Kate Rogers
Kathryn (Kate) Rogers has twice been short-listed for the Winston Collins Best Canadian Poem Prize by Descant Magazine (Toronto) in February 2009 and January 2008. Her poetry, Essays and reviews have been published in anthologies and literary magazines in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Canada, the U.S. and the UK. Publications include the Asia Literary Review, Many Mountains Moving, Dimsum, Pressed, The New Quarterly, Contemporary Verse II, Canadian Woman Studies, The Mad Woman in the Academy and Orbis International. Her work also appeared in the anthology, We Who Can Fly: Poems, Essays and Memories in Honour of Adele Wiseman.
Kate is co-editor of the international women's poetry anthology Not A Muse (Haven Books, Hong Kong, March 2009); her poetry collection, "Painting the Borrowed House", debuted at the Man Hong Kong Literary Festival in March 2008. It is available on Amazon.com and from Proverse, Hong Kong.
Originally from Toronto, Kate has been teaching writing, literature and English for Academic and Professional Purposes for colleges and universities in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan for the past ten years. A bi-lingual Chinese and English collection of her essays about conservation, bird watching and culture in Taiwan, "The Swallows' Return", was published in June 2006.
Kate teaches in the Division of Language Studies at the Community College of City University in Hong Kong.
From Kate Rogers
Orange
(after Anne Michaels and Allan Jefferies)
It is your favourite fruit - you like its heft
and hold it in your hand for something round
to palm. Then you sink strong teeth into
the thickest skin, peel back to reveal
flesh quivering beneath. One bite
and it explodes juice - luscious on your tongue,
flooding your mouth.
I wash my most delicate veined segments, all my moons
and half-moons with Satsuma, pomelo, tangerine.
I want our promises to breathe zest and tang.
As you slide into my tart, warm pulp, we make a flower.
You, the stem and me, the brimming cup as dawn
gives birth to a blood orange.
The small female cat returns to the street below,
torturing the air with yearning. You don't appear to hear
yet neighbours fling off the weight of dreams
to thump windows closed. She has been back
every dawn this week, gut strung taut with loneliness.
Accompanying her pain with opera. And every morning
I've gone up to the roof to eat oranges while the sun's red
head has crowned the mountain.
