Late in the Empire of Men

This debut collection reads the author's coming-of-age in Ohio and California against the westward trajectory of American history, which he simultaneously situates in the larger context of empire by looking back to Rome and Carthage and by glancing forward to a time when"the idea of people/is over." Employing a baroque layering of image and allusion and post-narrative self-consciousness, Kempf reveals how commonplace rhetorical practices work to conscript young American men, in particular, into patterns of thought and behaviour constitutive of an imperialist state.