Christopher Kempf is the author of the poetry collection Late in the Empire of Men. His work has appeared in the Believer, Best American Poetry, the Kenyon Review, the New Republic, PEN America, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Kempf teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.
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This is a brilliant and beautifully ambivalent volume in which the poet uses his entire self to make whole and healing poems.--Jericho Brown, author of "The Tradition," winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry What Though the Field Be Lost offers us a guided tour through the tragic cyclorama of American history. Revisiting, revising, and reforming constructions of whiteness from Milton to Whitman to the Southern Agrarians and beyond, Christopher Kempf refuses to 'plant plastic flags for Gettysburg's fallen' when more reparative futures await our construction.--Srikanth Reddy, author of "Underworld Lit" Deeply thoughtful and statement rich, What Though the Field Be Lost steeps us in an expansive interrogation of Civil War statues, racial violence, war, slavery, masculinity, and the breaking news that threatens to inundate and overwhelm. Throughout, Kempf shows that old familiar history has a fierce appetite. It waits to consume us all.--Janice N. Harrington, author of "Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin"