End of empire / Marissa Davis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Davis, Marissa, author.

Series:

Penguin poets

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Social conditions--Poetry.

African Americans.

United States--Social life and customs--Poetry.

United States.

Genre:

poetry.

Poetry.

Physical Description:

114 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, [2025]

Summary:

"From a prizewinning poet whose work "points to an unfathomably bright future for the canon" (Danez Smith), a stunningly lush collection about desire, mythology, and our fraught and ecstatic relationship with the natural world. A collection as remarkable for the force of its feeling as for the range of its vision, End of Empire explores personhood, and especially Black womanhood, within an ecological framework. Inspired by the language and landscape of the poet's rural Kentucky hometown and the ways that inherited religious and political narratives shape our relationships with our surroundings and ourselves, these poems reckon with the ways the speaker, their body, and their natural and ideological surroundings continuously remake each other. Formally dynamic, emotionally resonant, and rich with biblical, mythological, and historical allusions, these are elegant, impeccably crafted pieces that evoke the fearsome power of nature and of the tangled, sensual self"-- Provided by publisher.

End of Empire is a powerful poetry collection that explores Black and American identity through an ecological lens. Drawing on the language and landscape of rural Kentucky, the poems examine how personal, natural, and ideological forces shape one another. Rich in allusion and formal variety, the collection blends emotional depth with reflections on nature, myth, history, and the self.

Contents:

Lot's wife triptych

REVELATIONS. Psalm for the unloved body

Elegy for the living

Dys/morphic dis/order

Antigone in the bluegrass

Notes left for the Ohio River to read after it tells me it has forgotten its source

Ecclesiastes: Deciduous

JUDGES. Ecclesiastes: Storm

Twister tristate

If we had known,

Spring in the key of Pyrocene

Parable for the apocalypse we built, I: The forum

Parable for the apocalypse we built, II: Doe of the Haruspex

Wild grasses

Ecclesiastes: Thirteen-year cicada

THE GOSPELS. Thirteen ways of looking at a dead fish

Illuvium archive

Broke-down litany for an empire's end

For Columbia

Ecclesiastes: New Madrid Fault

Black girl kintsugi

Union

GENESIS. Diaspora poetic

Memory of Mammoth Cave, provoked by a pelvic ultrasound

Katabasis

Singularity

The living soil

Altar-mondialism

Ecclesiastes: Mapleseed

Acknowledgments

Notes.

ISBN:

9780143138471

0143138472

OCLC:

1455632939