Bobby C. Rogers's second collection, Social History, listens hard to the voices of American characters and celebrates the gestures of ordinary life. The long lines of his narrative poems trace the undulations of southern speech, and his careful eye for detail reflects the influence of generations of storytellers, from authors like Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty to Rogers's own distant family members, living in "decrepit houses where the floors sagged and the front rooms reeked / of snuff, bitter as the smell off a pile of clods beside an open grave, the scent of time that hadn't...