Publisher Description

This debut collection reads the author's coming-of-age in Ohio and California against the westward trajectory of American history, which he simultaneously situates in the larger context of empire by looking back to Rome and Carthage and by glancing forward to a time when"the idea of people/is over." Employing a baroque layering of image and allusion and post-narrative self-consciousness, Kempf reveals how commonplace rhetorical practices work to conscript young American men, in particular, into patterns of thought and behaviour constitutive of an imperialist state.

Author Biography

CHRISTOPHER KEMPF has published poetry in Best New Poets, Gettysburg Review, The New Republic, and Ploughshares, among other places. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, he is the 2016-2017 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College and a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at the University of Chicago. He received his MFA from Cornell University.

Table of Contents

Sledding at Harding Memorial * Information * Call of Duty: Modern Warfare * Lacrimae rerum * The Indianapolis 500 * Predictive Text: The Corn Monster * Oregon Trail * In the 90's * Blackout, 2003 * Bindery * Clearing the History * Dominion * Shady Cove * Gold Star Tree * What Happens in Vegas * Okay, Cupid * Venice Beach * Sutro Baths * Vestige * Scabies * Yosemite Lodge Food Court * In a Year of Drought, I Drink Wine in a Los Angeles Hot Tub * 80 East, Nevada * At My Sister's Wedding, I Dance the Dance of Swine * Missed Connections * We Are Made of Stardust & Will Explode * High School Graduation Party * Death of the Star High School Running Back * Pacific Standard

Review

"Kempf's debut collection succeeds in familiar--if not quite traditional--ways."--Stephanie Burt "New York Times" (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)

Review Quote

"Kempf's debut collection succeeds in familiar--if not quite traditional--ways."--Stephanie Burt, New York Times

Details