Shift Work gathers a chorus from the storytelling working classes of the Upper South. In narrative poems made of sinewy, Whitmanesque lines, Bobby C. Rogers composes portraits of dwellers in the small towns, unincorporated communities, and hard-edged cities they have flown to, always packing their past with them, an inheritance as ephemeral as vapor, made mostly of memory even as it was being lived.
DAVE SMITH, the grandson and great-grandson of Civil War soldiers, earned a degree in journalism from Boston University after serving with the Marines Corps in Korea during the Korean War. After working for several years as a newspaper writer and editor, he spent twenty-eight years with a major insurance company as a division director of communications. He lives in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.