This Is a Story…

The girl feeding the fish in the pet store says, “I don’t know when the night help will get here. I thought I’d just go ahead and give them some extra.”

We smile.

“I don’t know how much longer the boss is going to put up with her.”

We smile again.

“Do y’all ever watch ‘The Brady Bunch’?”

My wife says no, not really.

“You ought to. They have some things on there that could really happen in real life.”

We move away.

“Like the one yesterday. One of the girls got a job working for this man in his store. She did such a good job he asked her to recommend somebody else to help out. So she told him about her brother Bobby and Bobby came in and just goofed off and wouldn’t do right.”

I say, “They should have had Alice drown Bobby in the toilet bowl when they brought him home from the hospital. He was never any damn good.”

She smiles. Then she moves away.

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It’s good to see there’s an unbroken chain of vernacular words coming out of supernatural Kentucky—Daryl’s poems remind me of the banjo & harmonica & guitar murder ballads from out of them dark hollows of the 1920s & 30s—incantatory, rhapsodic, plainspoken, ironic, grotesque, dystopic, full of chicken coop thieves, corncrib burglars, wet-brained ex-boxers, insane situations right out of a Sleepy John Estes song—open-heart surgeries, existential fatigue, hopelessness, moonshiners, poems emerging out of the dirt of the Earth, this underbelly our poets keep finding in America the Not So Beautiful, who drink of the black waters, the isolated America at the social margins, where loss of innocence is common currency, where a drug overdose is merely absolution—speaking of which: How does one survive all this? Do we put a down-payment with the cardshark to dig our graves with the ace of spades? How do we reconcile our existence? Where is the substance with which we can illuminate our lives?
—Mark Weber

In prosody reminiscent of Creeley and tone recalling Bukowski, Daryl Rogers gives us brief portraits of characters living on the edge—alcoholic house painters, the angry homeless, racist Vietnam vets, sex shop denizens, and self-styled street preachers. In these spare but energetic poems, Rogers reveals the soul of a 21st-century Beat poet who looks directly at daily human experience and doesn’t flinch.
--Jeff Worley
author of The Only Time There Is and A Simple Human Motion

Mark Weber writes:

Daryl, i reread SUNNY DAY late last night and it is very very very good --

it helped to remind me that slice-of-life micro stories are where it's at

whew, very good,

mark

Jeff Weddle, who is a recipient of a letter in the new Bukowski collection, says:

I'm reading this collection of poetry I found in my mailbox, slender little hand grenade of a book called Sunny Day. There's not much anybody can really say about art, I guess, other than I like a piece of work or I hate it, the vast black hole of literary criticism and newspaper reviews aside. But I can say this: You have a wonderful, spare style that gets to the heart of things, grabs hold and knows when to let go.

Lee Thorn (the editor of Fuck) writes, in regard to my poems being classified as dark in reviews, blurbs etc.: "I see your work much as you do, stuff that just happens and presents itself in the form of a poem. The point of view seems less dark than simply awake. For me the fun of much of your stuff is that it's like having the experience myself, which is to say that I'm not very conscious of the poet or what his point of view might be."