Middletown

In Middletown, her third book of poems, Stephanie Rogers reflects on her chaotic childhood in the drug-addled industrial wasteland of Middletown, Ohio. In an engrossing collection of formal beauty, sardonic wit, scathing anger, and class resentment, Rogers' uniquely vivid voice describes a transformation from a frightened but defiant little girl to a desperate, angry adolescent, and finally, to an adult coping with the death of her estranged father, an addict. In the end, Middletown reveals the rage and rapture of growing up feeling unloved in the middle of nowhere.