Nude Descending an Empire

Sam Taylor

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780822980292
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

As a collection of politically engaged poetry for the 21st century, Nude Descending and Empire develops the lyrical voice of a citizen-poet speaking to the urgency of our contemporary moment, especially its ecological crisis. This is a book that brings all the supposed sensitivity of poetry into contact with the world we actually live in—with all its crises, madness, and modernity—and insists that we feel it all. A reader will recognize many of the urgent political issues of our time, yet will find them re-inhabited and transformed here by the imaginative power of poetry. Our great ecological crisis is cast as the fulfillment of a long history of violence, domination, lies, and alienation—in one word, empire—and the book suggests that a livable future requires that we wholly inhabit our body-heart-mind and discover a new paradigm.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• [From My Last Life as Rain]
• [I Am Addicted to Being a Man]
• [Welcome to My Native Land]
• [I, America]
• Notes
• Acknowledgments