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It’s hard to say what I love most in this glorious debut volume; is it the glorious Frog & Toad poems, the love poems, or the one-on ones with mentors—Stevens, Pound, and Wright? What’s clear is that re-reading only intensifies the delight of Dean Rader’s Works & Days. There’s something reminiscent of John Donne in Rader’s poems, the earnest spiritual questing of the sonnets and sermons counterbalanced with delightful and unexpected wit. Contemplate the marriage of “Batter my heart” with the playful “Mark but this flea…” and you’ll get a sense of his range.

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Dean Rader’s book is full of vast expanses. The title is taken directly from Hesiod (a bold reference for a debut collection). The original was a key work of classical literature: a farmers’ almanac instructing the writer’s brother on how to work the land in the midst of a farming crisis. Rader comes from a different place and time: born and raised in Oklahoma, he is now professor of English at the University of San Francisco. But there’s a convincing sense of a connection across the centuries: both writers share a concern with land, labour and language . . . One of the reasons the voice feels so confident in this collection is that you feel the poet is in command of the effects he achieves, which is not something you can say about everyone. The first challenge for any poet is to find a poetic register in which they can express themselves fully and naturally, and Dean Rader has found his.

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Works & Days is an engaging book that manages to be both experimental and “accessible,” if by that latter term one doesn’t mean dumbed-down. More than just a conglomeration of poems, it is a book with a subtle architecture, an ironic unity fashioned on the theme of fragmentation. This coherence and sophistication is an outstanding achievement in a first book.                                                                                                                              
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I find particularly appealing Rader’s preoccupations with language, God, and desire—and what I liked most about this book is that it managed to explore these themes and incorporate a delightful sense of absurdity and humor. As I read these poems on the train, I often found myself smiling to myself, even laughing—and maybe the other passengers thought that was a little odd, but isn’t it beautiful to enjoy a book in that way? . . . He manages to create poems that are perceptive and contemplative while also being fun, and this is the sort of balance many of us strive for—both in literature and in life.
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Oh, golly, what a bunch of fun Dean Rader's Works & Days is. To come upon such a book that makes me think, laugh, feel, and hear language anew! Where to begin? . . .  As I was reading the book, I kept thinking of Lucretius' exhortion to his goddess, the he be able to deliver his facts in honeyed words: poetry doesn't get much better than when narration and music, reality and imagination, seriousness and giddiness all hook up. . . . He uses most of the poet's toolkit--the ancient art of repetition, call and response two-liners, Anglo-Saxon alliteration, dashes, italics, ellipses, and brackets--and when those do not prove to be enough, he invents some new tools for doing what he wants in order to make us see poems afresh . . . Rader is a model of a madman freedom that has been persuasively bent to the craftsman's bridle.

Download the full review here
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  • Sima Rabinowitz on Rader's award-winning poem "Hesiod in Oklahoma, 1934"

Dean Rader’s prize-winning poem is an excellent one. Rader’s poem is original, intellectually satisfying, sophisticated, and serious. I appreciate his attention to sound, his idiosyncratic lyricism, and his consistent and focused commitment to the poem’s vision. Rader never loses sight of the poem’s purpose and never releases his hold on a particular style of diction. Above all, the poem is incredibly satisfying rhythmically.

There is always the grass ahead of him on and on :
and behind him the grass the gouged skin they strip it from:

saltspiked and silty, endless and unending:
their labor the field’s body, the field’s body their stale host. …

furrowed and famished: find the poet swathed in dirt: inscrutable and silent:

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     Rader’s presentation style is energetic and light-hearted, and soon he was “moving away from the reverent part of the evening, to the ironic and darkly humorous” poems of Works & Days. 
    Inspired by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s work of the same name (though with its ampersand fully spelled out!) Rader’s poems in this volume similarly place emphasis on the value of labor (the “Works” section) and the passage of time (“Days”). Throughout the volume hop two familiar characters from children’s literature, Frog and Toad – though scarcely recognizable to readers of the children’s books, as Rader’s Frog and Toad deal with anger management, parallel universes, and writing sonnets. 
    Some of the poems – more “post-modern” work from the book’s experimental “&” section – were written in a style reminiscent of Mad Libs, with fill-in-the-blank spaces that often brought laughter from the audience. While one introduction of the original Works and Days describes Hesiod’s long didactic poem as lacking the “quintessential elation that is expected of good poetry,” clearly Rader’s remake doesn’t have that issue. 
    “He reminds me of [former U.S. Poet Laureate] Billy Collins,” said Albany resident Sylvia Paull, citing Rader’s mixing of pop culture with high culture and philosophy. She even speculated that perhaps we had just heard a future Poet Laureate.
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  • From Alexandra Yurkovsky's review of Works & Days in The San Francisco Chronicle

In [an] impressive debut, Works & Days, Dean Rader, a San Francisco writer and professor, serves up a feast of styles and subjects. The title is borrowed (inherited?) from Hesiod; thus the book includes "Hesiod in Oklahoma, 1934" and "Self-Portrait: Hesiod in Iraq." There's also a Hesiod epigraph, but considering the oblique Self Portraits, not to mention the amusing appropriation of Frog and Toad from Arnold Lobel's children's stories, Kathy Steele's epigraph seems most apt: "The self is not continuous" . . .[an] enjoyably clever book.

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