ABOUT THIS BOOK

Late Empire, David Wojahn’s most wide-ranging collection of poetry, affirms his status as one of the most compelling and original voices of his generation. In these poems, private history and public history mingle and merge in a way that is by turns deeply personal and elegiac. Centered around tow masterful elegies for the writers parents, the poems also treat an array of subjects familiar to us from news events but rarely examined by contemporary poetry.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

David Wojahn is professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and also teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of Spirit Cabinet, The Falling Hour, Late Empire, Mystery Train, Glassworks, Icehouse Lights, Interrogation Palace, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and World Tree, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize. Wojahn is the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes, the William Carlos Williams Book Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the George Kent Memorial Prize, and the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, among other honors. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

REVIEWS

“Wojahn impresses with his finely honed ability to interlayer the present day and its prosaic details with the shadowy horrors and honors of the past.”
--Booklist

"Wojahn delights in generating poems from the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary culture. This new offering reaches beyond his earlier work and enters more harrowing arenas of experience, exploring the collective and individual human condition via a catalogue of miseries, mishaps and bottled-up memories. . . .Late Empire marks a significant maturation, and is one of the more ambitious recent collections."
--Publishers Weekly

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

I

Late Empire

Extinctions

Clamor

Hive Keepers

New Orleans, Unearthing

My Father's Pornography

Homage to Ryszard Kapuściński

Videotape of Fighting Swans, Boston Public Gardens

Xerox of a Photograph of Bergen-Belsen

Human Form

II

White Lanterns

III

Wartime Photos of My Father

IV

Photo of My Father in a Snowbound Train

Tomis

Emanations

Elegy for Empire

A Print of the Expulsion

To the Reader

Sorting the Personal Effects

The First Six Seals

Tribute and Ash

Workmen Photographed Inside the Reactor

Notes

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