Late in the empire of men

"Late in the Empire of Men, Kempf?s powerful debut collection, reads the author?s coming-of-age in Ohio and California against the westward trajectory of American history, a trajectory he simultaneously situates in the larger context of empire?both political and anthropocentric?by looking back to Rome and Carthage and by glancing forward to a time when, as he writes in the poem ?Dominion, ?the idea of people/ is over. Employing a baroque layering of image and allusion, patterned sonic texturing, and post-narrative self-consciousness, Kempf reveals how commonplace rhetorical practices?football?s valorization of a ?warrior ethos, for example?work to conscript young American men, in particular, into patterns of thought and behavior constitutive of an imperialist state."--Publisher's description.