The visceral new work by Katie Ford, whose poems "possess the veiled brilliance of stained glass windows seen at night"—The New York Times Book Review
Colosseum
Poems
- A Publishers Weekly "Best Book of the Year"
A Virginia Quarterly Review "Top 10 Poetry Book of 2008"
A Poets & Writers "New and Noteworthy Book"
If you respect the dead
and recall where they died
by this time tomorrow
and recall where they died
by this time tomorrow
there will be nowhere to walk.
—"earth"
—"earth"
With gravity and resplendence, Colosseum confronts ruin in the ancient world and in the living moment, from historical accounts and from firsthand experience. Displaced from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Katie Ford returns this powerful report attesting to the storm's ferocity and its aftershocks for the lucky and the luckless. Out of this experience, Ford examines other catastrophes—those biblical, obscured by time, and those that play out daily, irrefutably, on television. Colosseum is an essential, moving book in its insistence that our fates are intertwined and that devastation does not discriminate.
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About the Author
Credit: Helge Brekke
Praise
- “Despite its political concerns, it stands as one of the most powerful books of poetry so far this year, offering a vision that’s at once personal and communal.”—Time Out New York
- “Moving through the Colosseum in Rome, to the Duomo in Florence, to the Louisiana Superdome, Ford shows impressive restraint in reconciling the vast accomplishments and devastations of history, creating an enduring collection of quiet and powerful elegies.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
- "Ford's work is strongly reminiscent of Carolyn Forche's The Angel of History and deserves the same level of recognition."—Library Journal
- “Oracular, beautiful lines…marvelous.”—The Star Ledger (Newark)
