Based on two years living and researching in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Christopher Kempf's What Though the Field Be Lost uses the battlefield there as setting and subject for poetry that engages ongoing conversations about race, regional identity, and the ethics of memory in the United States. With empathy and humility, Kempf reveals the overlapping planes of historical past and public present, integrating archival materials-language from monuments, soldiers' letters, and eyewitness accounts of the fighting-with reflections on present-day social and political unrest. Monument protests, police shootings, and heated battle reenactments expose the ambivalences and evasions involved in the consolidation of national (and nationalist) identity. As the book's title, an allusion to Milton's Satan, suggests, What Though the Field Be Lost shows that, though the Civil War may be over, the field at Gettysburg and all it stands for remain sharply contested. Shuttling between past and present, the personal and the public, What Though the Field Be Lost examines the many pasts that inhere, now and forever, in the places we occupy.
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.
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"
