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Dean Rader has written, edited, or coedited numerous books, including the poetry collections Works & Days, which won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry; and Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), in which his poems and Twombly’s works appear side-by-side. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco.

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Self-Portrait Bop

by Dean Rader
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  after Langston Hughes

If it hasn’t killed you by now
Just wait. This doesn’t mean you
Can fly. In the quarter, in the
Shadows. The supermarket sea,
A blue safari, a pot of collard greens,
A field of flower seeds. These are things

America never was. America to me
People on couch
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