Unlikely Stories Presents

SUMMER ROGERS: a woman for all seaso... nevermind.

To the Unlikely Stories home pageIf you spend a little time in the Internet's dumber poetry chat rooms and NewsGroups, you'll find people frequently debating the definition of a poem. There is a growing movement towards poems that tell a story with prose-like grammar, and many poets object to such poems strenously, saying that they are prose pieces masquerading as poems.

The writings of Summer Rogers, on the other hand, could be considered poems masquerading as prose pieces. Utterly arresting with their unique form and sentence structure, these avant-guarde "stories" blur the lines between poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, confessional and political. They discuss the ills of society and the ills of the narrator as though they were intertwined, which of course they are. Their clarity feeds on their abstract nature, and though they never say anything directly, they never confuse.

Summer Rogers’s goal has been to transfer her imagination and energy into activities, events, and discussions with generations X, Y, Z. Besides passing along wisdom from the beat and beat up generations, she is a community organizer, youth mentor, and substitute teacher in Chicago. Summer is a Loyola University New Orleans graduate and former intern of the New Orleans Review and New Orleans’s OffBeat Magazine.

Summer has been published in Bad Girl Magazine, Wrapped Around My Neck, Hunger, The Maroon: Women Seen as Weaker Sex by Society, WREC Magazine, Iris May Tango Near You, OffBeat Magazine, and The Revealers: More Than Reggae. Write to her at stuckonwritersblock@msn.com.

Summer's works here at Unlikely Stories are:

2002:
Com Ed, or, if things fall in place
split personality, the difference between
the day Mama was born