Late Empire

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 *

A quiet, brave and impassioned rage pulsates in the heart of Late Empire, lifting this imagined history to a state of enduring grace and ruth. Here's a poet who celebrates a needful music in an intriguing landscape, with all the hard questions shining through. . . .This is the stuff poetry and lives are made of. . . .a twentieth-century empire in the psyche offered to us out of love and awe.

* Yusef Komunyaikaa *

In the brilliand, harrowing poens of Late Empire, David Wojahn illuminates the end of the twentieth century—this world we live in—and weaves in seamlessly into the tapestry of a history that is both personal and public. Not since Lowell has a poet spoken so courageously about his parents' deaths, and created art out of teh drtritus of memory. With its energetic language, ambitious craftsmanship, and unflinching approach to extreme situations, this book is fully engaged in the quest for the meaning of human existence.

* Maura Stanton *

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.

* Publisher's Weekly