious meditation and wry humor. Characters in Rader’s interactive landscape include Wallace Stevens, Michael Jackson, Dorothea Lange, Arvo Part, and even Frog and Toad. Like its namesake, Works and Days by the Greek poet Hesiod, Rader’s work takes on the great issues of any era—our attempts to make sense of dreams, duty, and the divine.
On the road with epistemology and a company of poets and philosophers, Frog has his work cut out for him. Beginning with a funeral and ending with day’s end, the poems in this ambitious collection seek—not conciliation, not reconciliation—but what you could call real locale in terms of the poetic tradition. Playing with the conventions that—depending upon your aesthetics—either free or bind us, Works & Days asks timely questions, never forgetting that Self too, is a fundamental part of the landscape. This is a serious book that never takes itself too seriously. It could be a primer for MFA programs everywhere.
—Claudia Keelan, 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize Judge
Visit the full Works & Days page to read more about the book including excerpts from various reviews.
Emotionally and intellectually engaging, Dean Rader’s debut collection of poetry undertakes provocative questions about identity in original, ambitious, and playful ways. In a style that is at once both traditional and experimental, these poems map the terrains of high and popular culture with serious meditation and wry humor. Characters in Rader’s interactive landscape include Wallace Stevens, Michael Jackson, Dorothea Lange, Arvo Part, and even Frog and Toad. Like its namesake, Works and Days by the Greek poet Hesiod, Rader’s work takes on the great issues of any era—our attempts to make sense of dreams, duty, and the divine.
On the road with epistemology and a company of poets and philosophers, Frog has his work cut out for him. Beginning with a funeral and ending with day’s end, the poems in this ambitious collection seek—not conciliation, not reconciliation—but what you could call real locale in terms of the poetic tradition. Playing with the conventions that—depending upon your aesthetics—either free or bind us, Works & Days asks timely questions, never forgetting that Self too, is a fundamental part of the landscape. This is a serious book that never takes itself too seriously. It could be a primer for MFA programs everywhere.
—Claudia Keelan, 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize Judge
Visit the full Works & Days page to read more about the book including excerpts from various reviews.
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Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI
Winner, 2011 Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Scholarship
Published in April of 2011, Engaged Resistance is the first scholarly book to look at the intersection of Native art, literature, and film. With its comprehensive interdisciplinary scope and its accessible jargon-free writing, Engaged Resistance is one of those rare books that will strike a chord with both mainstream and academic audiences. One one hand, Rader's study is a model of well-researched scholarship, and on the other, it is a lyrical, episodic story of how American Indian artists, filmmakers, and writers, tell their own stories about their own communities in their own voices.
Visually beautiful, poetically adept, and analytically provocative, Engaged Resistance brilliantly sets out a unified field architecture for reading American Indian political aesthetics [and aesthetic politics]. Dean Rader's lively writing, broad range, and cool interpretive moves make him one of the most compelling scholars working in interdisciplinary American Indian studies today. —Phillip Deloria, Professor, Department of History, The Program in American Culture, and The Native American Studies Program, University of Michigan
Visit the Engaged Resistance site at the University of Texas Press
View the Engaged Resistance pages from the 2011 University of Texas Press catalogue
Read the first review in the San Francisco Book Review
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The World Is A Text: Visual and Popular Culture, with Jonathan Silverman. 4th Edition.
This cultural studies reader directly engages the process of reading and writing about the “texts” one sees in everyday life. Using the lenses of rhetoric, semiotics and cultural studies, students are encouraged to become effective academic writers while gaining deeper insights into such popular culture categories as movies, technology, race, ethnicity, television, media, relationships, public space, and more. Just as important, the book teaches students the usefulness of actively reading their surroundings.
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Speak To Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry, with Janice Gould
Although American Indian poetry is widely read and discussed, few resources have been available that focus on it critically. This book is the first collection of essays on the genre,Speak to Me Words is a stimulating blend of classic articles and original pieces that reflect the energy of modern American Indian literary studies. Highlighting various aspects of poetry written by American Indians since the 1960s, it is a wide-ranging collection that balances the insights of Natives and non-Natives, men and women, old and new voices. Included here are such landmark articles as "Answering the Deer" by Paula Gunn Allen, "Herbs of Healing" by Carter Revard, and "Song, Poetry and Language—Expression and Perception" by Simon Ortiz—all pieces that have shaped how we think about Native poetry.
The well-written essays . . . offer a variety of critical and theoretical approaches from scholars and scholar/poets, with a unique intertexuality arising from some contributors analyzing the poetic works of other writers in the volume. . . . This volume shifts the focus in formal studies of American Indian poetics to the people as they are now and their hopes for healing in the future. —Great Plains Quarterly
The well-written essays . . . offer a variety of critical and theoretical approaches from scholars and scholar/poets, with a unique intertexuality arising from some contributors analyzing the poetic works of other writers in the volume. . . . This volume shifts the focus in formal studies of American Indian poetics to the people as they are now and their hopes for healing in the future. —Great Plains Quarterly
- Read a review of Speak To Me Words in Studies in American Indian Literatures vol. 17.1, 2006.
