The Eternal City

"Winner of the 2012 Book Merit Award in the General Trade, Poetry Series, New York Book Show" "Finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry" "Kathleen Graber, Winner of a 2017 Arts and Letters Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters" "Winner of the 2011 Literary Award for Poetry, Library of Virginia" "Finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry" "Finalist for the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award, Poetry Society of America" Kathleen Graber teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of The River Twice (Princeton) and Correspondence and her poems have appeared in the New Yorker and the American Poetry Review, among other publications.
Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award

With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber's award-winning second collection of poetry brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim. "Graber is one of the most interesting, slippery and philosophical new poets to come along in a while. . . . What makes Graber's poems so fresh and wild are the associative slips that happen between the distant past and the urgent present." "Nothing short of a revelation. Graber is a new poet that we should have always had but didn't until just now. Graber is the kind of poet who thinks out loud, though not in the tricky, needley way of John Ashbery, but like someone very smart and very well-read trying to get to the bottom of every troubling and exciting thought. She thinks about her day to day life, family and friends, their every day goings on, their deaths and big tragedies, and she thinks about big ideas-life, death, meaning-mostly in the same poem. She name-checks some of the big figures of Western thought-Marcus Aurelius and Walter Benjamin, for instance-but does so as if she were talking to or about friends. She manages to do a scholar's work in these poems without the alienating haughtiness of many scholars. And despite their learned-ness, these are poems anyone could love. . . . If you only read one book of poetry this year, that's not enough, but start with this one."---Craig Morgan Teicher, Publishers Weekly "Graber's book-this is her second-is one of the few to come out in 2010 that has joined the little clutch I have of poetry books I read and reread. It's an unusually wise and sturdy book for a poet whose career is so young. . . . Graber isn't a formal innovator, nor is her subject matter--family, love, friendship, death, and the great books of classical literature-new to poetry, but she is nonetheless an absolute original. . . . Which is not to say she is by any means a grandiose poet. She's more of a very smart friend. Her problems are common-how to get along with others, how to make everyday love last and/or hurt less, how to have fun in the midst of a typically difficult life-and her poems offer, if not solutions (for there really are no solutions, are there?), company, and really good reading." "A really unusual, engaging second book. Graber writes philosophical, meditative poems in a diction that's strangely natural and conversational; one poem is occasioned by leaving her keys in the apartment complex laundry room and locking herself out, another by rereading Walter Benjamin. The effect is of eavesdropping on the neurotic yet rigorous mind of an