The Eternal City: Poems - Paperback

by Kathleen Graber (Author)

Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award

With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber's award-winning second collection of poetry brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim.

Author Biography

Kathleen Graber teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of The River Twice (Princeton) and Correspondence and her poems have appeared in the New Yorker and the American Poetry Review, among other publications.