Skip to main navigation Skip to main content

Graywolf Press is proud to announce a series of events throughout 2024 celebrating fifty years of adventurous publishing, featuring debut and longstanding authors and taking place in New York City, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Chicago, and Tucson. More here

Book Title

Colosseum

Subtitle
Poems
Author 1
Katie Ford
Body
If you respect the dead
and recall where they died
by this time tomorrow there will be nowhere to walk.
—"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.

Share Title

List Price
$15.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-501-2
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
64
Trim Size
Trim Size
6 1/2 x 8 1/2
Keynote
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

About the Author

Katie  Ford
Credit: Helge Brekke
Katie Ford is the author of If You Have to Go and three previous poetry collections: Blood Lyrics, named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Colosseum, recognized as a “Best Book of the Year” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review; and Deposition. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Reading Prize, she teaches at the University of California, Riverside.
More by author

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)
Back to Table of Contents